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emi-ren-blog · 6 years ago

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Fear, a little something wrote by me

“What are you afraid of?” she asks you.

You have to think on it. Fire, the dark, stones, brimstone that tastes like liquor, dragons most of all.

Fear is felt in the upper part of your body.

When you feel some type of fear, everything is tense. Your body is rigid and unyielding, muscles are ropes of stone and boulders form under your skin.

A glacier slides its way down your spine. Tremors shake like earthquakes in your statue-like stony body. The world around you shrinks, you’re crawling through a tunnel filled with nothing but your fear. Breath pants hot and acrid from your mouth. Humid. Heaviness engulfs you, a thick cloth covering your eyes, nose, mouth, ears.

You wake, breathing hotly, two eighteen in the morning, a large shadow looming over you. You can’t move, speak, look away.

All you are is round staring eyes, whites visible in the dark, breath panting and steaming out of you.

Finally, finally, centuries pass and you blink, the shadow is gone. You are back in your bed, crisis averted. Two nineteen in the morning. You can sleep, at least until you awake at two eighteen the next morning.

Fear is curled into the corner of your bed, listening intently to the horrendous rampaging on the other side of your door. The door is locked of course, with your baby brother safe in the corner with you. You are safe, but the dragon outside still scares you. His roaring and belching of flames should be deterred by a locked door, and silent statue-children not making a peep.

You know you aren’t really safe. For the dragon outside wants a victim. Someone to inflict his rage and temper and violence upon. And your captured princess-turned-mother is not here to claim that attention.

Children like statues born of an ill-suited marriage are innocent. They did nothing wrong except be born into a world of pain and rage and fire. They fear. They fear the lick of all-consuming flames, the scent of brimstone and liquor creeping poisonously under the locked door.

One statue child that looks like you has more to fear than the smaller child.

You fear overly large hands with thorn-like talons suited to tear into faces, arms, necks, chests, and upper left sides of backs. You fear these hands gripping ponytails (you learn to wear your hair down like you learn to lock your door) swatting at your backside.

You fear the comments made of your developing body. Comments of your virtue.

Statue children feel the fear clouding their lungs of brimstone and liquor. They fear the all-consuming fire around them. Clasped hands, silent tears, terrifying rage. That is all they know for a short time.

But all dragons must sleep, even the greatest and most terrible of night-terrors do rest. The fire banks low and quietly goes out with a snore. The children can finally separate and rest. Embers remain in their lungs from the fire and brimstone and liquor.

Fear can be your best-friend-turned-lover. For six years you have one person. Your one person. Everything that comes together and makes you, he knows. The liquor-tainted brimstone filling your lungs. The embers of the fire you were born into still burning low in your chest. The stones filling your belly from night-terrors and shadows squirming and flickering in the corners of your ceiling and mind. The painful ropes of muscle-stone of your upper-left back from blows long forgotten by your mind, but your body cannot forget.

Your best-friend-turned-lover smiles and takes that all in stride. Loves your back, your lungs, the sweet smoky singing coming from your chest. He loves you because some things were untainted by your dragon-father, and came out unscathed by the flickering shadows of two eighteen at night.

Your fingers did not grow the thorn-like talons of your father and brother (sadly he was cursed to that fate). Your palms, fingers, thumbs, are works of art. Colors and patterns swirl from your fingers, entrancing, bewitching to the eye. And if there is a slight smell of brimstone, you can mask it with turpentine.

For this fearful statue-child is adept at masks. Masks for her mother, brother, friends and acquaintances. But her favorite mask of all is the one she presents to her best-friend-turned-lover. Because, is it really changing herself at all if she loves who she is when she is with him?

Fear is when even the best of friends-turned-lovers grows weary of the mask he helped you create to suit his own desires.

Fear is when even this person can have his head turned. You know, some lovely girls are born just the way he likes them, and without a dragon in their belly and brimstone laced with liquor in their lungs.

Fear is when he asks to see other people and still come home to you. An empty ring born of no promises but five years and seven months worth of late night conversations, shared friends, and syrup kisses. A chain around your neck, small sterling silver heart hanging from it as a pretty decoration of ownership.

Fear is four months and three weeks of watching this lovely girl (and your only girl-friend) steadily try to get closer to your best-friend-turned-lover. Four months and three weeks of diverted car rides (she always wanted to wait to ride with him, but you’re smarter than you look), of sitting between them when your group of shared friends would go out. Four months and three weeks of bickering and petty arguments. Never enough to end anything, but enough for you to remember the words. The two words he said that brought back the glacier down your spine, and the boulders in the upper-left side of your back.

Open Relationship. The words taste of brimstone and liquor when you utter them. The one time you did your mouth was so scorched everything tasted of ash and dust for a week.

Fear is the way you remained silent. The way you loved the boy he was that you told noone of the two words that you couldn’t utter, for they brought the fear back into your heart. You couldn’t tell anyone, because if you did, it might become real.

Fear is the end of four months and three weeks. An argument over where to eat for dinner. He asks you to take him back to his car (both cars are his but that doesn’t matter to you).

Fear is in that car, that crowded parking lot, the place where you both work. The middle of a warm afternoon three quarters through the month of May.

Fear is when he says your name. He never says your name, he doesn’t like it. Three syllables for a first name that only has five letters. A short blunt last name. He joked of giving you his.

Fear is when he says your name, and two words that taste like fire and brimstone and liquor come back to the front of your mind. They never left, always on the back burner waiting to scorch you with their promise.

Fear is when it is over.

Fear is two weeks. You have two weeks to go back to the place where you first learned of brimstone and liquor. Never mind that the dragon no longer lives there. The place where you learned that dragons exist, and of stones, and fear settling deep in your lungs. Of the fear that roots itself into the boulders of the flesh of your upper-left back.

You would rather settle your stony body gently at the bottom of your river than go back to a place that reeks so strongly of fire.

Fear is the first hour. Tears on your face driving back to the only safe place you have left. The back of your (his) pickup truck, breathing out the humid brimstone and liquor that has made such a nice home inside your lungs. Breathing it out in the arms of a friend that always liked you better than he liked him.

Fear is still not being safe for your friend is still a man, and has had his head turned by the very same girl that turned the head of your best-friend-turned-lover.

Fear is going home alone that night. Empty, empty, empty apartment.

Fear is days one and two gone.

Fear is learning that on day three the girl made her move. While you’re in the room with her.

You let the brimstone and liquor in your lungs into blinding, furious flames (the embers had always been there waiting).

You roar at the girl who did so much more than be merely pretty enough to turn his head. The girl who unknowingly stoked the embers in your lungs for four months and three weeks. You hope the raging flames scorch her too. And maybe they do, maybe the shame burns a little in the pit of her stomach.

Fear turns your beautiful paint-stained fingers into the thorn-like talons of your father and brother.

Talons long enough to reach out and strike his left cheek. Turning the skin red enough to bring out the gold and peridot color of his eyes.

Fear is the shame of letting the dragon slumbering (but listening) in your stomach find his way winging through your lungs, up through your throat to burst out of your mouth like flames. Taking over your body until you become exactly what you have always a feared. Your own dragon of brimstone and liquor, burning into the lungs of those around you, planting embers of anger and rage and pain.

Fear is five months later being afraid still. Afraid of your dragon, and the dragons possibly lurking in the bellies of those around you.

Fear is not letting other people close to you, for fear of the flames. Fear is two years, eleven months and five days of pretending to let others close.

An even worse fear is when you realize you were pretending.

That when you told people of yourself, you omitted the dragon inside you, and your best-friend-turned-lover. You don’t tell of the fire, and brimstone, and liquor residing in your lungs like a sticky residue.

Fear is someone new, someone who understands quite a bit of you. An instant attraction in the meeting in a women’s restroom. A new lover.

Fear is one month and two weeks of courtship and being afraid of growing dependency on each other.

Fear is opening up.

Fear is the new lover-turned-best-friend who carries so much of your stony heart.

Fear is not telling of the dragon still in your stomach, of the boulders under the skin of your upper-left back, of the brimstone in your lungs. Somehow over time you managed to banish the liquor. Perhaps you found that you could drown it with liquor you liked. Or you found you enjoyed the taste of it, and it no longer bothers you. You might be able to do the same with the brimstone one day.

But the biggest fear of all is how you have learned to love your dragon, and the help she can sometimes give you.

Fear is wondering what this stomach-dragon is capable of. What can she do if she puts her paint-stained thorn-like talons to use.

Fear is being afraid of your own fire and what it is capable of. Pain and destruction.

Fear is being afraid of other people’s fire, and what it reminds you of.

Fear is being afraid of fire, regardless of who it belongs to. For fire burns indiscriminately regardless of who struck the match.

-emiren

#writing #writers #writeblr #excerpt from a book i'll never write #fear #painful #dragon

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