Exit

I felt it

the galaxy moved and I

was seen

an echo lost in

the static

I am cold here

but leave me this sadness

it is the truest dream I’ve

ever known

Backwards

 

I am the servant of time

of a truth I cannot

form

made of wisps and

dirt and stolen pieces of

lung

I tried to breathe around it

that was always my way

until the gasping became a

forbidden scarring in the

mind

do not talk of journeys

of hope without destination

decades mean nothing to me

I am still there

counting the tick tocks of

passing

serving a master who knows

I will never be free

Safe

My head hurts.

Hmmmn, says George.

 

Yes, I answer.

 

Sorry, but I can’t help you there, he tells me.

Have you seen the statue?

 

What statue?

 

The statue, he says impatiently. In the

middle of the courtyard.

 

I don’t go in the courtyard.

 

I suppose not. You don’t

really go anywhere.

 

Neither do you.

 

I’ve got the dolls with knives to

worry about, he reminds me. What’s

your excuse?

 

It’s not just the dolls, I answer. 

Everything has knives.

Buried

 

I saw her, once

while everyone was sleeping

the indifference about

made her feel safe

“Show, don’t tell,” I said

and laughed at the irony

she wasn’t amused

after a lifetime of keeping

the pictures in my head

from the words in my

mouth

so in silence we stood

the victim and her warden

the baton in my hand

another girl imprisoned 

by doubt

Beginning

They found it, separately. Sometimes one at a time, sometimes in small groups, but not together at once. They had shied away from each other, accepted without argument that certain hallways remain locked to them. What did they want to see each other for, anyway? They didn’t. They didn’t, and they wouldn’t.
 
And yet something had brought them all here. 
 
They lurked, uncertain, in the shadowy corners of the hall that surrounded an interior courtyard. No one spoke. No one moved.
 
At last a teenage boy appeared. 
 
He let himself into the inner courtyard. He spread a white sheet out onto the concrete ground. On it, with meticulous care, he set red plastic drinking straws—one after another, never stopping, never hesitating. He paid no attention to the faces peering at him through the windows.

Soon the straws began to form an intricate pattern. Those hiding in the brick building did not want to look at it. When they did, they pretended not to understand. Was it a formula? they asked. The kind you needed to be a math genius to understand, perhaps? They were not math geniuses, so they would never understand it. 

Satisfied, they slid away from the windows. All except for the one little girl who someone had forgotten was there. 
 
A group of pirate boys living in the courtyard’s largest tree also watched from high in the branches. They knew what the red straws on the white sheet meant. They knew it was a key. A key to a map that would lead everyone in the building to the one place no one wanted to go. 
 
No one, that is, but them.

Make Believe

How we hope

craft facts out of

fiction

these little triumphs of

rationalization

only to sing the same 

 old cowboy song

try again, my love

stop looking for wisdom

once again you are

nature’s victim

take a deep breath

carry on

nothing more to see here

you were wrong

Desolate

Most remained here with me

I gave some to the wind                       

the wind that separated my toes

but something stayed    

crept     

poked 

inside

whispered

never mind the  

frost outside

inside is just as 

cold

What I'm currently working on...

So many times I’ve tried to remember that day, and I just can’t. I know I was young—not even quite five yet. But considering all that followed, I feel like I should remember. That it’s somehow wrong I don’t.

Not that I could have predicted the future, of course. And maybe it was the hysteria taking place around me that led to my memory wipeout, a kind of watered-down version of PTSD brought on by extreme external stress. Julia, the one responsible adult in my life, had spent days crying her eyes out and randomly hugging me. Then, on the morning in question, she answered the door to the man she equated with Satan and legged it to the kitchen, leaving me alone with the prince of darkness. Even Alex, the kind of kid who stuck his unwelcome nose in everyone's business, hid in his bedroom closet. With those nearest and dearest to me acting as if the Apocalypse had come early, I must have been terrified.

The man who inspired this borderline insane response was a 20-year-old college student named Bryan Jennings. He also happened to be my brother—or half-brother, to be precise. Before this meeting he’d been a fact I knew but couldn’t quite comprehend. We’d last seen each other a couple of years before, when I was a toddler, with the result that I couldn’t remember him. No one told me why he’d dropped out of my life, and I’d never asked. Even at my young age I already knew that family didn’t always stick around.

My present circumstances had proved that point. Julia wasn’t my mother. She wasn’t even my stepmother, at least not in the most technical sense of the word; her divorce from my father Hugo had come through a month before I was born. This is because Hugo had gotten frisky with the cleaning girl, and I was the unintended result. When Hugo confessed to Julia that he was about to become a father with another woman, she packed up their young son Alex and moved out. Although the affair clinched it, Julia was more than ready to call time on the marriage. The 25-year age gap between she and Hugo, not to mention his endless depression and drinking, had combined to make living with him a misery. Even if she didn’t want to admit it, she was relieved to have an excuse to leave.

Because I was living with my mother, Julia was able to pretend I didn’t exist. That all changed a year later, when Hugo called her up, drunk as a skunk, to announce that my mother had died in a car wreck and he was now my custodial parent. Suddenly I went from being the symbol of Hugo’s treachery to an object of pity, and then concern. Julia knew better than anyone that Hugo didn’t really want me. He hadn’t really wanted my mother, either—she’d just been a momentary escape from the reality he could barely tolerate. Julia was convinced he wouldn’t be the kind of father I needed, and she was right. He hired a live-in nanny and then continued to work horrendous hours at his fancy law firm, before he disappeared into his study every night with a bottle of whiskey.

Julia was horrified. She was also a divorced woman in her mid-30s who wanted another child. After a bit of soul searching, she made Hugo an offer he couldn’t refuse: if he allowed me to move in with her and Alex, she would absolve him of all paternal responsibility for me. It was a slam dunk for both of them. With me out of his hair Hugo could carry on with his self-destructive lifestyle guilt-free, while Julia in turn was gifted a daughter without having to put up with another useless man. I won, too. Maybe it was a weird arrangement, but it gave me something more closely resembling a family.

That was how things stayed for the next three years. And then Hugo died.

Truth

 

All I wanted was one incorruptible truth to call my own.

But truth is organic, like a strand of DNA. It can mutate, or combine with other strands, until it evolves into something no longer bearing even a passing resemblance to its original self. For too long my truth did just that—twisting and changing, attaching itself to others and then corrupting them, until it became the worst kind of Frankenstein.

One that was always going to come for me in the end.

From The Unravelling, now available on Kindle!

Under

I saw you then the knife

always you first

it kills in two hits

I would never know

back and forth

back and forth

even once to be close enough

how hard I wished it away

but the lie was everything

to you

 

Burned

 

were you caught

in the firestorm of a million

conversations

or lost

in a dying admission

 

because just one thing I can show

and that is I am here                          

without you                         

alone

 

Warped

“I’m here because he loves you.”

Megan laughed a little, even as tears of desperation streamed down her face. “I used to think that, too,” she said. “Star-crossed lovers, like Romeo and Juliet, kept apart by warring families. But you know what? It’s bull shit. If he’d really loved me—I mean, really, really loved me—he wouldn’t have left. And he did."

Alturis gave a dismissive wave with his knife. “You don’t know how men work.  We leave what we love.  It makes us feel powerful.”

“That’s ridiculous."

"So you say, because you are a woman."

“You mean sane.”

“The truth is crazy sometimes."  Alturis chewed thoughtfully on his salad, before he added, “Or maybe he didn’t want you to see him bald. A man wants to be remembered with hair.”

“He didn’t know he was going to be bald, did he?”

“Well, look at his father--bald as a pig’s bottom,” Alturis said.  “Sometimes, the fear alone is enough.”

Cold

 

my nighttime disguise         

this ink-stained mystery      

wrapped in broken           

bloodied history

which ring do I hold            which soul do I own            

will the blood in my veins      turn into snow

or should I sink

sink

sink

find a new home

deep in the drink

do I bear witness         can I name the crime             

will I break their hearts                      will they break mine                

only to limp         not to run               will I speak           will I jump

here where we cross

    where I fly fly fly               

         where words lift off the ground                       

open up the sky

I say no more     not tonight

if it wants to live    I will not watch it die

just to see              just to fail        

a tiger once caught

by the tip of its tail

        farewell                  farewell

                        my fairy tale

 
farewell farewell…

Futility

I was back at my mom’s house by 8:00. She was in the living room, watching a Cheers rerun.  “Everything all right?” she asked.

“Fine."  

She followed me into the spare room. When I pulled out my bag, she asked, “What are you doing?” 

“I'm going back to Chicago."

“When did you decide this?"

“Tonight.”  

I stuffed my few personal items into the bag and headed back to the living room. 

“Maybe you should think about it some more," my mother said, tripping on my heels. "It’s not the kind of decision you want to make on the spur of the moment."

“I’m sorry, but I have to go."

 “Angie, please...learn by my mistakes.  Don't make everything I went through worthless.  Make it count somehow."

That was a nice sentiment. And when I was a kid I’d sworn I would never turn out like her—that I would never allow a man to make me into something I despised. But sometimes who you are sneaks up on you so surreptitiously that by the time it overtakes you, there is no will left to change. 

I took a stack of bills from my wallet and set it on the end table. “Thank you for everything."

My mother lowered her head. I left without another word.

Earthbound

 if you can you see where the universe extends

maybe you can explain what I cannot comprehend

trapped under the weight of this

atmosphere

Adrift

                   when I am the snow without 
            the season
        made to believe in the riddle
but not the reason

 

The Unravelling, Chapter Three

My call to Christine Friday night was everything triumphant.  “I can’t believe you found a place,” she must have said at least a dozen times, and neither could I.  A hurricane had levelled my life, but I’d found shelter.  Now I just needed to come to terms with the destruction left in its wake.

On Saturday morning I set to packing my things, afraid I wouldn’t finish in time, only to be done by lunch.  Almost half of the boxes I’d bought from a moving company sat piled in a corner, unused.  Other than my clothes and art supplies virtually nothing in the house belonged to me.  Somehow I’d forgotten that Ethan’s mother had kitted out the house for him, and solely to his taste; as such, it was filled with the kind of modern furniture I could never figure out how to make comfortable, and things I’d used for years but never owned.  I could only lay claim to a couple of flowery mugs and the odd utensil.  On Sunday, when I viewed all of my worldly goods stacked in the little trailer I’d managed to rent at the last minute, I felt like a failure.  My life hadn’t amounted to very much in any sense of the phrase. 

I of course knew Ethan had done me wrong—that I should be grateful he’d spared me a lifetime of pain with someone who considered me so utterly expendable.   But years of living with my mother’s regret over her break-up with my unfaithful, yet otherwise wonderful father had taught me that infidelity shouldn’t on its own be a deal breaker.  Although she never spoke the words out loud, I knew my mom’s second husband—kind, dependable Dennis—never made up for the husband she’d left over his wandering eye.  “There is no such thing as winning,” she’d told me.  “Life is about trade-offs.  Make good and sure that what you’re trading for is worth giving up what you already have.”

Because I’d loved my father, too, I’d taken her advice to heart.  I’d turned a blind eye to Ethan’s occasional late-night hours and unwillingness to let me see his phone, convinced that the cost/benefit analysis ran in my favor.  If I’d had definitive proof he was cheating I might have felt compelled to leave, but I made sure not to look for it.  Not until the day he kicked me out of the house was I forced to confront my own complicity in knocking down the house of cards that I’d called my life. 

And now here I was, wandering around a futon shop like some kind of clueless college student setting up her first apartment.  I’d thought I could hold onto Ethan by letting him be who he was, rather than forcing him into a role that didn’t fit; I thought I’d learned from my mother’s mistakes.  Instead I’d suffered the exact same fate, with an extra dash of humiliation for good measure.  It was funny how my mother had never liked Ethan, even as she pined for my father.  Maybe she had seen what I couldn’t: that there was a difference between unfaithful, and just plain old untrustworthy. 

Daisy waited in the car while I picked out a futon.  She took up the entire backseat, but ever mellow, she didn’t mind the cramped conditions.  Life was looking up for her.  Ethan never warmed to my adorable brindle puppy—even a fish would have annoyed him.  He just wasn’t into the concept of pets.  It hardly helped matters when as a puppy Daisy chewed up his favorite pair of shoes, and the arm of his designer couch (it was the closest we came to breaking up in our earlier years).  Once she was out of the chewing stage he and my dog settled into an uneasy detente.   Daisy learned to go to him for nothing, and Ethan learned to pretend Daisy wasn’t there, quite a feat given her eventual size.  Neither one would miss the other.

Her enormous head resting on the car window, she eyed the two shop employees lugging my new futon over to my car with withering suspicion.  One look at her and they finished the job, lickety split.  I would have laughed, but nothing was funny anymore.  Daisy felt like the only bit of good left in the world; without her I would be terrified to live on my own.  With her I would just be terribly sad. 

I’d hoped the neighborhood would improve on second viewing, but it appeared even tattier than I remembered.  The same went for Rick, who emerged from the back of the bookstore just as I was letting Daisy out of the car.  I knotted up Daisy’s lead in my hand during his approach, marvelling at how someone like him could be a successful businessman.  He disposed of his cigarette before he reached us—because of course he smoked—and said, by way of greeting, “That’s quite a mutt you have there.”

My mouth went dry.  I hadn’t signed a lease yet, and if Rick changed his mind about the apartment I would have nowhere to go—or, at least, nowhere I wanted to go.  Trying to keep the accusation out of my voice, I said, “I told you she was big.”

“It’s fine.”  He gave Daisy a friendly scratch on the head that she accepted without complaint, an unusual response for my canine protector.  While she never bit anyone (bull mastiffs preferred to knock people over), like all bullmastiffs she took her role as a guard dog very seriously.   “What’s her name?” he asked me.

“Daisy.”

“And yours?”

“Oh, it’s Stevie.  Stevie Callaghan.”

Rick arched an eyebrow, the usual reaction of those old enough to remember Fleetwood Mac.  I tried not to flush, but it was hard, because my name was a constant source of embarrassment to me, something my normally sensible mother never understood.  In her fan-addled mind she’d bestowed a great blessing on her daughters by naming us after Fleetwood Mac’s celebrated female members.  For Christine it wasn’t a problem—her name was so normal no one made the connection—but I’d spent my life suffering for it.  My only consolation was that as Stevie Nicks faded from public view, and parents found ever stranger things to name their children, fewer and fewer people noticed my mother’s misguided homage.  One day, I hoped, no one would.

“Is someone with you?” Rick asked, peering past me into the trailer.  “You can’t move all of that by yourself.”

Whatever gratitude I felt at his bypassing the name banter instantly gave way to another wave of embarrassment.  Over the course of my relationship with Ethan I’d lost touch with almost everyone I’d been close to in college.  Because I’d felt lucky to have a boyfriend and a sister, I hadn’t cared much.  But now that my social life was suddenly halved, my friendlessness had proven both mortifying and inconvenient.  I’d called every mover in El Prado, only to discover no one was available, and Christine had apologetically told me she had to work.  There was no one left to ask for help, but I’d told myself that I could handle it.  If the Egyptians could build the pyramids before the advent of machinery, surely I could deal with a little move on my own.  “It’s mostly boxes,” I told Rick.  “I’ll be fine.”

“You don’t have any furniture?”

“...A few things.”

He gestured for me to elaborate.

“Well—a futon,” I said, very much against my will.  “And a work table and an office chair. But I’m sure I’ll be able to get them up the stairs by myself.”  Never mind that back at Ethan’s my neighbour had helped me load the table into the trailer, once it became obvious I couldn’t do it alone.  What little personal dignity I had left demanded I not concede that to Rick.  “It will be fine,” I told him.  “Really.”

“Right,” he scoffed.  “I’ll send a couple of my guys to help you.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I protested, but Rick was already on his way back to the bookstore and no longer paying attention. 

A part of me was grateful for his intervention.  Too bad it also felt like just one more indictment of my incompetence. 

I was frowning at the trailer when two guys joined me.  The older was dressed in business casual, suggesting he held a managerial type of role, while the younger could have wandered straight out of a university class.  The manager treated me to a dazzling smile.  “Hello, there,” he said, his dark brown eyes twinkling with the hint of friendly conspiracy.  “I’m Malik, and this is Mike.  Rick told us you need help moving some things upstairs.  He had to take off for a meeting so here we are.”

I nodded miserably.  “I’m sorry about this…”

“Don’t be.  It’s good for a man’s fragile ego to help out a damsel in distress.  Besides, you can be damn sure we’ll demand a bonus from Rick to cover any resulting aches and pains.” 

I laughed gratefully.  When Malik and the student also chuckled, I gave in and showed them the furniture I needed help with.  It wasn’t as if I had any hope of managing on my own, anyway.  Maybe Rick and his staff would know I had no friends, but at least I would have my stuff.

And have my stuff I did, because after they finished with the heavy pieces Malik and Mike insisted on emptying the trailer of the boxes, too (“It’s better than doing inventory,” Mike grunted).  All in all the venture took them twenty minutes.  Not sure what was appropriate, I offered them each $20, but Malik refused.  “We do what the big boss man tells us to do,” he answered, in a faux Southern accent.  “And better yet, we now have leverage against him the next time he annoys us.  Welcome to the family!”

Charmed, I thanked them several times, even as I wondered exactly what kind of family I’d been welcome into.

 Once Malik and Mike had returned to the bookstore I brought Daisy to a conveniently located grassy area to do her business.  She sniffed at a palm tree as I thought about Malik and Mike and the skinny server who’d encouraged me to look at the apartment.  They’d been everything kind and understanding—in other words, nothing at all like Rick.  It was as if he made a point to hire people with good personalities to compensate for his own deficiencies…either that, or no one else would put up with him.  Whatever the reason, at least there would be a few friendly faces around. 

Back upstairs I stood in the living room and surveyed the space around me.   Unlike both the neighborhood and my new landlord, the apartment looked just as good as it had upon initial inspection, although woefully bare.  That was nothing a shopping spree couldn’t fix, but I refused to consider buying anything beyond the essentials, just in case.  When Ethan returned home and I wasn’t there…well, he might decide he’d made a huge mistake and beg me to come back to him.  I was still angry and hurt, but I hadn’t reached the point of no return.  I would give him another chance if he truly wanted it.

Like the deluded idiot I was, I made sure to have my phone on me during my trip to Bed, Bath & Beyond to purchase the few things I absolutely couldn’t live without.  In a whimsical moment I chose a stupidly expensive ceramic bowl in a beautiful royal blue for my morning yogurt.  Otherwise I kept to the basics, just like at the grocery store.  I wouldn’t need cheering up for long if Ethan and I got back together again.

But that first night in my new apartment, even though I checked my phone repeatedly, he never called. 

The Unravelling is now available to purchase on Amazon Kindle for only £0.99/$0.99! For details click here: The Unravelling

Crash Landing

 

Every sneaking suspicion 

every grand fantasy

locked in the pale and

infinite sky

me on the ground

broken from all the

times I came 

plummeting

down 

Hindsight

 

“You are such a moron,” Jack snorted. “Didn’t you ever notice that the building was set way off the road, and in the woods at that?”

Jonah shrugged. “Well, yeah, but-”

“Where do you think the Muellers got all that money from? Selling ice cream?”

“I knew they had a tavern, but-”

“During Prohibition, idiot! They were connected to the mob!”

“You know that?”

“No, but I can connect the dots myself,” Jack retorted. “Don’t even bother asking Mom about it, either. She’ll just bore you to tears with stories about scooping ice cream cones for cute boys from school, and getting bowls of peanuts for her parents’ friends while they played cards in the backroom. It’s a complete waste of time.”

“Well, by the time Mom was scooping ice creams cones, Prohibition was over.”

“Yeah, but she had to realize what was going on before then. I heard from Jenny Schutz that Grandma and Grandpa used to hide the liquor in the basement when Mom was super little.  That was why the Muellers built them that house right next to the tavern. Who knows?  Maybe there was even a tunnel connecting them!”

“I doubt that.”

Jack let out an exasperated sigh. “You obviously don’t know how the criminal mind operates.  And the naiveté you cling to is exactly why you’re stuck in a dead-end job, my friend.  Because the realists are outmaneuvering you at every turn.”

“Programmers don’t try to outmaneuver each other. We just program.”

"Sure, bro," Jack said, obviously bored with the conversation now. "Whatever you need to tell yourself.”

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