Grotesque

The moon peaked through the thin curtains. Playfully breathing it's light onto them, flirting gaily from the sky. They were coiled like ivy climbing a branch. Equally as poisonous, equally as lethal. The air was cool. The death of a summer day. The birth of a new one yet to rise with the glorious August sun. Her skin sprouted goosebumps and her fragile body shook quietly. He wrapped his arms around her tighter - shielding her from the newly spawned sinister chill. The moon continued to watch, happily assessing the lovers as they lay stagnant as corpses - melting into one another in the low heat of the night. He coiled his finger across her skin, spelling out silent declarations of love he was too proud to allow past his chewn up lips. She pretended she couldn't feel the letters as they lightly proclaimed themselves on her flesh. She wished his soft touch was a knife; carving the words into her so she could never forget them. A harsh bloody reminder of her alliance, one that couldn't be locked away in the company of another. She wished he would throw her. Beat her. Kill her. All befitting punishments for her infidelity. But his cautious touch was a greater penance. His devotion tortured her more effectively than a million whips across her back. He knew what he was doing. He smiled as his caress scathed her flesh. The moon hid behind a cloud. Its eyes swam with pain. Unable to deal with the duplicitous longings of the damaged girl as she lay happily in his arms; so afraid of letting him go that sometimes she caught herself breaking the skin of his back with her nails, as she clung on to him so desperately. His touch a necessary distraction. It muffled the screaming in her mind. But somewhere beneath the voices she loved him as was expected. In the honest way a girl loves her boy. That tiny rush of feeling injected her with a slither of hope, lead her to believe she was functional. How little he knew how he kept her alive. The moon swam in the empty black sky. The clouds ran from it in a vindictive feat to make the moon watch. It wept as it saw them. Their tryst a pyrrhic battle by which neither would survive un-wounded, and no clear victor would ever be crowned. Only victims. Two bodies, but years of blood shed between them. Their hearts having been ripped apart too many times. The moon couldn't bare the horror. It had once been so fond of the lovers, so proud. Now it feared them. Their dependency and their deceit. The moon moved its eyes. It would rather see eternal darkness than have to observe humanity, and withstand the cruelty of jealous love.

Did he hear the sound her shoelaces made, as they dragged across his floor? Her feet wouldn't let her stay in his embrace. They crept to the door before he could even comprehend the sun. They flew so quickly. Their silent ghostly float zooming her away from him. The sun itself couldn't move as fast. With the moon gone their protective night had ended, their sadistic games concluded with it. Instead they were forced to show their real longing, their vulnerable devotion. Without their conscious minds to protect them they slipped into a loving embrace. Unable to spite each other with a stiffened arm or a turned back. In the empty bland hint of dusk, with no sky to watch them through the grey, they moved to each others like poles of a magnet. Slowly, strongly - inevitably. 

In the few hours before the appearance of sun - the hours that few knew; just the guilty and the broken, the milk men and the whores - they were able to show who they were, before they became grotesque.

The sun was afraid to rise. It wanted to keep them in the dark, allow them a few stolen minutes of unconscious perfection before the truth eroded their ignorance and her feet ran from its newly born reality. Her unfaithful nature was burning letters into her heart, but no scarlet 'A' appeared in a bloody crest. Instead; his name seeped slowly - like a gash on a shaven face it oozed, then ran seemingly forever. She lost so much blood from that wound she could barely stand. She would continue that way until it stopped flowing to her carved organ. 

But she never wanted it to stop. She never wanted to forget his name. To stop feeling his pain. So in the true spirit of masochism she looked back at his peaceful form. Breathed in his innocence as she tried to keep up the illusion of hers. She ran from the sun to keep him in the dark. But he heard her shoelaces against his floor. He heard it every morning.

He kept his eyes shut tight though, in protest to the sun. For he never wanted to hate her. But he couldn't feign naivety away from their delicate senseless night. The part of him that loved her despised the sun. That part wished to glue his eyes shut, dose them in chemicals or carve them with knives. Then he could never allow the glow of the star to illuminate his daybreak. The sun blazed that day, to apologize for the truth it had shown them. Not knowing that its kind gesture was frying the skin from their bones. 

Silence

He was a knife to my chest that kept on bleeding. I glued the wounds with all the Pritt Stick I could gather but the blood never ceased to flow. Every laugh ripped the gashes apart, and as the memories seeped out the joy I felt for a fleeting ignorant second was laced - laced with the toxic poison of my grief. His ghost became my shadow, I couldn't escape it. It followed me always, and grew with the night, stretching and stretching until the sun ran from it. The light kindly left me to be alone, to pull my self together and carry on; but I never was, and so I never could. The silence screamed at me - the deafening scream of absolute nothing. No breathing to punctuate it, no honey drenched whisper to weave across it. Nothing. In that silence his smile stayed. Its beauty corrupted by the mutating dark, twisting into a vicious snarl as my memory of its ethereal purity faded. Instead his smile mocked me, taunted me - hated me. My boy became a cancer. His memory fed on me until I died. He killed me a thousand times a day. Every time I allowed myself to forget him, his memory would smirk and stab once more. My organs so mangled they healed around the knives, forming callus skin that could never be torn again. Except by him. Always by him. So I will be forced to breathe through my trauma, until he wrenches my injuries apart for the final time. Then I will claw into my skin, shred it to the bone and as I am drained of life, let my own smile transfigure -as I finally join him in the silence.

Tick

The clock is mocking you. Daily it glares down at you, challenging your optimism. You turn to look at it and it cackles back, providing evidence that barely two minutes have passed since you last gazed at it. It knows its winning. It felt like hours. Every time you spin your chair around to engage in war with it, it's poised for attack. And with one slow ebb of the second hand it's launched, sent puncture wounds into your already battered psyche. Tiny lesions where your ambition can seep through. You've been bleeding for years. Ever since you left university. Before then you were titanium. Failure an impossibility. Then the rejections came, so many of them endlessly streaming from corporation after corporation. 'We thank you for your application but we're afraid we are not hiring currently' Yeah, right. Your back's to the clock now, but you can still hear it, every tic another assault to your raw injuries. The first hits, they hurt the most, the first steps away from your dreams, they stung with a power like you couldn't comprehend. But back then you believed you would heal. They were only obstacles and you'd recover, right? Yeah, right. You kept the dream in sight. But you were getting further and further away, more and more hurt. You started to substitute your ambition in lay of money. That's all work became to you then, money. You lost that edge that you held throughout education, your lust for debate and knowledge. So much so that by the time you were shown to your seat behind the glass here, you could barely even remember what your dream was. You were so hardened by rejection that your skin was thick, layers upon layers of scar tissue protecting you from the pain of the world. Even the clock didn't really hurt anymore, transiency was ripe in this wool padded chair facing the station. You remember what the wizened guard had said to you after your orientation, after you were taught how the ticket machines worked. 'I think you'll enjoy it here'. Yeah, right. That was twelve years ago. Even in your own mind you're not sure why it's been that long, you blame the economy, unemployment, but truthfully it's you. You got so comfortable here, and you were so afraid of failing again. Terrified, even. Despite your thick skin you're a coward. A worthless servant. You don't even lie to yourself in the mirror anymore, whisper to yourself in the dark. What's the point? Every time your mind adopts its peppy cheerleader status and tries to restore morale you scoff. You tell yourself it'll get better, you dust off that old dream and you swim in its glory. You'll quit tomorrow, you'll do it, you'll chase that dream and you'll catch it and ravage it so hard it'll be limping for weeks. Yeah, right.

You're impotent. Your dreams limp. Worn and old, nothing but sinew and pain. Bleeding, bleeding, bleeding - the tick of the hand just waiting for you to clot. But you'll be okay, right?

Boring

It's healthy to want to fuck yourself. That may seem like the stupidest thing you've ever heard but I have the evidence to back it up. Stats and research, a whole bunch of it in a power point on my laptop. Trust me. I know what I’m talking about. If you wouldn't even fuck you then how do you expect anyone else to? They probably have higher standards than you too. I think it was J LO that said 'If you don't love yourself, you can't love anybody else' and that's true for fucking too. This may just seem like an elaborate way for me to tell you to go fuck yourself but I'm talking about it in the metaphorical sense. Basically, self appreciation is a good thing. You’re probably wondering where I'm going with this, and honestly I don't know if this was the best way to start but I'm writing in ink and I don't have any tip-ex so it'll have to do. But really I want to tell you about Mr Candy.

I suppose I should start from the beginning, but there was no beginning. Mr Candy was my English teacher last year. We'd gotten on well, as students and teachers do, joking conversation and stuff, but nothing more than that. So when he killed himself and referenced me in the note, no one was more confused about it than I. The way Candy had seen it was we were in love. He stated in vivid detail being tormented by dreams of me and my "perfect form". Now I'm not gay. I don't think I am anyway. I'm sixteen years old so I haven't really had time to decide yet as I live in a town where everyone's in a relationship with God until they pass the baton on to their spouse in marriage. But as far as I knew, I liked girls. I don't have anything against Candy's preference, and in actuality I suppose I was rather flattered; no one ever likes me like that ordinarily. But it's difficult to not be a bit angry at someone when they've unlawfully outed you to your entire town. Even if they are dead.

I'd be a lot more appreciative of the attention if it wasn't for this place. I can safely say that the temperature I am currently sweltering through must be the hottest since records began. Of course, I said that last summer, and the summer before - and I'll probably say it next summer too. It is often easy to forget the former year's discomfort in the new, pressing existence of ongoing unease, and it's really hard not to wallow in self pity when your exterior somewhat resembles slow roasted pork.

This place feels to me as if it is full to the brim with people who missed their escape, who are hereby entrapped here in dire contentment. But mutually I also feel the town holds ghosts, long gone whispers of those who had managed to liberate themselves from it's crushing hold, and go on to thrive outside it's borders. Constant reminders of my ineptitude in the fight against monotony. It is easy to say which bothers me more, because even as the ghosts strike me, remind me of a life I doubt I’ll ever experience - it is not them I am stuck interacting with day to day. No, instead I am forced to coexist alongside throngs of people in denial, repressing their feelings of a claustrophobic deadlock and instead plastering on their 'Little Miss' pageant smiles and politely continuing to fight the suicidal urges. 

'An exciting place to call home' it reads across the border sign welcoming you here, right underneath where 'Boring, Oregon' is printed in an oppressive grey font. I dare never link the two within an utterance. I know the rest of the people in this town are accustomed to adopting a false pride with their situation. And pride, as a result of a cold denial, can imbue in people a very protective rage and I am not about to suffer another beating due to unimaginatively noting the comedic correlation between the name of my home, and it's most accurately descriptive adjective. 

As a child I'd cherished this land, basked in the wide open spaces for running and jumping and pretending. But as my imagination fades and all I am left with is a bitter sense of tedium, I can't help but curse the endless advance of fluctuating greenery. I am living a ground-hog existence. The only difference between today and any other day is this essay. The title, as you know, is 'un-knowable truths' - I suppose most kids in here will be writing about God or, whether or not child birth hurts more than a kick to the gonads; but I thought it was about time everyone knew my truth, because that is knowable. Even if some of the explanations aren't. 

The expression 'I remember it like it was yesterday' is grossly overused but I can definitely sympathize with the truth in it - because I do. Most poignant days in our lives are more profound in our memories than the insignificant ones so I suppose it's a logical statement. No one ever says 'oh that day I sat on my ass and did fuck all, yes, I remember it like it was yesterday.' No it's all first kisses, graduations, weddings, and in my case teacher suicides. Listlessly gazing out the window I saw the police car first. I was allowed a few more minutes of blissful ignorance and meagre curiosity before the mousy receptionist scurried into the room flanked by two officers and I was asked to join them out in the hall. At first I thought maybe my parents were dead, or my dog. But other than that I couldn't fathom what I was being requested for. The officers were looking at me uncomfortably. They started mumbling about sexual assault and my eyes widened in fearful shock thinking about all the girls that could have accused me of assaulting them, all the girls I’d ever gotten close to; the list was very limited. 

'I'm sorry but who am I supposed to have assaulted?' I rasped, my throat bone dry. I swallowed loudly as they looked awkwardly through me. 

'No son we're referring to your assault, we're referring to Alan Candy.' 

Things got weird after that. I had to be checked for signs of sodomy because despite my insistence that I had never been touched inappropriately or otherwise by Mr. Candy no one seemed to believe me. Everyone these days is so knowledgeable about the infinite amount of psychological ailments a person can hold that instead of believing my virginal status they preferred the deduction that I was repressing the incidents. I was forced to sit through hours of scrutiny by countless numbers of 'professionals' who all seemed to be arriving at the same conclusion; I was gay, gay, gay. They kept telling me it was nothing to be ashamed of. I kept telling them I was aware of that. It was an infinite tedium. I think the worst of the bunch of sympathetic adults was my mother, she was distraught at first, naturally, but in time she began to adapt to my suggested sexuality in an unnecessarily obnoxious way. Her bumper sticker that previously read 'My child is a BA High honor student' now declared 'Honk if you support marriage equality' in an aggressively rainbow font. She slipped countless pamphlets, with titles such as 'What does it mean to be gay?' and 'Am I normal?', into my clean washing. I stopped trying to argue with her and instead begrudgingly accepted my situation. I'd seen my dad hide his fitness magazines from me, I suppose so I wasn't tempted. He wasn't speaking to me that much. I wondered if maybe I could do it. I mean I'd always appreciated the beauty of Johnny Depp, maybe that was something to go on. One night, clad with my laptop I attempted to explore the depths of the internet and try and assess my suitability for a homosexual lifestyle. It didn't go well. At the first glance of cock I slammed my screen down angrily and decided people could think what they wanted but I am categorically not attracted to men. 

Life went back to normal mostly thereafter. I carried on being secluded, but I was no longer invisible. What had been inferred between me and Candy wasn't exactly confidential - and even if it was nothing stays that way in high school. People stared at me as I passed in the corridor, girls giggled behind their hands, the reaction from the guys differed; one had pushed me against a locker as he passed snarling 'queer' as he did so, a few others had 'innocently' asked me over for study sessions. About a month passed before I received the letter. 

I never get mail. I think I signed up to a free trial of some gym which I never went to and they occasionally send me letters generally telling me i'm fat and I can't survive without their service, but aside from that the only letters my house gets are for my mum and dad. That's why when the envelope arrived with 'Nate Astera' scribbled on the front my parents were suspicious. I tried to act blasé when they handed it to me but I ran to my room with it clutched tightly in my sweaty fist. Originally hoping one of my rich removed relatives had died and left me all their money, I was more initially disappointed than confused when I realized it was a letter from Candy's girlfriend. I had to read it multiple times to confirm it. Girlfriend. Surely there was something awry in that. She was asking me to meet her at her home that coming Saturday. She said she'd be there all day and if I could 'pop over' that would be great. That was it. No mention of Candy other than to reference who she was. No agenda. No anger. She invited me over like she was a friend's mother, or a potential date. Against every howling warning brewing in my mind, I knew I had to go. 

The house was like every other house here. Small, one storied, chipping paint and dead bugs liquoring it. I took a moment to assess myself in the blacked screen of my phone before tentatively knocking on the panelled door. The door opened instantaneously, as if she'd been waiting on the other side, eye to the peep hole, for hours. That however was not what stunned me. Long red hair falling in cascades over ample breasts, freckles, the kind you long to kiss, dotted over a perfect nose and across her angled cheeks, eyes of a deeper blue than any ocean on the planet, widened and fringed with lashes of a delicate impression. She was beautiful. This confirmed it, or at least the rush of blood to my crotch did, I definitely liked girls.
'You must be Nate' she smiled, but as she surveyed me tears came to her eyes and creases formed in the area between her eyebrows. She really was lovely. 
'Yes' I said, 'Trista?' she smiled sadly as confirmation and gestured for me to follow her inside. The interior of the home was flawless. Everything matched accordingly, the pallet one of both soft hues and rich colors. Even the lighting seemed to compliment the furnishing. 'You have a beautiful home' I added, manners were not alien to me. 
'Oh, Alan designed it all, i'm useless with things like this - not the creative type.' she sighed. I looked at her apprehensively, not daring to be the first to address the subject. 

She sat down on a red leather love seat positioned to the left of the glass coffee table. So as not to imply anything, I sat on a separate leather foot stool opposite her. 
'Being gay in this town isn't a crime.' her face flushed as she looked at me, then she turned her gaze towards her hands, now cupped in her lap, and continued; 'I've actually looked into it. You can't be married, obviously, but you can be in civil partnership. There's even a whole section on Oregon.com about gay-friendly hotels and stuff. I think that just means you can share a room with your partner, without discrimination - I doubt they have gay themed activity nights or anything that flowery. I don't mean flowery, I just mean...' she trailed off, distracted by a dislocated section of the thumb nail her hand had been trailing, she began to pick at it. The silence became unbearable, with just the methodical ticking of nail-against-nail. 
'I'm not gay Trista.' she continued to pick at the hardened skin beneath her nail, it had grown raw and flushed as darkly as her cheeks when I spoke - it took a further minute of silence for her thumb to start to bleed. 'Trista?' I enquired, flinching at the sight of her mutilated cuticle. She looked up at me again, her expression one of desperation.
'Please don't lie to me Nate.' I began to argue back, a tedious feat I'd grown accustomed to of late, but she cut across me; 'I have HIV, Nate, he gave it to me. You probably have it too. I don't know how it happened. I remember being really sick, I just thought it was flu, about a year ago, and then it was gone. I didn't think anything of it. But I didn't know about Alan then, about you... I just didn't think anything of it.' She began ripping at the fly-away skin, she pinched it between the thumb and forefinger of her opposing hand and began to drag it towards her. The skin tore easily, like a rake through sand. She didn't flinch. Her eyes were fixed wide onto me. Her breathing was jagged. 

'He brought me soup Nate.' She began crying, silent tears cascading down her flawless skin. Her jaw was clenched in hostility but her tragedy shone through. 'The man I loved, as I lay in my sick bed. He brought me soup and watched as I drank it, possibly aware that he was essentially sitting by my coffin - the pistol that shot me concealed beneath his jeans.' She edged along the loveseat, edged closer to me. Her manic expression was distorting her doll-like features. She was a horror movie embodied, the sinister transformation of innocence. I was ashamed to see her like this, this woman I didn't know, in this moment of emotional nudity. I looked away from her. She rose her voice, demanding my attention back - I complied. 'That's not even it though Nate. I hate what he's done to me. What he, did to me. But that's not it. I don't hate him for killing me, I hate him for killing himself - for leaving me. I don't hate him for you, I don't hate you either, more than anything I hate myself for not being good enough.' she began shaking, her sobs erupting from her chest and hitting me like ejaculated rocks from a live volcano, her fiery hair a symbol of that flame. Like a broken record, an obedient parrot, I sang my familiar song;
'I'm not gay.'. She rose to her feet in a flurry of anger and launched herself at me. I squeezed my eyes shut as I felt her weight on top of me, her fists colliding with every part of me she could reach. I felt her teeth sink into me roughly and tear at my flesh. I felt her sharp nails across my skin, I felt her hands tangle through my hair - pulling it roughly - I felt her furry, but more than anything I felt her grief - for the lives Candy stole from her; for his present, and her future.

I waited until her fit died, she slumped over me and sobbed as the fury drained from her, replaced instead by a heavy despair. She crushed me with her delicate form, the way she lay across me tense and awkward. Our bodies not made for that kind of jigsaw. I couldn't bare to move her, worried that dislodging her would also dislodge her repressed rage, force it back onto me. Not that her punches hurt, but the pain of her misery bruised me deeply. The weight of her was paramount because of the added mass of her loss. She rolled from me and turned in on herself, like a flower wilting in an unforgiving heat. She lay there shaking, a pill-bug in the path of a predator. The only other time I'd seen a woman cry was when my grandfather died. I hid when mum cried though, excusing myself with homework and deadlines - I even went walking alone simply to pretend I was out with friends so I didn't have to be around her sharp mourning. 

I decided I couldn't do that to this woman. I lifted my arm, and extended it shakily to her shoulder. But just before I could make impact I froze. My quivering limb osculating above her trembling body. As if I was controlling her anguished convulsions. What a cruel puppeteer. I clenched my fist painfully. Turned on my heel, and ran out the house. If I'd ever been to a gym in my life I probably could have run all the way home, but instead I collapsed in a burning sweaty heap about a block from Candy's place. I started regretting not keeping that gym subscription. That's when the guilt set in. I suppose it never really left either. 

But that isn't why I chose this as the subject of my essay. I suppose it won't be long now until the symptoms set in. The doctor who tested me said it usually takes about a year or so after infection and I ran away from that house roughly this time last summer. So before I'm tarred with the same old brush, this time with a more acidic and condemning poison drenching it, I thought i'd make it clear for once and for all; I never slept with Alan Candy - but thanks to his frivolity, and his debauchery, I'll probably now never sleep with anyone. Because, as I said it's healthy to want to fuck yourself. But no one wants to fuck someone unhealthy. 

Typhoon

There was a general electricity to the air. It crept up on me slowly with each step I took further from my home. I’d been lost in an unyielding despair since she left and it was only after abandoning my own company that I really managed to shake the rejection off me. The evening was warm, that kind of sticky humidity that consumes your oxygen as it filters through rested lungs. I’d forgotten what spring felt like. The months that winter claimed had been colder to me than I thought imaginable. No woman to wrap herself around me in the blanketed haven atop my bed sheets.  No hand to hold mine and fend off frost. No happiness to thaw the ice from my heart. She had breathed a storm into those months, her absence the thing that gave it force – her name the sound that replaced thunder, my tears a constant rain. I’d never felt a typhoon as terrible as that which she created for me as a parting gift.

Then one day I awoke to the kiss of sunlight. That hand of warmth that cascades from white ethereal clouds stretched thin across a blinding blue sky. It touched me softly, through my thin mesh curtains and carefully stroked my eyes, coaxing them open with a defiant oath; I will not let you fester. So I followed its guiding reach, out into the world and away from my tormented bed. Every step I took away from my cavern of depression shed a further regret from my shoulders. ‘I should have begged her to stay’ left me at the first step out my door. ‘I should have been kinder’, abandoned my mind as I rounded the corner. ‘I could have changed’, was cast away at the first lights in the junction by the park. With each step I lost a bar in the prison of insecurity I had trapped myself within for months. The sun broke through the darkened clouds her abandonment had forged and it shined upon me triumphant as I ventured towards its source.

I watched children play by a glistening canal. Their laughter dancing across the water. Playing the roles of mothers and fathers, kings and queens, victims and murderers – unaware that all these things were too adult for them to truly comprehend, unaware that one day they would be forced to, unaware of the importance of their precious, ignorant youth. Too eager to grow up. Too naïve to know what it meant. Ducks slid across the liquid advance, chasing scraps – a violent selfish hunger destroying the calm of the scene with every crumb that rippled the water. Through my squinted eyes I caught a glimpse of white. A conditioned swish of a long swell of hair. I gripped the edges of the metal bench on which I sat. My knuckles clicking with the strain of my panic. Was it her? I felt myself sinking, the judge’s gavel had struck and I was condemned back to my prison. But as the girl lifted her head I saw her eyes weren't the ones that betrayed me, her lips not the ones that had spoken my sentence. She was merely a phantom imitation of my demise.

I began to rise slowly from the bench. I was not free of her, I never would be. No amount of sun could shine through her cruelty. I sauntered past the canal in a desperate haze. The children’s laughs once so melodic to me now stung me like nettles, whipped me like vines. The happiness of others, such a dreadful reminder of the melancholia of oneself. I felt the first specks of rain as I reached the junction, and as my skin accepted the moisture, my mind accepted the anxiety. It flooded into me like a tsunami, destroying every rational thought in its path. ‘She never really loved you’ – my voice hissed at me as I ignored the ‘DO NOT WALK’ sign. ‘It’s because you let yourself go’, was fed to me as I ran to the corner. I gorged on the venomous words, unable to fill my nervous stomach sufficiently with their poison. ‘You’ll never be happy again.’ my head spoke these words as I reached my front door. Shaking with defeat I fumbled for my keys. ‘You’ll never be happy again.’ It repeated, to reiterate the blow. I sunk down to my knees, a fighter knocked out in the first round. And as the reality of the words sunk in, I got further drenched in the dismal rain; unable to tell which drops were mine - and which were her.

She

She never felt like she fit in. She was a jigsaw piece without a puzzle, never completed - never even attempted. She was a lost toy at the bottom of a box, not touched since the move as the kids were too old. She was the skin on top of the milk, thrown away before the beverage was consumed - disgusting to all that encountered her. She was never appreciated, but unlike a forgotten work of art from a niche era, she never would be. She was the last breath taken at the end of a day, before the clock struck twelve and a new one began, not even noticed - foiled by slumber and replaced before consciousness. She was a broken glass, damaged and useless, kept in the cupboard to be grabbed but resented, scoffed at for her ineptitude and abandoned once more. She was a story without an ending. A narrative with no beginning. A trend that never caught on, or even began. A star without a glimmer. A cloud without any rain. A nothing. A loser. A ghost floating through life.

She was a child of no home and she stayed that way. Never finding a salvation in the arms of another. Never finding a purpose among the attempted feats. Lost in the throng of existence she couldn't bear the maze, the entwining of paths she could not follow. That was the way she stayed, from her start to her end. The end that would appear to have come too soon to anyone but her, but could not have come soon enough from where she lay.

Not even abandoned as she never was held. Not even rejected as she never offered the chance. Not even forgotten as not quite remembered. Not ever the victor. Not ever a pro.

She held on to the hope of a future for as long as she could, but it disappeared as she realized she was barely alive.

She was a poet of sorts, an artist of kinds. Forging the picture of a life she did not understand.

And then, as insignificantly as she was here; she was gone.

Incipient

[The following prose was written using a collection of ridiculous words provided to me on facebook. They appear in the order by which I received them, beginning with the title of this piece.]

Everyone has a beginning. Most lives start with the chaos of birth, the kicking and screaming of both mother and child, all sickeningly ignored once a cry is produced. That wail an adrenalin shot to the soul, awakening the maternal instinct. A necessary cappuccino for that naïve wench as she begins her first shift. Creation, a forgotten horror, lost in a hormonal haze of cooing and suckling. But I wasn't created there. I slid out of my mother's chlamydia riddled cunt into a life of begrudging acceptance. My childhood a conga line of meagre meals, neglect, belittling, fear - and ultimately poverty.

My mother was a crack-addicted cliché. She would slip a bottle into my mouth as a pipe slipped into hers. In her cloud of addiction she could barely see me. It was only in between hits she managed to differentiate me from the upholstery that engulfed my delicate form. In some sort of sick cosmic joke however, I survived the initial pandemonium. I can't remember growing up, but it happened fairly quickly. I remember having to clean vomit off my mother's face before I knew how to tie my shoe laces. I evolved, I grew able to deal with her capricious fits. Her crying, her declarations of love. Her screaming, her acrid hisses of loathing. I was her punching bag, taking hits from the rage and depression that came with her comedowns. I was her carer, there to watch her while she flew transcendent, her mind riding the cloud each puff of her pipe produced. I always made sure she landed safely, guiding her back to reality gently. I was too afraid of what I'd do without her to notice how cancerous she was. She was human aids, attacking the immune system of my life. Any bit of sadness I felt outside the walls of our rented hell floored me. I was far too crippled to withstand further third-party beatings.

So I became angry instead. As I grew I stopped being the timid child from that broken home and I started to break children. At home I was a runt, a forgotten mongrel cast to the shadows - the ill-favored brother to a fix born decades before. One off-spring of my mother's frivolity enslaved her, the other she enslaved. But on the days I was allowed to leave her, by orders from the council, I could be any one I wanted, do anything I wanted. Her darkness could no longer breed with me. But it had laid eggs within me; I wanted to hurt.

My performance deserves a toast, I was a convincing villain, frightful even - the role of terrorizer was one I played impeccably. Twisted serendipity meant I'd seen my fair share of terrifying people. Men who beat my mother against walls, bouncing her like a yo-yo from their fists to the brick. Men demanding money we could not give, using their chocking grip on me as a bartering chip as she frantically fished coins from her purse, jewellery from the cupboard, her stash from my room. She always told them not to touch 'the boy' - it made me wonder if she remembered my name. Or if perhaps my latest attempt at giving myself a haircut had made me unrecognizable to her constantly fluctuating lucidity.

She called me Asher to mean happiness - an ironic stab at the religion she abandoned when she ran away from home. She branded me with her rebellion, tarred me with the brush of it so that the only real blessing I ever received was on the day she died. Her organs stagnated within her. She didn't even feel it coming, so unaware of anything beyond her own mind. The air she breathed was always so toxic, a mixture of drugs, smoke, farts and sweat. We shared the air, but the production was all her. She lived in a midden of her own making. If it wasn't for me no one would ever have known she had died. The smell of her rotting corpse would have made no difference to the repugnant burn of the building we lived in. No one would have come looking for her. She would have just, stopped.

I noticed of course, when her lungs ceased and her pupils blew. I noticed. I screamed as loudly as I could, repetitively for hours, trying to wake a neighbour to come find us. No one came, and we didn't have a phone. I was forced to abandon her where she lay. Her eyes fixed, paralyzed in a bulging shock. Her hand coiled around the child she treasured above me - the pipe lived for longer than she, burning beyond the time I turned my back on them both and left the flat.

That was the day I was born, from the crusted excrement of someone else's not-quite existence. The eleven years prior; a prenatal incipience.

I pretend to others that my mother died in a car accident. She had dropped me at cello practice and she was just going to go pick me up a treat for afterwards when a lorry slammed into the side of her at a busy junction. I've told the story so many times, for so many years, that I almost forget the reality. In the engaging sonder I experience away from her I forget our abysmal existence, shocked instead by the diversity of life. But my mother's lies have not left me, they seep into my dreams at night; 'I don't do that much', 'I can quit any time', 'It's not my fault', 'I fed you already', 'I'll get help tomorrow', 'I'll come home tonight', 'I won't let him hurt you', 'I won't let anyone hurt you', 'If you don't help I'm going to kill myself', 'I love you'. They swim through my mind like ghosts that she left, hatchlings of the darkness that raped my psyche for the decade before I was born. A frustrated onism convulsing through me, fed by a crippling fear of my own DNA.

The ghosts are so often there I'm beginning to wonder if they're really my own. Children of my own darkness, not hers. I just want to make them go away. To confuse them, just for a while so I can clear my head. Maybe i'll give them something to make them leave, to make them stop. Just a little bit. Just once.