Broken, Pt. 3

For Part One:  http://thedevilsdiaries.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/broken.html
For Part Two: http://thedevilsdiaries.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/broken-pt-2.html

Part Three

The corridor seemed miles longer than usual, maybe because I was so little now.  I peered into all sorts of paper thin passageways I’d never noticed when I was big, but they were so dark and uninviting that I dared not travel down any of them.  I needed to solve this fairy riddle first. 

My woolly thoughts seemed to be leading me somewhere, so I pushed out of my mind the math exams I’d missed, the classrooms I couldn’t find.  I didn’t want to think about the times I woke up in a library, with only a few days left to write a year-end term paper I hadn’t even started.  I never knew how these crises turned out, because suddenly they would be over, and I would be here, on my way to the restaurant to visit Marietta.  She never asked where I’d been.  She was my friend.

Finally the hallway widened into a large, silent atrium, with massive stairs leading to the second floor.  I buzzed up the staircase, following its curvature instead of simply flying straight up.  In the much smaller hallway off to the right some instinct, or past experience, brought me to a small bedroom, gently lit by a reading lamp.  I didn’t know whose it was or why no one slept there tonight, but I did know I would be safe here—at least for a little while.

The bed, however, was not an option, so I fluttered over to the tall chest of drawers.  Each drawer had been left open, just the tiniest bit:  I settled for the middle drawer, the one with the thick woolly winter sweaters.  When I was big I’d hated wool and its scratchy, suffocating warmth, but now I curled myself into a tight ball between a snowflake-patterned jumper and a purple cabled cardigan and let out a little sigh.  Tomorrow, perhaps, I would be big again.  Tomorrow I might remember why I kept forgetting.

Last October

Where is         here I am        

 gone home without you

when I would rocket from the world

out of an ocean so impossibly asleep                                     

is the rain your final call

because I am wondering what this was for

           

why you ever loved me

why you do not anymore

there is no witness here

only ghosts of words that nudged into breath

  

the shape of a fool      shivering and wet       

your blanket thrown over the bed one cold night too late

 my eyes, heavy with dreams 

but you—                  

very much awake

how I welcomed the chance to be wrong

to never ask why you had to leave

why you had to come at all

was it to drift away from this eroding shore

or was it

not wanting to be sorry

not wanting to be felt sorry for 

one last secret for memory to keep

 Now our half-truths ship out

under cover of a cloud-filled sky

the sun you once spoke of

never any friend of mine

                                   

can you feel it rain

can you?          

Fading

As I paced around the guestroom, listening to Hal’s snoring through the wall, I felt transported in time.  Once more I stood in the hallway, a little girl, peeking through the open door as my mother sat on the edge of her bed.  The shades were pulled down, and her body hunched over, as she cried for the drunken husband who had hit her once again.  Watching this scene time and again had taught me one thing: make sure to close the door all of the way.  Only then did I sit on the edge of the bed, and cry for the husband who had forced me to leave him.

Dead End

ferry me to your kingdom of

make believe

let me run without the

inferno 

closing in behind

me

Broken Pt. 2

(*Follow this link for the first post: Broken)

Now, in the pantry, I stretched myself and abruptly remembered how to fly—I began running until suddenly my wings caught air and lifted me off of the hardwood floor.  Once in the air I turned down the narrow, artificially lit hallway that led into the dining room.  No one waited for me; not even Marietta sat at her usual table.  Only I existed, a lightning bug in disguise. 

But while the restaurant was familiar, I knew it was not safe.  I would need to find some other shelter where I could clear my head, or better yet, where I could sleep and wake up again as something else.  In the restaurant lobby I therefore held my breath and squeezed through the narrowest of gaps between the locked double doors.  When I exhaled again I rolled, tumbleweed style, into the magnificent hall that joined the restaurant to the great corridor. 

This hall was, like the restaurant, empty and silent.  The noise of my beating wings sounded too loud in the stillness around me.  As I buzzed along, expecting to plummet to the ground at any moment yet moving forward all the while, I felt vaguely troubled.  My illness had made the many snickets of my mind as dusky as the sky outside, but that wasn’t the problem.  I’d been ill before.  I had forgotten before.  But when I’d woken up the other times, it was to find myself at school and late for a math exam, with just a faint, frustrated notion of where my classroom might be.  I was used to that, even if I hated it.  I was not used to this fairy business.

Uneasily, I wondered if I would ever be big again.  Where would I live until I was?  The dollhouse in the attic had gone long ago.  As with nearly everything else I cared about, it had been sacrificed for a future that kept morphing into a past I could not remember.

Faithful

where did I go to

just to be loyal            

to one last deception

cycles of wishing

no chance to be faithful

when I meant to love you       

loss made me leave you

heavy as warheads

this fear almost fatal

here in your believing

triumph is fleeting

from so far away

no tongues left to speak in

so our silence becomes as

cold as the season

each yesterday we kill            

another act of treason

            but could it be             could it be       that she creeps up behind you

            could it be       could it be       that whispers will deny you   

                        no tears and no words             no soul for the selling

                        too much to pay                      to keep her from telling

since pain could not be swayed

a slow train runaway again

            the line for redemption

            from here to forever

and that jail you broke out of

the last portal to heaven

time is a monster                     asleep under the carpet

so easy to trip up on                to cover in never

with purples and yellows                    not just for pictures

but her yesterday sees            

her tomorrow remembers

because your shame hid away

a slow game come to play again

            the mercy you traded

            bursting with color                                                     

and what you thought finished

only just started

                        I could never love you

                        hope made me leave you

                        the damned has its day

                        trust still in the cradle

now here in this leaving

one stopped the bleeding

from a day unintended

night saved for dreaming

           

where have you gone to

crouched in a circle

you married the flame

this death for your trouble

if only for tomorrow

one last declaration

a lifetime of knowing

I will be faithful

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.