A Less Formal Life

Sunday, November 23, 2014

"A Novel Snippet" Part One Thousand (and Hopefully Counting)

Tonight I finally found a home for this bit of writing in one of my novels, which seems to have ushered me through a long and excruciating writer's block in the novel department (years and years). I wrote this snippet initially quite a while ago as a short short story ... but when I rewrote and rearranged it tonight on a whim, it suddenly just fit right into what I was working on like a destined, missing piece.

It might be somewhat out of context in the absence of the rest of the world, but I find the words pretty savory:

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The night Scott and I initially met in Chicago, blind but vocally and wordily knowledgeable, was magical dust thrown into the fan, scattered. I had an inner-narrative flash of the night scarred on my brain the moment it began, continued, ended, presently tense, tensely present, our voices melted into one force:

“Everything is electric, on. His face is a Gerber daisy with a scare of black gravity hair that rocks with molten power above the apartment’s slicked-back hardwood floors,” I said.

            “An electrified knock, and I turn the light on. She is behind my cracked door, an exotic flower in red, a pleasure-meeting, melting first-time. I might have already been waiting for her on a travel-crowded street, passing her El platform in a whirly whizz of colors, her face shooting refracted rainbows through each flourescent-lit window,” he admitted.
           
            “We have chamomile tea in a dungeony cafĂ©, laugh-lifting lead-laid cups that camouflage our faces each time they rise, tone biceps with ludicrous weight. I keep disappearing, becoming a white round with tight-pressed moony fingernails,” I remarked.

            “I simply wait, wait for her ghostly eyes to glitter above the lipstick rim. There is a good-luck ladybug on the sill with a strange leg growth. She saw another one today that bustled into her car only to fly back out the window into the new crinkly-green autumn,” he pressed.

            “Two ladybugs dance, almost perfect save a broken brown wing. I watch his lanky fingertip tracing up-down, letting her leggy red alight. The insect rattles down the window and re-begins her persistent ascent -- Our Good Luck,” I sighed.

He noted, “We are walking hungry to a party. I want to touch her tornado static. Words that have been lingering on a black-cursored page are among us, whistle through winded ears, cyclone in hearts stimulated by shocking same-thought paddles.” 

            “We are leant up against a Kahluha-cream stove, turned-on. Emphatic fingers fondle burners, trace map paths through white and black letter jungles of mediocre magnetic poetry. His jeans are stuck like electric-dryer-sock thigh muscles clenching my hip. We are one energized unit with multiplied parts,” I exploded.

            “I am parking my car. She is using my bathroom. She will touch my things, my toilet paper, my faucet,” he insisted.

I shouted, “I may not be alone anymore, selfish or crazed or desperate. I might not rush each moment without tickling, tripping, adoring.” 

            “She is next to a photograph. I like the look of her life next to mine, how her hair curls around one ear, streaky with amazing sunlit citrus. She doesn’t know I notice her through closed doors, but I can see her x-ray straight through, me looking at her looking at me, keeping the calculated completeness,” he contemplated.

            “I might be incited, playing kitchen equipment games, glasses of calcium-enriched orange juice. His finger creeps and seeps supernatural, tangles my bracelet, dangles my kneecap. Hands clasped pray for a safe journey into the dark bed that overlooks an alley decorated by a flat-tired, hatch-back Honda Civic,” I breathed.

            “We are in the wilderness dark.  I may flick on the light. Instead I grab her, pull her turtleneck and touch her lips, suck upper and lower free while I tear her limb from limb, contorting her so we might climb inside melted bones,” he pressed.

That night, he was kissing me eruptive; our singed skeletons played Memory, flipped over card after card after card, all cherries. 

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