49 posts tagged “creative writing”

Tonight I glimpsed you in your old age. Why a man's voice deepens as he moves past his prime into his factorial self I'll never understand; my voice will thin and stretch as I become round and full with daughters, rich blood. Even so, your unkempt elder-self, humming a verse like a Degas painting, passed through the door stridently, as if commanding me: Distill these thoughts into words. Like this dark stranger you will be untrained and coercive, an unintentional muse, your notes insistent as they descend from your sharp tenor to the bass I do not yet know but already love; you too will pass through the door into the dim, unremarkable streets.

The beautiful part of picking up a girl who works the deli counter at a supermarket is that she must always be at least eighteen. There are no questions of a woman's age, then; no awkward admissions that one is underage and therefore not a real target for my lust. A utilitarian concept, for sure, but then, I'm like that: a utilitarian kind of guy.

When her life begins to parallel the circumstances leading to her childhood molestation, twenty-eight year-old Jacqueline Hardy's relationship with her fiance disintegrates because she can no longer distinguish the reality of the present versus her halfway-fictionalized account of the past.

In 1890, as eccentric heiress Sarah Winchester tirelessly moves to add rooms to her so-called "Winchester Mystery House," a servant and a builder feud to win their mistress' favor and come to understand what it means to love.

"There ain't no heaven and I been doin' fine, jus' fine."

Hello, rain. Hello, vanity.

"I feel so low -- all hookers and gin."

We watched the watchmaker drown.

It was then I realized the madness of men and the madness of women as separate things, differential lusts: escapes.

I didn't believe there was a problem, not yet at any rate, because there wasn't anything akin to sorrow scratched into his face. If you looked you could maybe see the beginnings of frustration making its mark across his forehead, a few new sullen lines where the skin had once been taut, but certainly never sorrow. Perhaps I wasn't looking hard enough. I've often been accused of looking without seeing. But each night we slept facing each other, our noses barely touching, a sleep so close as to make it impossible to ignore the development of a face's landscape, its new landmarks, when one was awake to complete the study. I rarely slept when we were like this, actually, because his sleep was so peaceful that it seemed to refresh the both of us. With him I was an insomniac: watching him sleep was enough, just enough, to keep me rested through the new day that spread through the blinds every morning. Which is why I feel I can say with some authority that I didn't believe there was a problem, not yet: he gave no outward indication, no notice of the coming loss.