In stasis

I have considered you as

I watch the creeping

mould overtake the

fading paint on

the walls.

As the dampness of an

unventilated room drowns

each molecule of

air.

And I wonder which certainty

chased conviction away.

But whatever took me down the

other road—

it becomes simply another irrelevant,

better left unknown.

And just when I thought I had made

myself old over wishing for

something to whisper

like a kind stranger into

my ear,

            I understand, and I do not

            blame you

I find myself catching the edge of

every movement of

atmosphere even the leaves

have forgotten.

Listening

waiting.

But you will not send me any dreams tonight,

when there are already so few left believing.

So it is here any chance for you

to find me again.

It is here.

Just me and the mould,

listening

waiting...

Broken, Pt. 4

I woke still tucked between the sweaters, and still, to my disappointment, very tiny.  A quick check confirmed the presence of fairy wings.   I risked a small peek outside of the drawer, but nothing in the room had changed.  The lamp glowed softly, the faded flower-printed covers of the double bed remained untouched.

As I emerged from the drawer I realized I had no idea how long I’d slept.   The endless twilight had not given way to dawn—it never did.  That hadn’t seemed to matter the other times I’d visited, but now it left me cold.  I wanted to know how long I’d been in this room—or at least to believe that the clock was ticking down on this fairy fantasy, and that soon I would wake up somewhere else.

Try as I might, though, I could find no clock.  In low spirits I left the room, the quiet now beginning to stifle me.  Yet it seemed unwise to make my own noise, so I flew in almost total silence back to the restaurant, hoping to discover Marietta this time.

Once again I passed no one in the stairwell or the grand hallway.  The restaurant was similarly empty.  Disappointed, I buzzed through the restaurant, looking for any sign of life.  In the kitchen I noticed a door leading outside, slightly ajar.  With a peculiar feeling of dread I moved toward it, tempted to turn around but somehow compelled to keep moving.

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.