What would you attempt to do

.

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:06:53 GMT

The saddest thing is that in some ways, being with River Alph is the greatest love ever but it's unwritable. I can't tell you what it's like. I can tell in explicit detail how it feels to be love with the wrong person and to walk away from it, I can tell you in explicit detail how it feels to be loved by the wrong person, too.

But I cannot tell you what it feels like to be in Safe Love. There is no analog.

So the greatest love in the world, the kind that exists between the artist and the muse, is the love that can't be written because it is, in itself, an unwritable thing. And I am not referring to River Alph and I, we are not the greatest love in the world. The greatest love in the world is shared between a brown haired man-girl and a red haired girl-man in the middle of nowhere and to be frank, you wouldn't look at them twice. Their love is a house with closed windows and closed doors, and outside the house the world is standing, looking in at them... knowing that it cannot understand or tap into what happens inside that house of love. The house is full of noise that no one will ever hear. When these two people die or leave each other (it happens) all that will remain is maybe that vibration, the paintings in the basement that are full of life and story, but the story is lost to everyone. We all stare, moved, but unable to say why or even interpret what we see.

Am I repeating myself?
I am repeating myself.
I repeat myself all the time.
Some people say they find it demeaning, like I'm telling everyone that they're stupid.
I say, Shakespeare said everything twice! He made up WORDS, he had to say everything twice!

They say I am not Shakespeare.
This makes me sulk.

Pina Bausch

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 03:12:27 GMT

This.

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 00:30:29 GMT

I'm always interested in the erotic, and not so much the pornographic. This concert performance of Mysterious Ways has always been my lodestar for what is erotic and evocative, what is powerful and compelling. Nothing given away, because that's boring. Giving it all away is boring. The dialogue over what could be given, maybe, is eternal and so much better than the alternative.

The red belly dancer.

In particular, I've always appreciated the balance between male and female in this performance. Him. Her. Balanced.

Recommendation

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 01:03:06 GMT

When I find something I love, I tell people about it.

I love the soundtrack to Braid, and the songs are for sale on iTunes. The music wasn't commissioned for the game, it was composed by musicians and artists because they were going for a certain sound... and the game designers picked the music up later.

A track listing. Maenum by Jami Seiber is my favourite. Click the link on that page to go listen to the song.

Absolutely amazing.

Getting Well

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:53:26 GMT

I'm getting well. It seems like I was literally poisoning myself by drinking too much caffeine, and I sense that I may have been low on Vitamin C as well. I've switched from drinking tea to drinking one bottle of juice every day, and not a juice cocktail with added sugar! Real juice. 100%+ of my daily vitamin C.

And no caffeine, or little to no caffeine.

Instant results were felt.

This summer has been a struggle. Not an extreme kind, but a struggle. Every weekend was "booked" with a "vacation" to a cottage/family members' home/etcetera. I didn't do any laundry, I didn't get to clean house, I barely gardened and that snowballed into a yard full of 6 foot high weeds. I photographed River Alph twice, holding up thistles that went from the top of his head to the ground.

So I stopped with the caffeine, I started with the juice, and began to confront all the things that are in my way. All the threads I've left undone, unhandled. Bills unpaid, projects that are desperately needed (bathroom renovations, window replacements) and more.

Some of these projects (the renovation in particular) have reared up like cobras and bit me in the face with their reality.

Some of the projects were just dealt with (like the garden) and I am better off for it.

I just wanted to let you know that I'm making it better.

Last night, we went to the fair where I photographed rides. I'll be editing those photos tonight. My camera needs to be serviced, which I'm going to get handled immediately. It's full of dirt and the card reader is malfunctioning, causing me to lose image files. I can handle that.

I'm even beginning to perform again at work, producing good work and once again advancing in my understanding of the job I do. That's big. My salary is our bread and butter - I must work harder!

But I'm getting better.

No progress made on finding a therapist, but I'll get there. My aunt's death and my mother's side of the family is still a problem for me. I still need help.

Mapping by time, by mood

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 19:43:19 GMT

I am depressed when I wake up.

I don't want to get out of bed. There are a lot of options for what I can do with my time and all of them are overwhelming. I choose to do nothing, and then feel sorry for all the things that aren't being done. When I do get up, it is because I have chosen to do only One Thing and usually it's the thing with the least steps. When I am depressed, I become acutely aware of all the steps involved in daily tasks and I can't handle it. Something could wrong with each of those little steps and I just don't think I can take it. If I get up to make tea, and I spill the milk, will there be a dishrag to clean it up? If there isn't one, I'll have to go find one. What if I can't find one? I'll lose all this energy trying to discover what the sweet fucking hell my boyfriend did with all of them. It is better not to get angry and tired, I will just stay in bed. If I want to garden, I will have to unlock the shed and I am never sure where the key to the shed is, or really what it looks like. Better to not even try. I will stay in bed, even though my back is getting sore and my mouth tastes horrible. I will focus on having a shower, maybe, later. River Alph climbs into bed with me and quietly snoozes by my side. He's horny as hell but is trying to contain it because I'm so miserable and not in the mood.

I am depressed in the middle of the afternoon.

The day is fading. Where did all the time go? Have I even eaten yet? I am already exhausted and my head is up, my eyes are open, my brain is on, but I feel completely lost within my comfortable surroundings. I'm not doing enough, not working hard enough, I don't want to work at all, I don't want to do anything. The sun is too strong, I'll get a burn, my throat hurts from my allergies, I can't go outside anyway, I'll get thirsty and I don't know where my water bottle is, the job is too big for me, I can't let my boyfriend do it because I SAID that we would get a house with a yard and that it would be MY job to care for it. I am defeated before I think I've even started. I've heard from River Alph that there's a hornet nest being built in our garden shed. Another straw on the camel's back and I'm creaking dangerously. I never get into the garden and I can't remember where my afternoon has gone, what I was doing. Memory blank out. I am beginning to feel like my brain is a Gordion Knot, and I just need to knife my problems in half. Suddenly, I remember that the only way TO unknot the Gordion Knot is to just DO IT. I get up suddenly and hit the ground running. It has probably taken me two hours to decide to do something. The sun keeps fading. Rain comes. I garden anyway.

I am depressed before bed.

I am jet lagged and I feel like I don't fit. I finally fall into bed at 1:31 and I'm not even tired. My whole circadian rhythm has shifted to "depression cycle" and I desire sleeping in late. Nighttime is the best time to be awake. I reprimand myself but there's no point. With a sigh, I try to sleep. Beside me, River Alph sparkles in my dull lamp light as I leaf through a book - he's sweating in the heat. I throw the duvet off him and he moans, rolls over. Poor bastard... I fan him with my book and he giggles sleepily.

On letting go of Neil Gaiman, because he's dating.

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 04:04:48 GMT

I don't know what's wrong with me. I've developed an aberrant crush on Neil Gaiman, and I can't imagine why. What the hell is it about him? His need for black clothing, his out of control popularity? And why am I affected? I'm never affected by fads. But clearly, I'm affected by the fad of lusting for Neil. If this affliction were a town, it would be named Ridiculous and it would be populated by all the nerd writer girls and at least half the nerd writer boys. The town of Ridiculous would be pathetic in nature, because the populace would be wandering around in a haze of "I wonder if Neil would like me if he met me" and doing absolutely nothing else, aside from re-reading his books and poetry and obsessively scouring his blog and clicking the links he puts out.

Years ago, shadesong mentioned links from Gaiman's blog and I tried to read it, but I just couldn't. I wasn't interested in him at all. Time passed and someone somewhere linked me back to it, insisting that there was this one entry that was ever so clever. Something hooked me... probably, it was Coraline. I read Coraline first and was enthralled by the evil, and then I read American Gods. That's when he earned my respect. American Gods blew my mind the way Terry Pratchett's Small Gods had blown my mind.

So I'm wondering what the fuck is wrong with me when months ago a picture was posted of Neil Fucking Gaiman (an endorsed nickname, I'm not being all "angry" or something) sitting on a roof with Amanda Fucking Palmer (who completely rules for all the right reasons in crazy unreasonable ways) and I thought "wow... the sexual tension... what is wrong with me today? they're just sitting on a roof."

I don't consider myself brilliant at reading body language in strangers but something about how they were sitting, not touching, inches apart, on a roof in the night made me realize that there was some manner of insane sexual chemistry... and I was transported by jealousy.

And that.
Is crazy.

I moved to the town of Ridiculous and bought a condo. I papered the walls with press photos of Neil Fucking Gaiman and padded the floors. I began to sleep on the floors, with semi-gloss Neil photos watching over me. Everywhere I looked was Neil. My little cave was so complete in its insanity that other people came to visit and some even hoped to stay. The other residents of Ridiculous thought this little Neil altar that you could crawl into was kind of a great way to express one's Neilphilia. I threw them all out, screaming and throwing empty aluminum cans at them. They were trying to steal my Neil, they had to be eliminated.

And just recently, at a benefit show, I suppose the cat was let out of the bag (although I'm sure it's been out of the bag for a very long time) that Neil Fucking Gaiman is dating Amanda Fucking Palmer and the coming together of their middle names was celebrated in the Town of Ridiculous by all the fan girls and fan boys simply screaming "FUCK" as loud as they needed.

We now pray for a break up, and a random chance meeting with The Black Clothéd One. So he can, you know, like, casually find us and realize that we are the latest, greatest Amanda Fucking Palmer.

The town of Ridiculous is, in a word, lame. Who does this? Who has this kind of a crush on someone like Neil Gaiman. He has very silly hair and he's way too busy - how could you even date him? Just as all stalkers give up on Martha Stewart because they can't keep up, how can any man/woman fathom dating The Neil? He's so fucking BUSY! How will Amanda Fucking Palmer do it?

The town of Ridiculous has it figured out. (Remember: our population is also our HR strength. If we have a question about Neil Fucking Gaiman, this town will have 3 answers and a 4th "thinking outside the box" option too.) Our answer is that Amanda Fucking Palmer is made out of magic and unicorn vomit and the distilled righteousness of all bipolar maniacs everywhere. This enables her to be The Most Interesting Person Alive, which has ensnared Neil Fucking Gaiman.

I can't be positive, but I'm quite sure that Ridiculous is plotting a way to capture and distill the charm of Tom Selleck's mustache, which is considered the equivalent of unicorn vomit. I assume a second work team is conducting a feasibility study on how to create an artificial essence of the "righteousness of all bipolar maniacs". I mean, come on. Have you ever met someone with bipolar disorder? They're FASCINATING. They've had intense lives and they've done a little bit of everything and frankly... well... they're just so goddamn interesting.

Meanwhile.

I lie on the bottom of my padded cave and all the semi-gloss photos are shredded and I'm wearing a scare mask made of an 8x10 glossy photo of Amanda Fucking Palmer. Do you think it would fool Neil Fucking Gaiman? Probably not. I don't think my hair is right. As I lie on the floor and the riots in the streets of Ridiculous carry on (they're burning cars and tearing their clothes, it's a full on Greek chorus out there) and I consider being a fan of someone else for awhile. I wonder if Patricia Briggs will take me on....

Reader's Requests

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 23:23:05 GMT

magnifelyn asked me for photographs of the space in our new house that is all mine. And I have mentioned in the past that I'm not blogging because I hadn't set up my home office, and then once I did, I was whining that my wireless internet was not receiving. This is what happens when I allow River Alph to install the wireless router in the basement, and I know perfectly well that it should be on the top floor. We have arguments about this kind of stuff.

So here are some photographs of my (not working very well) home office. It's halfway done. At the moment, it does not resemble the room you see here. The television is gone, and instead there is a third bookcase (identical to the first two) and a tree and a big white shelving thing that we removed from our master bedroom closet.

When magnifelyn asked to see the room the first time, it had a boxspring, 30 boxes of books and untold amounts of garbage in the room. A bedframe was in there. It was very ugly. I had to step over big piles of things to even get to the window. They were dark times.

The room isn't done yet: I have curtains in the works. My mother is making them, and they will be magnificent. More photos to follow.

Why is the room green? I don't know. I got it into my head that the room was going to be spring green. It could very easily have gone a different direction. The room should fill up, presently, with all the bills and paperwork related to our lives. We have many renovations to undertake and I think of the spring green home office as our brain centre. Why is the room where it is? I don't know. It was the smallest room and it's adjacent to the master bedroom. We did up the second largest room for our family and friends who want to stay with us.

...that's a lie.

What happened was, I was afraid of losing "me" when I moved in with River Alph, so the spare bedroom may just happen to have, for no particular reason at all, been painted the colour of my bedroom when I lived alone. And the bed linens are mine. They are my favourite. And the curtains are mine, and the curtain finials are mine. In fact, the spare bedroom has all of my favourite things. So maybe it would be fair to say that in the spare bedroom you will fine a portrait of my life before him, before we moved in together. And I can happily visit my old life, and I can sit on my old duvet and I can touch my old pillow and pillow cases.

It's a very nice room. It's very personal to me. But it is not "my space". Well, it is, but it isn't where I go to be alone and do my own thing. For that, I go to the green home office. The office needs more work, but it's pretty damn good as things stand right now, so it goes without saying that I'm pleased.

Now.

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:51:26 GMT

Now I can't sleep. Today was a terrible day.
My father is fine: he's full of morphine and he's happily snoring in his bedroom.
I am on his laptop, in the dark, in the place where I started.

I started writing on a computer in this two bedroom condominium, looking out over farmer's fields and the tops of trees. I dreamed about owning my own house. I dreamed about getting out of the house and running out to smell the fields. I would've. I would've...

Today was a very bad day.

Everyone has been very nice and very forgiving about it, even though I cried. I was supposed to bring my father home from the hospital today but it happened sooner than I thought it was going to, and I wasn't near my cellphone. I missed 7 phone calls from the family, trying to find me. It's all my fault. I left my cell phone in my purse and even when my phone is right in FRONT of me, I still miss calls. So I missed seven phone calls. And they came to my house to get me, and they rang the doorbell, and I was in the shower.

And I didn't hear the doorbell either.

I was very upset when I found out and I shed many hot tears because I did something SO BAD that nothing I could ever do would make up for it. Nothing. I did a bad thing that I cannot take back. I am surprised that everyone forgave me. I don't know why they did.

Maybe because they decided I could never take it back, and yet they're stuck with me because I'm family. So they said to themselves "let's let it go. She can't apologize."

So I shed some hot tears and I wondered if I should kill myself but that's just silly. It's better to have something to eat and to maybe get some sleep this century than to kill yourself. And cutting up your arms is just so stupid and drama-rama. THIS IS HOW SORRY I AM, it doesn't say. More like, it says "pay attention to me and not Dad, who got shafted today".

So I didn't do that because killing yourself is just dumb. I realize there are some dead people, like Kurt Cobain, who might want to reply with a comment that says "are you calling me dumb?" and I would say "I'd probably call you Ghost" and then he would be annoyed and write a celestial song about his annoyance. Or maybe we all get reincarnated and he's already a fresh water dolphin in China, swimming along and worrying about pollution. He's probably got some nice dolphin calls mastered already.

Where was I going with this.

I can't sleep. I'm so tired and my father is asleep and I TRIED to sleep (tried is an anagram of tired, which is funny because when you're tired you'll try anything to sleep and usually you're observing the "try" in the past tense as the things you tried failed to in the face of your tired).

....I am very tired.

I was developing a migraine because I can't sleep and because I had screwed up so badly and I took Advil for it, and then everyone was very forgiving, so now my head doesn't hurt but I can't sleep.

I just can't sleep.

Charity

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 04:00:31 GMT

I give money (through the internet) to people who I think are deserving. Earlier this year, I donated money to a guy with a house blog that I love. He's restoring a home that his wife bought for a dollar because she loved it so much. They're living really hard lives under really hard circumstances in a beautiful house that's eating up all their money and all their time.

I had to tell the guy that I wanted to give him money, and then I had to make him put up a paypal button, and then I had to get my own paypal account and in the end, I gave him $100 USD. He was completely surprised and in return, I got a card with a hand drawn pen and ink sketch of the house on the front.

It surprised me to find that he had great penmanship.

I just gave money to Help Vera.

I have my reasons for helping Vera: mostly because I'm safe from her situation and other people are not so lucky.

I'd like to ask the people on my friend's list to donate a small something to Help Vera, if they can. If it helps, the target amount of money needed is just under $12k and the money collected is just over $7k.

There's an auction going on, too. You might find something at the auction that would be a perfect gift for someone you love. Here's what I would buy:

Astonishing X-men, Volumes 1-10. Signed by Joss Whedon and the artist, John Cassaday.

A Jayne hat! If I didn't already have one, I would buy one. (Why yes, I do have one!)

A pair of hand knit socks. (Cozy!)

A copy of Under the Mere by yuki_onna, who I admire very much. Her book is only available on her hard drive, so you'll be getting the ONLY copy of the book. Think on that! People are already bidding up to $165 for the book. OH MY.

Kythryne is offering to make you a piece of jewelery from Wyrding Studios that is equal to the value of your bid. Keep in mind, if you bid $200, you will get $200-worth of bling but all the money for the materials will come from Kythryne herself. You get to dictate what you want in terms of colour or jewellery type, so if you were thinking that you wish you had a fairy crown but just couldn't find a reason to buy yourself one, here's your chance to blame it on Vera. It's easier to blame it on Vera, too, when you're wearing a fucking fairy crown. SRSLY.

alankria is offering to send you a story on a postcard or in a regular card every month for the next year. As a person who subscribed to the Omikuji Project, I cannot rec that enough: I love getting something mysterious and special each month.

There are tarot card readings, books of poetry, books that haven't hit the shelves yet, and rare/hard to find books up for auction. The pieces by Yuki_onna seem to be hot, hot, hot.

So bid.
It could be you.
It might BE you.
Donate a dollar, or buy an item.

*nods firmly*

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 05:48:31 GMT

The rain is loud on the church roof. The water coming off it, rocketing off the roof in the dark -

like someone pulled the plug and it's all -

(gushing water)

I tell you, I am made of broken sentences and wet leaves in the streets, being lifted up and torn up and thrown around, coming down with delicate little slaps on the pavement.

And the church is being really loud.

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 19:38:51 GMT

I am all blood and ashes. I am a dark room where the thoughts of "oh God!" are only rustles down near the mahogany feet of big pieces of furniture, big thoughts, that were meant for bigger houses or bigger minds.

I am the wet stuff and the dry stuff unfortunately thrown together, red and black and white and teeth all over.

I am just
You are so
I can't even finish

Big pieces of red black wood in dark rooms in dust, with little rustling thoughts weakly trying to be said, thoughts hoping I'll pick them up and put them together into strings of meaning and maybe arguments, and is it too much to hope for perhaps a conclusion or two?

But this furniture doesn't fit this room and so nothing moves, everything is paralyzed in awkward positions, with just enough room for me to be blood and ashes in the middle, stuck in the act of a polite propinquity that I can't bring myself to violate.

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 20:28:39 GMT

I have learned a truth about people everywhere.

People everywhere believe that wrong doers will be punished with wrong doing and with badness. Therefore, if you are afflicted with a wrong, with something bad, the reverse logic is coded into how we think.

That you must have done something wrong before the bad thing happened to you.

You push too hard.
You didn't push hard enough.
You didn't lock all your windows.
You didn't lock all your doors.

You shoulda thoughta dat first.

This weird cult of blame and "logic" that happens in people's heads when the Bad isn't happening to them.

The most egregious, most outrageous examples of it we have begun to call out. Think of "you shouldn't have worn that dress". I remember reading one girl's account of being raped at a party. She hid it from her parents but the police were onto her and she had been talking to them, so she realized she had to tell her parents.

So she did.
And they said "what were you wearing?" the night she was raped.

And she said to her mother "the Miss Piggy sweatshirt you made me".

And if that doesn't answer the question with some very serious finality, and in its own way illuminate how retarded the question was to begin with...

Anyway.

I understand this now.
I understand that many people have this coded into them, that it is coded into me.

A weird cult of "you must take ownership of the Bad Thing That Happened so that you can get better".

Take ownership for your anorexia, admit that it's your fault you're so desperate for control, admit that you eat to reduce yourself so that men don't see you and you are non-sexual, take ownership of it so that you can say "I control the Bad Thing in some way, and I can defeat because the Beast is mine" but it's a lie.

It's a lie.

Sometimes, bad things start. They just start happening.
It's not that you did something bad, there is no karma in place.

Sun, 18 May 2008 03:44:33 GMT

There's something occult about handwriting. How many letters of the alphabet make you trace counter clockwise circles?

Typing is so much better, so up and down. Forward and backward.
No circles.

Tue, 13 May 2008 19:39:14 GMT

Last night I sat up in bed and from every book on both my bookshelves extended white two-dimensional hands, the hands of all the characters in the books.

Some of the books with bindings pointing out, oh my God, they were rattling on the shelves and bumping around as the hands inside them reached out to bang on the back and top of the bookcase and shelves.

I screamed at them to put themselves away and, leaking disturbed vowels that dripped like fallen leaves in Times New Roman, the hands put themselves away.

I saw a hand from American Gods touching a hand longingly from a book of poetry and they didn't want to let go, they were holding on. They saw me seeing them and the hand of poetry put itself away quickly, in an orderly fashion. The hand of American Gods made a rude gestures and pushed a sculpture off the shelf and then made itself into a two dimensional fist that slid outta sight.

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 01:22:23 GMT

I am just crazy for Salman Rushdie's face. Is it wrong to want to make out with him this much? I'm head over heels for him. When he smiles, I feel like I want to eat him.

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 13:52:37 GMT

Why does a tree always grow in front of the main entrance of an abandoned building? The cleared land around the building will go wild, but may not develop trees.

And then, the first tree appears and fills up the front entrance.

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:44:08 GMT

My manager bought me flowers.
They sit on my filing cabinet, in a fish bowl with water to keep them hydrated. I want to keep them in the cellphane so I can take them home neatly.

So, what happened was, I turned around and looked over my shoulder at them sitting there in the shady corner.

And I got up and walked over to them.
I wasn't going to take the cellophane off, but I saw that the cellophane was split down one side, and with trembling caffeinated fingers, I quietly fitted a few fingers in and touched them.

Smooth stems leading up to flower heads.

I noticed that I was stroking the outsides of the flowers with my finger tips.

I guess the insides are for bees and the outsides are for people.

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:17:13 GMT

Dear Grandpa,

It has not been a year since you died. It has been something like a year and two months. This is not a good time to write about your death because it's lacking in evenness. I have not waited an even five or three or twelve or six months. It's been fourteen.

Mourning goes like that.

Grandpa, I never told you that the night you died, I was out taking photographs in the Museum of Civilizations. My battery died, and all I got were beautiful digital photos of a wonderful ceiling mounted sculpture made of cut glass that changed colour constantly. The best pictures are of the sculpture when it was so blue and indigo that it is almost black. Here: I will show you a picture of it.

That is what I photographed that night. I didn't go home afterwards, I went to a friends house and we had hot, greasy pizza together. We edited our photographs. I sneezed a lot. He drove me home. I remember him dropping me off here

It was one of those nights where everything was perfectly fine and nothing was wrong. When I got in, I didn't check my messages for the first hour. Then I did. My father called to say he was sorry, you were dead, and he was saying it like it was worse for me than it was for him. My father had been confused, he had called me at work to say that I needed to get a plane and come down as soon as possible because you were fading away and that everyone was coming in, but I couldn't have gotten that message in time. Everyone made it and you died surrounded by your children. You were in a coma.

You probably know that: it was your death, after all.

So I was very upset and I called other people to tell them that it was over and I left. The friend I had been with that night ended up dating a friend of mine, and I ended up dating the River Alph. That was the last night all four of us were single, I think. After that, we four paired off.

There are stages of grief I'm told, and one of them is anger. I never experienced the others, I don't think. I experience acceptance immediately, but the stage of anger was truly out of control. I hate the church. I hated your funeral and how it was handled. I hated everything about your death.

Grandpa, you were the first person I saw in my life as a corpse. Although you had been embalmed, it was like a strong wind and come and blown hard on your face, your flesh was swept around in the way that death changes face. It was like the strong wind was still silently blowing on you, pressing your cheek down.

My cousins were flattened, reduced to tears.

Your death was not their first death, but I think it was very hard on them and I do not know why. Perhaps they did not see you as much. Perhaps they felt they'd missed out on the end of your life and perhaps they felt that they had missed out on you. Perhaps. Or perhaps setting eyes on you made it real and all of a sudden, they expressed their grief all at once with their crying.

And it made me terribly terribly angry.

I wasn't angry at anyone or anything, I was very angry at the situation. I handled it by being someone that I was not. I made a point of greeting everyone at your funeral and talking to them about you, or more accurately, by listening to them talk about you. Everyone said you had great dignity.

All I know is, I held the hands of many older people.

I hate embalmed corpses.

My cousins C and T didn't know what to do, and their mother lead them up to look at you, and all evening long they wandering back and forth, looking and then looking away. I shared a bed with C after you died - it was very strange to sleep next to a girl that age... is she twelve? I think she is.

But you were dead and I saw you all waxed and propped up. At your funeral, what I needed was to listen to people talk about you before we buried you. I needed to hear more about you as a person, I needed that catharsis of talking it out. What the fuck was that Catholic shit? What. the. fuck. I hated the church for their bullshit which is so completely meaningless. They had nothing to say that had anything to do with what I was feeling. I understand that they were being very traditional and they were performing a Rite that is essential to completing your time on this earth, but I cannot stop being angry over how it felt.

C did a reading and I did a reading. After she did her reading, I turned my head to tell her that she'd done really well and as I dropped my guard for a second and forgot that I was grieving, I suddenly burst into tears myself.

I did not go up to receive communion, I'll have you know. Hmph.

And you - dead. You, the corpse. I saw you, dead.
I cannot get over what it was like.

Your rosary wrapped around your hands, beads laid out so artistically.
I think we buried you with a salt shaker, and I may have gotten my wish, we may have buried you with two silver dollars.

That was painful, actually.

We buried you with a pin that you may have had made for Grandma. It was a war thing, some kind of insignia. I forget.

I saw you dead.

I saw your flesh, dead.
I saw your body without life, sagging.

If I have anything to say about your death in public, I will say that you died at peace, feeling no pain, surrounded by your family. As deaths go, it was a good death.

If I have anything to say about your death in private, it is that I am slowly becoming less angry about it all, but I am not exactly able to NOT be angry right now. And also: I saw you when you were dead. I saw that you were without life, and some how this is horribly private and terrible.

This is a very terrible thing. My grandfather, the man with the dignity, I saw him dead. I saw your flesh sunken.

I saw it.
It was terrible.

And now, that uncanny feeling that some wind had come and blown against your face and changed the shape of you has become my lasting memory of your death.

My father has commissioned a portrait of you, based on a photograph I took of you. As the artist paints it, he is sending us copies of the layers he does. We get to see all the underpainting. It disturbs me deeply to see the underpainting because I feel in a sick way that I am seeing God's hands paint you up from skull to muscle to tendon to skin to hair to colour. It revolts me, and it reminds me again of how you looked when you were dead.

Also: the artist is painting your upper lip wrong. I should tell him, but I'm too polite.

This is my letter to you. I think of you often, and I don't cry about it much. In truth, when I think about your death it mostly is expressed by some weird form of horniness, which I understand is something to do with affirming life and dealing with grief. This is why my head is, right now. I am dealing with it, it's going to be fine.

You are missed.
I inherited a carnival glass dish, which I think you would have liked, and tea cups.
The Hudson's Bay blanket, which is a five pointer! Woof, it's very nice.

Your picture is in my office. People ask who you are: I think it is obvious that you're my grandfather, but people still ask. Perhaps, when you died, you looked young enough that you could be someone other than my grandfather.

Love,
Me

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 18:35:49 GMT

I make so many little cuts and slashes on you, and I wait to see what comes of them, but that's not how it feels to do what I do.

It feels like a small curiosity that becomes an burning need to dominate you and then I cut you, I slash you, and sometimes you give in and sometimes you don't, and when you don't I feel like I've lost. Even lying on my back on the floor when I'm totally wrong, I still may fight to dominate you, even with your foot on my throat.

What it feels like is I'm killing us and this contest of wills is just my confusion of feelings overwhelming me because I'm a victim of patterns that I can't control. I don't even know what I'm doing anymore.

I can't stop myself from pushing you down and you can't help but fight for yourself and so we go down. I see us as birds, battering each other with our wings as we plummet.

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 03:52:14 GMT

Ooo I confess I made those little cuts on you, I made them and they wept red tears of blood and then they wept white tears of hopelessness and I feed off them, I do. I harvest you and you're all purple and blue and white all over and your heart beat races and your eyes glaze like glass marbles, and they rolled in their sockets, but you're nice and runny like a fine cheese and you taste good.

I confess
I made a lot of small cuts

On your arms
On your legs
On the curvatures of your torso

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 02:42:12 GMT

"...you have to fight every day to stop censoring yourself. And you never have anyone else to blame when you do. What happens to artists is that it's not that somebody's standing in their way, it's that their own selves are standing in their way. The compromise really isn't how or what you do, the techniques you use, or even the content, but really the compromise is beginning to feel a lack of confidence in your innermost thoughts. And if you don't put these innermost thoughts on the screen then you are looking down on not only your audience but the people you work with, and that's what makes so many people working out there unhappy. These innermost thoughts become less and less a part of you and once you lose them then you don't have anything else. So many people have so much to say and there are so many really worthwhile things to say that it seems impossible that we could cut ourselves off from this whole avenue of enormous excitement."

from Cassavetes On Cassavetes
edited by raymond carney

sweet

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 03:17:41 GMT

I am a piece of fruit - we are all pieces of fruit.
I am ripening. I grew hard when I was starting out, I was very hard.
My insides pressing against my boundaries.
I was green although I will become red

And now I am coming into my own.

My skin is my outer limit and now the inner bits, they're starting to cure. They're developing.

The black hardness I'm losing says it's just rot. I'm just rotting, I'm fermenting, becoming alcoholic.

And I say but even if you're right, I am starting to taste good to me
I'm starting to taste real good

The Bottles

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 17:32:42 GMT

The Bottles

Grace came to the house with a small bag and a knitted fingerless glove that went halfway up to her elbow on her right arm. It covered up the oil burn that finally got Grace's teacher's attention. She had been Grace's first teacher. Grace was six years old, but was the height and weight of a four year old. Her black hair was thin, and she had bangs that half-covered her eyes.

The social worker took Grace from the group home to a house on the edge of town, where Grace had been told that a family was ready to take on another foster child. Grace was going to go live with a nice boy called Deshaun, who was her age.

When Grace was told about the family, she didn't say anything. She just changed into her new green dress that someone had donated to the group home, put on her black Mary Janes, and let the worker pack her bag. The bag had more donated clothes in it, and a second pair of shoes.

The house belonging to the foster family sat on the side of a highway, facing towards the city. Behind the house, grazing fields for cattle stretched for kilometer after kilometer. Grace looked at the house through the wind shield and felt nothing. Grace was only little, but she was aware of feeling nothing because when she did feel anything, it was usual not good. When those feelings happened, they were followed by feeling nothing, which Grace found to be very pleasant.

She had put some thought into it.

She liked things, such as her green dress. It was wool - someone had knitted it. It was thick, like a hug, and Grace liked that feeling.

Grace had been thinking about liking the dress, and had decided to stop liking it because she was going to outgrow it, and she didn't want to be sad when she couldn't wear it anymore.

Grace was also toying with the idea of not growing, although she was mostly sure that there was nothing she could do to stop herself.

For the time being, however, Grace still preferred the green dress and was trying not to let it show. When she wore it, she pretended she was wearing a different dress, and she never said anything about the dress to anyone, because to speak of something was to draw attention to something, and to lose it. She was quite sure that no one had noticed the dress at all. She felt like she was getting away with it, for the moment. She was prepared for the dress to be taken away, just the same.

When Grace thinks about her dress, she imagines who is most likely to take it away from her first. Then she thinks about outgrowing it. Grace doesn't talk to people, so she has lots of time to think.

Grace thinks the house looks very square and very yellow in the late afternoon sun. There is a rusting swing set in the backyard, which Grace senses has never been used, and never will be used.

The front door is, mysteriously, on the back of the house, facing out towards the fields. Inside, the foster parents are sitting at the kitchen table. Grace can smell tobacco smoke and bleach in the other rooms. Grace can smell the mess in the other rooms. Grace knows this smell from her life with her father and mother. Grace doesn't feel anything about that - she knows where she is. She understands that she'll be fine while the social worker is there, and when the social worker leaves, Grace will be shown the rules. She has experience with this, and she is not afraid.

Grace doesn't get scared before things happen to her: she is always scared enough when they're happening. Sometimes, afterwards, she will feel nothing for a very long time, and sometimes that makes things okay.

The social worker asks to see the other child staying at the house, Deshaun. The man and the woman at the table look at each other, and then they look at the social worker. They say nothing. When the woman looks at her husband, Grace can see that the woman has a felty knot of hair just above the nape of her neck. When Grace got to the group home, the woman at the home said she had one of those, and she said it was called a "rat's nest". The woman had put all the other kids to bed, then she sat down with Grace and had begun to brush the rat's nest out while cartoons played on the TV. The woman in the home had talked to Grace while brushing, and the cartoons had played and played, but Grace didn't hear or see or understand. The rat's nest was hurting when it was being brushed, and big tears rolled down Grace's face. Grace didn't make a sound - nothing was going to stop her hair from being brushed, and if she made a sound and and things happen and you have to be quiet and if you're lucky if you're lucky you won't and if you're lucky...

So Grace's eyes shed tears, but Grace didn't make a sound.

Grace had thought many things to pass the time while the brush tugged at her head. She fell asleep before the brushing was done.

The woman and man tell the social worker that Deshaun's mother had come to take Deshaun home. She had paperwork and everything when she came. It was even on the right letterhead - they're surprised that the social worker doesn't know about this. The social worker is very upset, Grace sees it in her face, and she demands to see the paperwork. A folder is produced, opened, and the paperwork for Deshaun is not there.

The man says "That bitch must have taken it out of the folder when we left the room to get Deshaun! Shit! It was his mother, though. He called her Mom when he saw her."

The social worker is in tears, and she takes the folder. She makes it perfectly clear to the foster family that Grace has no family, and so she must never be handed over to anyone. No one will come for Grace.

Grace feels something, then - later on, she realizes she feels sorry for the little girl called Grace who has no family, that no one is coming for. Grace is surprised by this - it does not make sense. Grace is also confused: she has family, but they're not allowed to have her anymore. Grace wonders if her family doesn't exist anymore.

The social worker and the foster parents take Grace to a room, the room that was Deshaun's room. The room is on the second floor, and is all white. Grace walks in, and the social worker puts Grace's bag on the bed. Grace can see that the lamp beside the bed is plugged in, but has no light bulb. There is a small TV in the corner, but the on/off knob is broken. Grace looks at the bed and sees that the sheets aren't washed, and there is a long blonde hair, and a short black hair on the pillow. Grace turns around and listens to the adults who are talking in the doorway. This is not a room for children - children do not live here. Clearly, she will live somewhere else. The adults leave her in the room, and then Grace goes to the window to watch the car in the driveway.

The social worker leaves.

Grace sees her back down the drive way in her car, with the two different sizes of car seats in the back for different size children. The social worker disappears from sight, and the foster father comes into the white room. He picks Grace up by her arm, right under the armpit. Grace is carried, one Mary Jane'd foot touching the floor lightly, dreamily, into the basement. She's tossed towards a corner of the room and she lands safely. The basement has a dirt floor: she notices this when her feet make nice, soft thuds on it. She stands with her back to the foundation wall, ready for what comes next. The foster father scoops up a big bag labelled "bird seed", with a picture of a bird feeder on the side. He takes the bag upstairs after some yelling and hitting. Grace, who has a hard time remembering the hitting seconds after the blows have landed, can remember exactly what he says.

Be quiet.

Of course, he says more than just that. The essence of it, though, with all the bad words subtracted, is simply 'be quiet'.

Then, the door at the top of the basement stairs is locked. There are windows, very dirty windows, high up on the foundation walls. They look out at the yard, on the same level of the grass.

Dried blades of mown grass are glued to the window, and the glass is grey. There is a very large crate under one of the windows, and Grace gets up on it. She can see into the backyard. There is the foster father - he drops the bag of bird seed in a rock-lined pit and throws logs on top of it. Then he sprays everything with some kind of bottled liquid, and sets it all on fire. Grace watches this, keeping herself inside the basement shadows.

The fire is nice to look at.

~***~

The first night, a bag is thrown down the stairs. The door is shut and locked again right afterwards. Grace waits a decent amount of time to see if she is being tested. Before approaching the bag, she listens to the air at the top of the stairs. No one is breathing on the stairs - she goes to the bag and cautiously opens it. There is garbage and food scraps inside. She realizes that this is her food, and she eats.

~***~

Grace explores the basement. There are two hiding spots. The crate that she stood on has a loose board in it. The board could be pushed aside and she might be able to get inside. She is too big, and the board beside it can't be pulled out. She keeps it in mind as a spot to hide things, if she ever needs to hide something.

~***~

A pipe in the basement is dripping. At first, Grace stands under it with her mouth open, but then she learns better. She finds a metal teapot in a pile of junk, which she shifts through very, very quietly. She gathers up as much water in it as she can, drinks the mouthfuls. They taste like metal. She carefully puts the teapot back under the pile of junk. Being hit with a teapot hurts, she knows. It is always smart to put heavy things where they are out of sight, maybe even hard to find. Grace is in her green dress and she still has her black fingerless glove, and since she is alone, she is free to like the dress.

Cautiously, she lightens up a little bit and allows herself to admire it in the sun that comes in through the dirty windows.

She really loves the colour green.

She decides that green is her favourite colour.

Grass is green, her dress is green.

She remembers with surprise that she has green eyes, too.

She definitely likes green.

~***~

Grace learns to follow the light around the room as the day progresses. There is early morning light, and late afternoon light. In the middle of the day, there is ambient light from outside.

~***~

Nothing happens in the basement. They never come downstairs. One day, the social worker comes back and Grace hears her asking to see Grace. Grace is sick, and is out with the foster mother, she's gone to the doctor. It's just a head cold. Come back later. The social worker agrees to this. There is a short discussion of Deshaun, who has not been found. His mother says she didn't take him, because she was in jail. His mother is a lesbian, however, and the social worker thinks that the mother's long term girlfriend may have taken the boy. The girlfriend can't be found. It is thought that Deshaun called her mother because she was, in fact, his other mother.

Grace is surprised. People can have two mothers?

~***~

Grace stands on the crate in the middle of the day, when the whole house is very quiet. Something in the fire pit is getting tall.

~***~

Grace takes what she can't eat and buries it. She eats anything that would qualify as food, and almost nothing is left from the bags thrown down the stairs. If she has to go to the bathroom, she digs a hole to hide it and the smell. She puts things on top of her little toilet and garbage pits. She is afraid that if they find it, they will make her touch her little pits of badness, maybe push her face in them, and there is getting to be a lot of stuff there.

She does not want to get sick from what's in the covered pits.

She is afraid that if it touches her eyes, that she will go blind.

Grace practices squeezing her eyes shut very hard, to keep the bad stuff out, in case her face is put down there.

~***~

Grace finds a bottle in the dirt, when she is digging one of her pits. When she holds the glass bottle up to the light, it is green. This is exciting - green is her favourite colour.

Grace has gotten used to no one coming downstairs. She is allowing herself to consider the thought that they won't ever come downstairs. There is a wild joy in that thought - she has a dark, damp cave that no one ever comes into. Grace likes this thought very much.

~***~

Grace is sitting on the crate, thinking. She is holding her green bottle on the lap of her green dress, which is very, very muddy. She is looking at the grass that is getting quite long around the edges of the window, and drops of water from the pipe are quietly plinking away in the metal teapot. She's very thirsty, and suddenly she is very happy. No one has come downstairs in days and days. They give her food, she has found water. For a moment, everything is perfect and she is perfectly happy. Grace starts to grin, and then feels the urge to laugh. Her eyes water as she tries not to. She looks down and is surprised to see that the green bottle has something in it - it's gold, and it shifts back and forth like sand, or fog. Grace is mesmerized. She puts her finger in the end of the bottle to stop the stuff from escaping, and some of it touches her finger. It makes her finger tip feel good, really, really good. Really very good. Excited, Grace hopes that she has bottled her moment of perfect happiness - she digs around in the latest bag of food that has been thrown down the stairs and finds a nub of a carrot top. She presses it into the end of the bottle, corking it. Now her green bottle has a ponytail of green hair! Grace is delighted.

More green!

~***~

Grace finds more bottles.

Not all of them are green, but she likes them just as much as the first bottle she found.

~***~

The thing in the fire pit is a sunflower. Grace watches it all day long. The top of the sunflower is a thick, green disk that will eventually flower. Grace knows the flower will be yellow or orange. She can't wait to see it.

~***~

Grace decides to hide her bottles. She pushes the loose board on the side of the crate aside, and she is surprised to find that circumstances have changed. Now, she can squeeze into the crate. She pulls her bottles in with her, and decides that from now on, she will sleep inside the crate. She found an old tarp in the pile of junk, and after thinking about it for a few days, she decided to risk sleeping in it at night. She now makes another big decision, and she pulls the tarp into the crate. Maybe she can feel a little safer when she is in the box.

Hugging a bottle, she feels so happy with her little nest that the bottle fills up with something new. Delighted, she examines the bottle of safe nest feelings - it looks different that what she bottled before. This time, there's a plethora of little white eggs in the bottle, and they're soft like marshmallows. She wads up rags to cork the bottle.

In the dark, the ovoid shapes in the bottle are glowing.

Grace cuddles them, and falls asleep on the tarp.

~***~

Grace is keeping things, now, from the bags that are thrown down the stairs, and she is careful with her food. The bags show up infrequently. She collects bones from meat, and anything that can be kept for a day or so will be stored in the crate.

~***~

The sunflower blooms, and Grace is ready. She has seen signs that this was coming, and she is ready with a bottle in her hands. The inside of the bottle is instantly mirrored by Grace's response to the sunflower. Grace corks the bottle with a green marble she found, and some clay she dug up.

The bottled treasure glitters like fireworks, and in all the colours of a sunflower.

She is developing quite a collection, she thinks.

~***~

Grace sits in the late afternoon light, with chicken bones. She is lining them up neatly on her lap, examining their polished joints. The light illuminates her lower body, and Grace notices that her legs look like the chicken bones. She lays the bones down on the dirt beside her, in pairs laid end-to-end. She drags her skirt up her legs, and yes - from her feet to what she can see, she has chicken bone legs.

Grace thinks this is quite neat.

"I'm a bird girl!" she whispers, and her voice breaks. Surprised, she realizes this is the first time she has used her voice in weeks, maybe.

In reality, it has been four months.

~***~

Grace is getting careless, but she doesn't mind. She puts some of her lovely, lovely bottles with their fantastic contents up in the windows, where the sun shines through them. She jury-rigged a chair to help her reach them.

One of her blue bottles has a small drawing on the side: it is a green dress with bird legs sticking out from under the skirt. It is a self-portrait, done by Grace. The bird legs even have bird feet. In the dress is the body of a girl, but Grace wasn't sure what she looked like, so she just drew a plain body. The head has no face, because Grace is even less sure what her face looks like.

~***~

Grace isn't hungry.

She drinks water when she gets thirsty, though. Water is okay.

~***~

This one time, Grace falls asleep a rectangle of sun, and when she wakes up there is someone in her crate. The person is crying. Grace crawls to the crate and listens suspiciously. She pushes the board aside and peeks into the darkness - there is movement in the shadows. Benny is inside. Benny was a boy from the group home who got taken away by his mother. Benny's mother put him in the car, but she didn't have a car seat like she was supposed to. His dark face was a small, frightened oval in the backseat window, looking at Grace, as his mom drove him away. Benny had told the other kids, with Grace listening in, that his mom was always angry.

Grace puts her arm around Benny, who is just a shadow in the darkness.

"It's okay Benny, it's okay Benny, it's okay Benny"

She whispers that he has to be quiet. They can't be found, that would be very bad. She puts her arm across his shoulders, and her other hand over his mouth to muffle the sound.

Benny pulls her hand away when he's quiet.

"How is it, living with your Mum?" Grace asks awkwardly. She doesn't know how to talk to people.

"It's great, Mom is all better now. Is it okay if I stay with you for awhile?" Benny's two statements contradict each other, and Grace understands perfectly.

"Yeah. You'd better hide in the box, though."

Benny's eyes well up with tears and he starts to cry with disappointment. Grace tries to comfort Benny like she did before, but it's not working and Benny is really starting to cry, he's really really crying and someone comes down the stairs. Grace bursts out of the crate just in time, and maybe it's Benny, or maybe it's Grace herself, who gets beaten.

Afterwards, it's very, very hard to remember.

Later on, shadow Benny is there touching Grace's face in the blackness that is her midnight basement, comforting her. Grace reaches out for Benny, and instead she finds a bottle. The bottle fills up, is very heavy under her hand.

She has put something into the bottle.

She doesn't bother to cork it. Somehow, she just knows that whatever is inside it won't go wandering on its own. She never sees Benny again.

~***~

There is one full bottle, that isn't corked. It's the only dark blue bottle in the whole collection that Grace has made. Whatever is inside it occasionally rocks the bottle back and forth. Grace is kinda scared of the bottle, because it's full of Bad. Like in the pits she used to dig, when she had to go - the bottle is full of that kind of thing.

~***~

Grace is sitting against the foundation wall under a window, with the teapot nearby. She drinks, sometimes.

The light that comes in through the window starts on the opposite wall and swiftly slides down onto the floor, and heads towards Grace. When it's halfway across the room, Grace reaches out to the distorted rectangle. She looks at her hands and arms, and they are yellow and brown. There is a long white-yellow scar on her forearm, from the thing with the oil.

She washes off the brown, which was just dirt, and yes, she is yellow. Grace marvels at the change - she is yellow like the house in the late afternoon sunlight. Grace picks up the last bottle she has and thinks 'I am light. I am made of light. I'm not going to be a bird girl - I am turning into light.'

The bottle fills up with green sea water, and Grace sighs happily.

She corks her light in with a chicken bone and some clay.

~***~

Grace is in the crate when the police came to the door. Many police come to the house. Some of them explore the yard, and they go to the sunflower in the fire pit. They prod the contents of the fire pit gently, and then they all suddenly take big steps back. One man removes his hat. Another man goes to a car and returns with a camera. He begins to take many, many pictures.

Upstairs, a policeman with a very neutral face asks about Deshaun and Grace. Neither of them were ever registered for school. Why not? Home schooling. Is that so. And where is Grace? Grace ran away this morning. She does this all the time. She'll come home.

The lies are smooth.

Grace doesn't know anything about this - she hears nothing in the crate.

~***~

Policemen search the house. The lies at the kitchen table don't stop. The door to the basement is unlocked, and light spills down the basement stairs like heavenly water. The neutral faced policeman comes down the stairs and looks around. He sees the chicken bones neatly piled up, maybe a hundred or more. He sees the teapot under the dripping water pipe.

Hide and seek, hide and seek. Where would you hide, in a game of hide and seek? First he looks for a nest in the junk pile, but he's months too late, Grace has moved on. Then, he pulls a board off the crate and sees lovely Grace, curled up on her side like a blanched shrimp.

He believes her to be dead, until she twitches.

Grace the bird girl, Grace is made of light, Grace is light as a feather when he tucks her into his jacket, Grace is yellow and brown and green all over. He carries her out of the basement and her small, cracked voice speaks up from within the jacket. The shaggy black head says "the bottles".

Expert hands take her away, and she is flown to a children's hospital.

The policeman with the neutral face asks permission, and receives it. He lines a box with an emergency blanket, and collects all the bottles he can find. They're empty, dirty, and their necks are plugged with a weird assortment of things. He puts the box in the trunk of his car, noting that the only blue one is uncorked, and is unusually heavy. He wonders if it's an antique.

He drives all night to get to the children's hospital, which is in another city entirely. He's almost too late with the box.

~***~

The nurse says "we couldn't find a vein".

The nurse says "dehydration, malnutrition, emaciation"

The nurse says "no she can't eat, her whole digestive system collapsed ages ago"

The nurse says "too late"

The doctor says "liver gone, kidneys gone"

The doctor says "on oxygen, but it's over"

The nurse says "no family to call"

The doctor says "minutes, not hours"

~***~

The policeman takes the box into Grace's room. He lines the bottles up on the tray next to her bed and then rolls the tray up to her, where she can see the bottles when she wakes up.

She is unconscious.

He waits, and when she wakes up, she smiles.

Grace waits. When the man steps out of the room, she knows what to do, and she doesn't wait to do it. With a sweep of her arm, all the corked bottles go off the end of the tray and smash on the floor - Grace's happiness fills the room. The glass makes a fantastic cymbal crash. NOISE! Grace made NOISE. Grace is mad with glee. A big noise! Everyone is running into the room and looking! Sound!

And then, there is only one bottle left. A nurse reaches out to stop Grace but the policeman comes between them. What will one more hurt?

The uncorked blue bottle.

Grace holds it in her hands. It's nearly full. She thinks about the oil burn because she was a bad girl, she thinks about the pits, she thinks about her first and only teacher, she thinks about Benny in the back seat of the car, she thinks about her green dress which was cut off her when she got to the hospital. Someone finally took her favourite thing away- it was inevitable.

Grace feels anger, Grace feels wrath, Grace finally feels pity for herself, and then the bottle is full.

She throws the last bottle over the side of the bed and gives up, finally. The bottle breaks, and the sound is not good. The adults look over the side of the bed, and pouring out of it is the dirt of a basement floor. The room gets dark, and the dirt spreads and spreads and spreads.

Seen

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 05:54:16 GMT

a woman, still pregnant, in a wheelchair being pushed by a man, maybe her husband or boyfriend
her eyes very red around the edges, like someone traced them with coral eyeliner
coasting down the hall
holding a polaroid that looks like it's showing a black street at night, with traffic lights

Surely the picture was taken of her baby, a premature baby, in the neo-natal ward just around the corner, but.

A street at night?
What was the picture of?

And her stomach was still round and distended with pregnancy.

Did you deliver one baby and retain a second or third?

And what if I'm not wrong, and she really was holding a picture of a street at night? What street would it be, and why?