29.4.04
So, a week and a half of the weird and wonderful: Rooms of confetti, tribalism, foreign languages, room long optical illusions (good god, it's not a canvas, it's a window), sleep deprivation, small children, some sleep, but always six inches from the ground, airports, the worst breakfast in the world in the rain, returns, returns, returns to things that are, unfortunately, exactly as you left them, attempted catholic excommunications, and strange dreams about my uncle's cat, and me, and airports, and the cat has been dead for years, and when the cat was alive I did not like it. But in the dream, I liked the cat.
So. Since I also returned to the worst case of writers' block I've had in a very long time (and I can't even blame it on laziness as I usually do, because I've sat down, and I've tapped at my keyboard, and I've laid down on an airmattress six inches above the ground, and I've scribbled in my notebook, and still nothing worth a damn) I'm gonna give you the most recent piece of writing I've made that I think might not be completely irredeemable.
Ahem.
Some thousand years after it happened I got tired of remembering and I went to Alain and had him pull the names out of my head. The sensation was cold. In the seventies I watched a man freeze a raspberry in liquid nitrogen and smash it with a hammer.
I gave myself a new name and let my brother fade until he needed no name. He faded until he was just another boy I used to know. When I thought about him too much, he was a boy who saved my life; he was a boy I once watched die.
There are no names in this memory anymore.
My brother was walking with me across the snow, three miles under the glacier. We were headed for the forest on the far side when we heard the creaking. It creaked as if the sky had ribs, and the ribs were made of wood, and the ribs were being broken apart.
My brother screamed and I saw the white wave cresting at the top of the hill and I knew we should be running. But we stood still. We watched it tumble towards us. The scream had been stolen from my brother's mouth. He was as silent as the still snow, not the snow that was balling up and flying and running down the mountain to kill us. In the moment before we were hit, I wondered if the avalanche soaked up screams the way regular snow soaked up sound and if that was why it sounded like it hurt so badly.
The sensation of snow hitting the back of my throat; inescapable and cold. Sometime after I lost consciousness, I lost hold of my brother's hand.
That's it, though. That's all, folks. :)
So. Since I also returned to the worst case of writers' block I've had in a very long time (and I can't even blame it on laziness as I usually do, because I've sat down, and I've tapped at my keyboard, and I've laid down on an airmattress six inches above the ground, and I've scribbled in my notebook, and still nothing worth a damn) I'm gonna give you the most recent piece of writing I've made that I think might not be completely irredeemable.
Ahem.
Some thousand years after it happened I got tired of remembering and I went to Alain and had him pull the names out of my head. The sensation was cold. In the seventies I watched a man freeze a raspberry in liquid nitrogen and smash it with a hammer.
I gave myself a new name and let my brother fade until he needed no name. He faded until he was just another boy I used to know. When I thought about him too much, he was a boy who saved my life; he was a boy I once watched die.
There are no names in this memory anymore.
My brother was walking with me across the snow, three miles under the glacier. We were headed for the forest on the far side when we heard the creaking. It creaked as if the sky had ribs, and the ribs were made of wood, and the ribs were being broken apart.
My brother screamed and I saw the white wave cresting at the top of the hill and I knew we should be running. But we stood still. We watched it tumble towards us. The scream had been stolen from my brother's mouth. He was as silent as the still snow, not the snow that was balling up and flying and running down the mountain to kill us. In the moment before we were hit, I wondered if the avalanche soaked up screams the way regular snow soaked up sound and if that was why it sounded like it hurt so badly.
The sensation of snow hitting the back of my throat; inescapable and cold. Sometime after I lost consciousness, I lost hold of my brother's hand.
That's it, though. That's all, folks. :)
