A Window to the World, Excerpt 2

This is another excerpt from the serialized novel, A Window to the World, that will be coming to the website Chanillo in November.  More details to follow soon!

Once the doctor’s staff had taken Kitty to the hospital, there was little for the King to do but return to his office.  Distracting himself with work, however,  proved immediately impossible.  In despair he canceled all of his non-essential appointments for the day; even the critical ones received only his half attention.  Fortunately for his sake and that of the kingdom’s he was soon able to withdraw to his private quarters, with instructions for his staff to come find him if something urgent arose.  Otherwise, he would await word of Kitty’s death alone.

Because surely she would die.  He had seen her pallor when he took her from Leo, had felt the shallowness of her breath.  When the doctor then sent word that the blade had been saturated in juice from the toxic brixly plant, well, the King felt all whatever small bit of hope he retained drain right out of him.  Not even Kitty, the strongest woman he’d ever met, could survive such an attack.  No one could.  She would die, never knowing what she meant to him.  And with her a part of him would die as well.  The teenage girl from the Exterior could not have hurt him more than had she plunged her own poison dagger right into his heart.

Not for the first time the King felt a fit of rage that he’d even met Kitty.  How absurd that she would just stumble into the Interior when he, and not someone else, was king!  And through the Arizona window, when the Last Window was located mere moments from her home.  Why?  Why couldn’t she have fallen through some other window, realized her mistake, and retreated again to the safety of her own world?  Why had Kitty stepped through at just the moment she would nearly run straight into him on an extremely unusual scouting mission?  If only he could understand.  If only he could turn back time and make it so that he never knew she existed.

But that was not to be.  Instead he would lose his family, find Kitty through the most extraordinary set of circumstances, and then lose her as well.   All of this, while he enjoyed the dubious honor of being king during a time of war.  "What more do you want from me?" he whispered to the butterfly ornament now in his hand.  But of course it didn't answer.

Fire Dance Redux

There is a dragon in the elevator

He will not tell me his name but

I know it

I’ve heard it in my sleep

He says, stay asleep, little girl

I will not harm you

but I only pretend

I am here and I am alive

If a dog howls, is it sad?

I dare not howl I am not that brave

I am tiny a little speck

Knowledge

Reality is the toe breaker

is the dance

is the false teeth sitting

innocent in the 
glass

Broken

I woke up as a fairy in the empty restaurant next to the woods.  I suppose I always knew when I wanted to live in the dollhouse long forgotten in the attic that my hopes and dreams beat inside of a tiny heart.  But not until I opened my eyes and found myself crouching in the furthest corner of the kitchen pantry did I know for certain.

I had been gone for a year—where, I couldn’t say.  All I could remember was that I’d been very ill, and that during this illness some industrious housekeeper within must have thrown huge dust covers over much of my memory.  I wasn’t sure I minded.  Something about the twilight endlessly falling over the woods told me that the last good day had been long ago.

The restaurant, however, I recognized.  Quietly elegant, with its white tablecloths, spotless place settings, and crystal water glasses, it spoke of another time.  Windows ran the length of the entire outside wall: restless trees and half-lit sky filled the view.  In the cramped kitchen, steel gray units and panelled cabinets housed the pots, pans, and other cooking items.  And then there was the pantry, nearly empty, where I now found myself.  I had never seen anyone cooking in that kitchen.  Save one, I had never seen another soul in the restaurant at all.

In the endless sunset that enveloped the restaurant, no customers ever came.  Instead my friend Marietta, the hostess, usually sat at one of the perfectly made tables by herself, doing paperwork of a kind we never discussed.  Only the fading light that rippled through those whispering trees dared enter the large T-shaped room.  Why were there no customers?  Like so many other questions I must have forgotten to ask Marietta this one, too.

Gone, Pt. 2

Restless again, Megan wandered over to the window.  When she looked out of it she saw a man standing on the corner.  He had thinning blond hair, and he was gazing up at the hotel, a look of inexpressible sadness on his face.  Megan stood back in the shadows, watched him.  After a few minutes he turned around and walked away.

Gone

I nail my hair to the floor

whisper through the strands

                Oh my Hosanna

                do you hear me tonight?

                oh my Hosanna

                shoot me a sign because

                I lift you up

                                I lift you up

                until you are the

highest  

                               

                                                I cast you              you take flight

                                                into this deconstructing night

                                                rain shining hammers

                                                down    

                                                                upon my head

                                                upon the dead memories I

                                                scatter on your altar

like lilies

                                                                  resurrected

           

For you I know of fires

                                around my eyes they burn

                                they bring me here with

                                crooked fingers

                I shoot you higher

                count the nails tumbling from my hands

                                you forgot me      left me here

                a thousand angels with tar-pitched wings

                                they drag me to this precipice

                they drag me here

                                life is for the jumping

               

oh my Hosanna Hosanna in the highest

               

                                                you bury me like a stick

                                                after you have broken off the buds

                to cast you            to take flight

                                they drag me here

                                call me fool to my face

                                show me my swelling toes underneath

                                your heels

                                                and these nails

tumble

upon my head

                                Yes, for you I have known of fires

                                with crooked fingers I

                                pray to you

                                through the ravaged ends of

        my hair

the floorboards hear me

pity me

Yesterday

There is a girl who almost remembers things.  She remembers things the way someone who is about to remember a name suddenly forgets it again.  Like sea waves in early spring that almost roll onto your toes but stop just a few inches shy and then return to the sea, as you both long for the feel of the water covering your skin and yet exhale relief because the water is so very cold.

She waits for dreams but they are so often the same.  She waits for someone to tell her something.  She is so used to accepting.  Accepting and accepting and accepting.  Some say this is a virtue, but acceptance can be the first stage of surrender.  She no longer fights, because she accepts.  She gives up.

There are many ways to die.  She died believing she had survived.  But all that survived were her involuntary functions, like breathing, and hoping.  Everything that moved under direction was murdered.  There can be no free will.  There can be nothing left that opens all of the doors in the hallway.  There can be no way through the red straw network.  There can only be walking.  Walking and walking and walking.  And there must be acceptance.  Her life was forfeit.  It was never meant to be practiced.  It was meant to be sacrificed to the greater cause.  If only the buffoon hadn’t been such a buffoon.  The great buffoon who accidentally saved them all by being so very useless and weird.  It does not matter who you are or where you came from if you are weird, and, therefore, unpredictable.  Close counts in more than just horseshoes and hand grenades.

He was a fool.  Even with fools he could not fit in.  He was a fool who fools despised, because he did not know he was weird.  His genius brain betrayed him.  Everything and everyone betrayed him.  It was a family full of nuclear silences.  The bomb has yet to go off.  Instead the leaking radiation is killing them all.