The exercise:
Write about something or someone that is: tentative.
So much for making things easy for me to remember. Max was born November 7th, but I guess his little brother didn't want to do April 7th. Perhaps the 8th will be more to his liking?
Mine:
Three steps forward...
Inch back.
Inch back.
Inch back to the start.
Two steps forward...
Maybe not.
Maybe not.
Maybe let's go back.
One step forward.
Feels good.
Feels good.
Feels good at the start.
Wait a minute.
The start?
The start.
The start of nothing new...
2 comments:
Your memory surely can't be that bad that one additional birthday will cause problems! Just forget someone else's :)
I like where your poem ends up, it sounds like a lot of children (and sadly, too many adults) that I know. Never quite having the confidence to move on on their own and just do things :)
Tentative
The moon was like a coal-miner's smile: a brilliant crescent in the night-sky. It was so bright that it felt like it was blazing down and I wondered that I didn't feel warmer, bathed in its intensity. It was definitely a Lovecraftian night and I wondered how close the stars were to being right, right now.
"Mac?" The voice was Jenny's, she was a friend of mine. At least she had been before the meth took most of her mind. She was wearing aluminium foil streamers in her hair and wearing an old dressing gown soaked with bodily fluids and stained like a Rorschach test. She had new slippers on: fluffy bunnies who little black plastic eyes glistened evilly in the refulgent moonlight. She thought the police were trying to read her thoughts, and I sometimes wished they were. "Mac? The Idol of Odile...." She fell silent again, though she wasn't waiting for me to speak, she was trying to hear a coherent thread inside her own head. She picked at scabs on the inside of her arm, and the smell of cabbage, ordure and cheap wine rose up in a fug around us.
I waited though; Jenny had seen the Idol walking and I needed to know where it was. I had no idea how it had gotten out and woken up, but I was sure that something was afoot. And I wanted to get there and find out what before anyone got any funny ideas about sacrificing goats, or eating their chicken on the too-pink side of undercooked, and starting summoning the other things that this City is built atop of.
"The Idol was looking for something...," she said. A tooth slipped in her gum and hung crooked; a slow sludgey trickle of blood started lazily down an adjacent tooth, and eventually dripped onto a cracked, blackened lip. "Alcohol," she said at last, her words tentative like a prostitute discovering that the address she's coming to is higher rent than she is. "It was heading towards the warehouses."
"Dire Joe's," I muttered, my throat still too raw from screaming to manage full words. "The biggest alcohol distributor in town. Makes sense. Thanks Jenny." I reached in my pocket for cash, but all I found was a mousetrap and someone else's finger. I gave them both the Jenny anyway and immediately tried to put them together like a child's puzzle. I left her to it, I had to go. The Idol of Odile was on the loose, and I needed to find out why.
Greg - that's a good idea. Knowing me, I probably won't even have to chose one to forget - it'll just happen on its own!
Ah, an unexpected but highly enjoyable continuation of the Idol story! Thank you :)
Also: the opening description of the moon is fantastic.
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