(no subject)
I'll have real Internet access in my flat from tomorrow onwards, so I thought it was time to come back to LJ. My writing is at my flat, so this is an old, extensively-reworked piece.
The small child sleeps alone in the dark house for perhaps the second time in a week tonight. Lips trembling, she presses the sheets to her burning mouth and shakes until the traces of the tears have faded into the mattress. Six inches beneath her, bed-lice swarm in the rotting cavern of the bed. Her sweat and tears have turned it into a gaping hole, punctuated by coiled iron springs like arrowheads buried in a long-healed wound.
There is a lamp by the child's bed, which if you spin will make a slideshow on the wall. Now, the dancing animals are still, and a bird carved into the lampshade in a painted sky illuminates the child's forehead with a single ray of light, like a martyr's in some Renaissance fresco.
But the child is not a good child. When she grows up she will be manipulative, and at the point when her friends have finally given up on her, she will introduce a false story of her parents sexually harassing her and so grapple them to her soul in rings of terrible pathos. She will entrap them in a conspiracy of painted secrets, and she will laugh at them from behind her carved smile as she spins, casting shadows across their faces.
Whatever her sins, uncommitted or otherwise, her parents have committed upon her the sin of omission. Her friends will never understand, when the lies fall down, that the most damage that can be done to a child is that of neglect.
Far away, her mother dances in the arms of another man while the father looks on restlessly, tapping time with his fork on a wineglass while his absent hand trails the curvature of the table-leg below the fringes of the tablecloth. As if prompted, the other man's hand begins the descent down his wife's thighs as she is whisked out of sight and across the dark cellar of the club to the other side of the room. No one sees this; and the one person who can feel it does nothing but laugh and pinch his elbow as she clings to his body, hanging within the epicentre of the spinning room.
Behind her painted face one would observe an illusion of zaniness, like a thin stretch of cling-film running with oils: behind this, a wound, as if one had savaged a human soul with fake nails and had stopped up its mouth with blusher and a bit of lippie. In this hole something weeps, something oozes; fingers push at the zaniness like her husband tracing her breast and the dream kicks at her - she laughs the louder to cover it up, and recklessly pushes her body into the nook of the man's hollow chest.
The writer pushed the two closer together until they seemed amorphous; their thin thoraxes pressed against each other until they seemed like the leap of a fountain, like the back of a dolphin. The child, who had wet the bed, surfaced upside-down above them and her dark voice screamed in spirals as the writer sapped her future from her until she was a pure, shining thing without eyes or a mouth, like an angel would look.
The three adult lovers chased each other like liquids in a drain, never touching this thinning droplet of the child; and then like bubbles they burst and were gone. The writer rose like a light from his writing. He crossed the room to the window, where the landscape was spread as always like torn sheets over the broken furniture of the city. The writer understood that when you diminish something, you transcend from it as well.
The small child sleeps alone in the dark house for perhaps the second time in a week tonight. Lips trembling, she presses the sheets to her burning mouth and shakes until the traces of the tears have faded into the mattress. Six inches beneath her, bed-lice swarm in the rotting cavern of the bed. Her sweat and tears have turned it into a gaping hole, punctuated by coiled iron springs like arrowheads buried in a long-healed wound.
There is a lamp by the child's bed, which if you spin will make a slideshow on the wall. Now, the dancing animals are still, and a bird carved into the lampshade in a painted sky illuminates the child's forehead with a single ray of light, like a martyr's in some Renaissance fresco.
But the child is not a good child. When she grows up she will be manipulative, and at the point when her friends have finally given up on her, she will introduce a false story of her parents sexually harassing her and so grapple them to her soul in rings of terrible pathos. She will entrap them in a conspiracy of painted secrets, and she will laugh at them from behind her carved smile as she spins, casting shadows across their faces.
Whatever her sins, uncommitted or otherwise, her parents have committed upon her the sin of omission. Her friends will never understand, when the lies fall down, that the most damage that can be done to a child is that of neglect.
Far away, her mother dances in the arms of another man while the father looks on restlessly, tapping time with his fork on a wineglass while his absent hand trails the curvature of the table-leg below the fringes of the tablecloth. As if prompted, the other man's hand begins the descent down his wife's thighs as she is whisked out of sight and across the dark cellar of the club to the other side of the room. No one sees this; and the one person who can feel it does nothing but laugh and pinch his elbow as she clings to his body, hanging within the epicentre of the spinning room.
Behind her painted face one would observe an illusion of zaniness, like a thin stretch of cling-film running with oils: behind this, a wound, as if one had savaged a human soul with fake nails and had stopped up its mouth with blusher and a bit of lippie. In this hole something weeps, something oozes; fingers push at the zaniness like her husband tracing her breast and the dream kicks at her - she laughs the louder to cover it up, and recklessly pushes her body into the nook of the man's hollow chest.
The writer pushed the two closer together until they seemed amorphous; their thin thoraxes pressed against each other until they seemed like the leap of a fountain, like the back of a dolphin. The child, who had wet the bed, surfaced upside-down above them and her dark voice screamed in spirals as the writer sapped her future from her until she was a pure, shining thing without eyes or a mouth, like an angel would look.
The three adult lovers chased each other like liquids in a drain, never touching this thinning droplet of the child; and then like bubbles they burst and were gone. The writer rose like a light from his writing. He crossed the room to the window, where the landscape was spread as always like torn sheets over the broken furniture of the city. The writer understood that when you diminish something, you transcend from it as well.