#anyway full poem on the gram
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ghostsofmemories · 1 year ago
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every year
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call-me-rei · 3 years ago
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Chapter 34
“We know we’re classic together like Egyptian gold.”
---
Love was in the air.
Not between me and my boyfriend, just in general.
It was February, which meant that hearts, candy, stuffed animals, and cheesy poems were around every corner. My school took the upcoming holiday very seriously. There were posters lining the walls that advertised a Valentine’s Day dance and buying candy grams for your special someone so someone from Student Council could go to their class and embarrass them.
I couldn’t care less about any of that.
February meant that Vic’s birthday was around the corner. I didn’t know how he felt about Valentine’s Day, but Tony had told me that he liked his birthdays to be lowkey. Usually he’d hang out with his friends then do something with his family. I wanted to change those plans, or at least add to them.
I was standing in the back courtyard at school with Tony. He was telling me about some of the things Vic did and didn’t like when it came to his birthday. He liked meaningful presents and chocolate cake but hated surprise parties because he liked to be in the know.
“Seriously, if you gave him a new notebook for his lyrics or something for his guitar, he’ll be more than happy.”
I nodded at the advice. I wasn’t the greatest at giving gifts. It took me too long to decide what someone would want. I always wanted to give them something they’d absolutely love and use, but I always doubted that they’d like what I gave them. I needed about a month in advance so I wouldn’t psych myself out.
“I know nothing about guitars though,” I whined.
Tony chuckled. “It’s okay dude, I do. If you want, we can go down to Guitar Center and get some stuff.”
“We’re going to Guitar Center?”
Tony and I turned at the same time and watched the Fuentes brothers walk up to us.
“Uh, no. Tony wanted me to go with him,” I lied.
Vic just shrugged and stood close to me. He leaned back against the wall I was standing near and reached his hand out discretely. I reached my hand back and lightly played with his fingers.
Since Vic was only out to his friends and mine, he didn’t want to draw too much attention to our relationship. Small moments like this were the only ways we could show affection to each other without letting the whole school know we were together.
“Why would you wanna go to Guitar Center?” he asked me.
I shrugged. “I wanna learn how to play guitar. Tony offered to help me get started.” Tony smiled at my quick lie and nodded to Vic.
“Why not ask me? I could help you with that,” Vic offered. I looked to see a slight look of offense on his face. I almost pouted.
“Well, I was talking to Tony when it came up and he offered. I wasn’t really trying to ask anyone,” I said with a shrug.
“Alright, I guess.” I put my hand in his for a quick second and squeezed. I didn’t need him to be suspicious or skeptical. I would’ve appreciated his help if my words were true.
“So Vic, you’re turning eighteen in a couple days. Got anything you wanna do?”
Vic shrugged at Tony’s question. “Not really. I guess since I’m eighteen we should throw a party?” He looked over to Mike. “You think Mom would be okay with it?”
“I guess. As long as you don’t invite the whole school.”
Tony and I exchanged glances as the brothers talked about party planning. He and I had gotten closer in the last few months so he quickly became one of the people who was able to read my facial expressions and know how I was feeling.
At that moment I was feeling kind of bummed. I didn’t want my plan to be ruined by a party that Vic was looking forward to more.
“Don’t worry, it’ll work out,” he whispered to me. I nodded, not wanting to dwell on the subject any further.
Thankfully the bell rang signaling the start of the school day. The four of us walked into the building. Mike and Tony quickly went their way to their first class leaving Vic and me to walk to government alone.
“You were kinda quiet out there.” I looked at him as we walked up the stairs to the second floor. “You alright?”
“Yeah,” I reassured him. “Just thinking about your birthday.”
His face lit up. “Why? You have anything planned?”
I shook my head. “No, just wondering if there’s anything specific you’d want to do?”
“Well,” he started. He put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me close to him. “There’s one person I wouldn’t mind doing.”
An evident blush spread across my cheeks at his words. I shoved him playfully while he laughed. “Fuck you, Victor.”
“You gonna?”
I bit my lip to keep the dirty thoughts in my mind from turning into words.
“You’re thinking about it, aren’t you?” I rolled my eyes to avoid admitting it. “I’m just saying, it would be a great present.”
I glared at him and flipped him off as I stepped into government before the bell rang.
***
I had successfully avoided Vic all day. It was the hardest thing I had to do.
It was Thursday after school. Vic’s birthday. I had the brilliant idea the night before to not say much to him, mostly because I didn’t want to get so excited and spoil the surprise I had for him. Tony had told me that Vic’s parents had allowed for a party at his house over the weekend so my present would be a good prequel to it.
What I forgot to account for was that my boyfriend wouldn’t appreciate being ignored on his birthday.
It wasn’t like I walked away from him when he talked to me. Of course I wished him a happy birthday when I saw him and talked to him at lunch, but I was very careful with what I said and how much I spoke to him all day. In hindsight I could’ve been a bit more open considering this was his special day, but I knew that if I had been I was going to ruin his surprise.
Did I do something?
I pouted at the message Vic had sent. I hated making him feel like he was in the wrong for something that hadn’t even happened.
No. Can you come over? I have something for you
It’s not my stuff is it??
I rolled my eyes at his reply. You never gave me anything
SO?!
If this is a breakup just tell me
Kinda ass that you’ll break up with me on my birthday
OMG just come over!I huffed after I sent the message.
FINE but I won’t like it
I shook my head as I put the finishing touches on the last part of Vic’s surprise. With a proud grin I carried it up the stairs to the attic. It was with a lot of luck that I didn’t drop it as I climbed onto the roof.
I always thought the view from the window in the attic was nice, but the view from the roof was even better. From the top of our two-story house you could see past the neighborhood and into the park down the road. The sun was about set which meant it was the perfect time for my plan.
As if on cue I saw Vic’s car roll into my driveway. I smiled to myself before carefully climbing back into the house from the attic window. I was very glad I had gotten my cast and sling taken off weeks before; I wouldn’t have been able to do any of this if I was still in them.
I rushed down the attic steps and the stairs of the second floor as Vic rang the doorbell. I smoothed the wrinkles out of my shirt before I answered the door with a big, excited smile on my face.
“Hey you,” I said cheerily.
“Hi…” I giggled at his confused state and pulled him into the house and led him up to the second floor.
“What’s going on, Kells?”
“I have a surprise for you.”
“I already said that breaking up with me today would be a dick move so-“
I rolled my eyes. “Shut up, I already said I’m not dumping you.”
“Then what?”
My smile grew when we stopped. “Go up the stairs.” He looked up at the attic stairs then at me. I nodded to reassure him.
Vic looked up the stairs again and blew out a breath but started climbing anyway. I followed behind.
“Alright, it’s pretty cool up here.” Since we had moved, I had decorated the attic. There was a rug on the floor and a table and loveseat around it. I had put some pillows and a blanket on the ledge in front of the window and was in the process of hanging up fairy lights on the walls.
I smiled at his compliment. “Thanks, but we’ve gotta keep moving.”
“To where?” I pointed out the window. “No.”
I bit back the laugh that wanted to escape. My poor boyfriend was afraid. “You’ll be fine, trust me.”
“I can trust you from in here.”
“Oh, don’t be such a baby.” I went over to the ledge and stuck my upper body out of the window. I grabbed onto the security rungs Mom and I had installed above the window and hoisted myself onto the roof.
“Your turn,” I yelled down to Vic when I saw he was watching me with his head out of the window. He looked like he was debating if he should join me or turn around and run back to his car. Eventually the inner turmoil ended, and he followed my example. Once one of his hands was on the rung, I pulled the other one and lifted him up.
Vic gained his footing and looked at the scene in front of him. I had set up a birthday picnic for him, complete with a picnic blanket, pillows, and basket full of food. I sat down on the blanket and pulled out two small bowls of fruit, bottles of water and cans of soda, and two sub sandwiches. I left the small chocolate Bundt cake in the basket for later.
He looked down at the setup then at me. “I didn’t know what to give you so I thought I’d do this. Do you like it?”
I was nervous when he kept staring without a word. I nibbled on my bottom lip while I watched as he took a few small steps forward. He kneeled in front of me, took my face in his hands, and planted a gentle kiss on my lips. “I love it.”
I smiled and leaned in for another kiss that he gladly gave me. Our lips moved against each other in such a wonderful way that it sent chills down my spine. I pulled him closer to me as I leaned back. He readjusted his weight so he was lying on top of me, our lips never separating.
What started out as innocent quickly intensified. Vic’s hands slid down my body and settled on my hips. He grinded his lower half into me which led to a moan escaping past my lips and into his mouth. My fingers tussled themselves in his hair looking for anything to hold on to.
His tongue had just slipped into my mouth when a car horn pulled us from our trance.
“Kellin, Kellin’s boyfriend, stop that! We have neighbors!”
We pulled away from each other and sat up. I looked at the ground below, seeing my mom standing next to her car with her arms crossed.
“Hey…,” I stuttered out. I scratched the back of my head to give my nervous hands something to do. My cheeks were no doubt red and my lips were tingling. What a fun scene for my mother to get home to.
“Aren’t you going to introduce me to your…friend?”
I blushed harder if that was possible and cleared my throat. “Um, yeah…? Mom, this is Vic. Vic, this is my mom.”
Vic seemed just as nervous as me, but he hid it better than I ever could. His voice wasn’t shaking as he spoke. “Nice to meet you, Ms. Quinn.”
“Nice to meet you too, Vic. I take it you’re Kellin’s boyfriend?”
He looked at me, giving me a small reassuring smile. “Yes ma’am.” I returned the gesture and held his hand. Mom had already caught us making out; there wasn’t anything else we could do to have her tease us more, so I took comfort in holding him.
Mom hummed. “Well, okay. Be safe up there. No running, always look where you’re going, and use a condom.”
I stand corrected.
I hid my face in my free hand and groaned. “Mom!”
She simply winked at me and walked into the house.
“I’m sorry about that,” I mumbled. “That was so embarrassing.”
“Uh, it’s fine.” He sounded so unsure; it made me smile. Vic was blushing almost as hard as I was, if that was possible.
“Should we start eating?” I nodded, grateful that he had changed the subject.
We sat in a comfortable silence and watched the sun set behind houses and trees. Occasionally one of us would hold up a piece of fruit to the other’s mouth for him to eat, but not many words were spoken. Vic broke the silence when he finished his sandwich and laid back on the blanket.
“How long did it take you to come out to your mom?”
I laid down next to him and put my hands under my head.
“Not long,” I answered. He looked from the sky to me, urging me to continue.
“I mean, I was fourteen and it was all new to me. Obviously I was afraid to tell her because you never know how someone is gonna react, but Mom and I were - and are - all each other have. It’s kinda like keeping something from your best friend. You wanna tell them more than anyone, but you fight it until you can’t anymore.”
“Right. So how long did you fight it?”
I thought about it. “I think it took me four or five months after I admitted it to myself. She picked me up from school and took me shopping for something. We saw a gay couple holding hands in one of the stores we were in and I asked her how she felt about it. Mind you, this was in Michigan where acceptance is kinda hit or miss.
“She looked me dead in the eye and said she would never judge anyone for who they loved. Love is love and no one has a right to say otherwise. I came out to her when we got home that night. She hugged me, cried, then told me she knew it.”
Vic chuckled at the end of my story. “That’s really sweet. I’m glad you had a good coming out experience.”
I smiled. “Me too. It kinda makes moments like earlier hard to deal with though.”
“How so?”
I chuckled. “Well, she won’t ever let me hear the end of it, for one.”
We glanced at each other before breaking out in laughter. Once we calmed down Vic took my hand in his and intertwined our fingers as he stared thoughtfully at the sky. “I think I should tell my mom.”
I looked at him. His eyes didn’t leave the space above him that had started fading into light shades of pink and orange.
I rubbed the back of his hand with my thumb. “I think you should too. Both of your parents actually.” He nodded. “I can be there with you if you want.”
“I’d like that.” He looked from the sky and sent me a warm smile that I returned.
“If your parents are as cool as my mom is, there won’t be anything to worry about.”
“My parents are pretty cool. Who knows, maybe we’ll have a ‘roof moment’ at my house.”
I giggled. “I hope not. I don’t think I could live through another one.” Vic chuckled with me and brought my hand to his lips, giving it a soft kiss.
“Just so you know, my mom is probably gonna call you ‘Kellin’s boyfriend’ forever.”
He smiled. “That’s fine. As long as you keep calling me your boyfriend then I’m okay.”
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nonamememoir · 6 years ago
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Chaos Like Me by Tori Bloom
I was in diapers until I was four years old. For whatever reason potty-training never stuck with me. One day, fed up, my mother told me that if I didn’t learn to use the potty that she would never take me camping again. I promptly ripped off my diaper and never looked back.
I don’t think of myself as an outdoors person. I like lazing about in bed all day, mostly. I don’t like the sun or the heat, and in my opinion beaches are only truly beautiful at night. I don’t like to swim much either. And still, I dream of marching across the great stretch of land between the Atlantic and Pacific.
I’m not a people person either. I’m a nervous, socially anxious, wreck. My lips work faster than my mind. I hate public speaking and job interviews. I hate introducing myself to new people. And yet, I dream of meeting strange, new, and exciting people with lives that might have never crossed mine.
If I could guess, I’d say these paradoxes arise from my early life. From the time I was eleven years old to when I was fourteen my life was chaotic. I spent those years moving from house to house, usually living with relatives, sometimes living with family friends. A bedroom of my own, where I could laze about, was never a constant. I learned to wall myself off in other ways. But sometimes I would find myself outdoors anyways, drawn to the openness, to the freedom that only my hands and feet could give me. So, maybe I am an outdoors person.
I grew up next to Williams Grove Amusement Park. The edge of our trailer park faded into the trees, and between those trees the William’s Grove miniature train snaked past. There was a bridge there, beside the track and high above the Yellow Breeches creek. I remember my friend Brittany and I, no older than seven or eight, used to walk up to that bridge and pick ripe mulberries until our fingers were dyed deep purple and our bellies were full. Every now and then the train would pass by us. We would sit on the edge of the bridge, fingers curled around inky berries, and wave to the people on the train as we stuffed our chubby faces.
Have you ever walked on train tracks that stretched over water? It’s a terrifying thing, but incredibly exhilarating. My older sister Stephanie was the first one to bring me onto train tracks. They were those amusement park tracks. I remember watching my feet move from one wooden slat to the next, peering into the water below us, just waiting for one of my tiny feet to slip through the cracks. My head would turn back now and then, watching anxiously for the train to come rolling up behind us.
When I was fourteen I moved on to bigger and more dangerous activities. My cousin Kelsey, our friend Allen, and some of his friends all decided to go on a walk along train tracks. Kelsey and I lived together at the time, so we did everything together. Everything usually meant walking around downtown California, Pennsylvania and entertaining ourselves in Dollar General. Sometimes entertainment came in the form of a vintage-style restaurant called Spuds. We would go there and order crispy bacon cheese fries and sit on stools, talking and laughing for hours. Today it meant walking on train tracks.
These train tracks were at the top of a steep hill that brushed against the Monongahela river on one side. On the other side of the hill, there was one smooth path up through the grass to get to the top. Most of us chose to climb up a particularly sharp incline of the hill, preferring the challenge.Kelsey, however, was a little more heavy set, her weight carried in her hips, so she decided it was in her best interest to take the smooth path up. Once Allen, his friends, and I made it to the top we began or walk. We watched Kelsey moving on the street, a good five feet below us, on her way to the path. Just a few feet ahead of us the track was suspended over the river. There was a stretch of solid metal to walk on connected to the tracks, a bridge over the water, but we all decided to continue on the tracks just to see if we could do it. I followed Allen and his friends’ lead, stepping out onto the wooden slats. Those train tracks were a far cry from the ones I knew at the amusement park. For one thing, they were much larger. Of course, that was because the train was larger, faster, and more powerful. It wasn’t an amusement park ride. My legs were shaking as I carefully took each step, avoiding the gaps between each wooden slat, trying not to pay attention to the pool of swirling, muddy, water peeking out between the cracks. I looked up for a moment and saw Kelsey on the other side of the bridge, moving toward us along the tracks, her dirty blonde hair a frizzy mess thanks to the humid day. She had her headphones in.
“This is freakin’ scary. Why are we doing this again?” I asked.
“I don’t know, ‘cuz we’re dumb?” Allen answered.
We were still walking over the water when we heard it. When I looked up again I could see the train barreling down the tracks, headed toward us. Kelsey had her back facing it.  
“Holy shit!” Someone shouted, and, like that was some unspoken signal, we all began running across the tracks. What had been careful steps minutes before was now sprinting, gliding from track to track. It hadn’t occurred to us that we could simply step to the right and continue on that metal bridge, instead of trying to outrun a train by running straight toward it.
“Kelsey!” We began waving our arms, trying to get her attention. Her head was down. She kept walking slowly. “Kelsey, get off the tracks! There’s a train!”
We all ran off the suspended tracks and made it back to solid ground. I fell down in the grass, panting. Kelsey stepped off of the tracks a second after that and walked over to us. The train flew by us, over that bridge, just a few seconds later.
“That was-”
“Fucking awesome!” Allen cheered. There was a chorus of laughter. “Kelsey, why didn’t you get off the tracks when we called you?”
“Oh. I didn’t hear you guys,” she told us, holding up her mp3 player.
“We thought you were gonna get hit by the train,” I said, laying back in the grass and running my hands all over my fear-flushed face.
“Oh no, I was fine, guys. I heard the train.”
We laughed harder.
I didn’t have a home growing up. When I was ten years old we left our trailer park behind and moved in with my grandparents. My Gram and Pap had lived there, in western Pennsylvania, for as long as I could remember. Now we were a part of that home, nestled in the mountains, thick forests, and winding backroads. It was, as all things in my life have seemed to be, only temporary. My older sisters, Amber and Stephanie, moved in with friends, I think. I sort of lost track of them for the next few years of my life. All of us were moving around too much, only brushing into each other at family gatherings. When I was eleven, my parents broke up. My mother and I began hopping from home to home. Somehow, somewhere along the way, I ended up on my own, living with my ill aunt and taking care of her. My mother left me and got married. My dad moved to Kentucky to live with his brother to make enough money to one day come back and take care of me. Everything, everyone, slipped out of my grasp. I couldn’t control my life, or what it had become. The only things I have always felt in control of are my hands and my feet.
With my hands I journaled. I wrote about baby birds that I saw, tucked away in their nests. Sometimes I wrote about boys or girls that I had crushes on. I wrote awful, cheesy, songs and poems. With my hands I created stories.
With my feet I walked barefoot on gravel, like my mother always used to do. My feet carried me wherever I wanted them to. I walked over bridges, through streams, down hot sidewalks and busy streets. With my feet I was free.
There was a tall tree beside our trailer growing up. I was about nine years old, coming home from school. I dropped my backpack at the bottom of the tree and grabbed onto the lowest branch, pulling myself up and over. Then I grabbed the next branch and pulled myself onto that one. I was so focused on the task at hand, and by the time I was up high enough my hands and and feet were scratched, red and raw. It didn’t hurt. I rested my back against the thick trunk, looking up at the oval-shaped, bright green clusters of leaves. I could see the sun shining through the top, yellow light radiating through the leaves and spreading spider veins over them. My head dropped again. I glanced at my house, barely visible through the leaves, and sighed. The kids at school had made fun of me that day, and that day I wasn’t quite strong enough to take it with a smile. sat there, against the tree, and let myself cry. My body shook against its great, big, trunk.
They called me names. I wasn’t Tori, I was “licehead”. The kids came up with this creative name after I spent two weeks out of school trying to get rid of the tiny little creatures making a home on my scalp. I was the girl who never got picked for kickball, even though I was good at it. I wore mismatched socks and didn’t brush my hair, so I wasn’t good enough. I brought some of it on myself, as I was a bossy child with very little social skills. I didn’t know how to make friends. I was aggressive and argumentative. But no little kid deserves to feel unwanted.
My tears fell from my cheeks, through the air and to the ground below, swirling like leaves and collecting on the dirt.
At the time I hadn’t thought that it was a strange place to cry. I know now that, although I it was unusual, this was my refuge. Climbing up, focusing on the movement of my hands and feet, the pull of my muscles, the sun glimmering through the top of the trees, gave me a moment of control. For as much as the kids at school could tease me and call me names, reject me, they couldn’t take away the green in the trees or the feeling of knotted bark under my fingertips. So I climbed, I let my pain go, and I climbed back down.
Spring semester of my junior year, my friend Patrick and I were drunk off of our asses after a night of partying. We lived in the same dorm, so we walked back from the party together. We made it all the way back to our doors when I paused, turned, and called out to him.
“Wait! I kinda want to go lay and look at the stars. Do you wanna come with?”
“Sure! Just let me get my coat.”
“Me too. I’ll meet you back out here.”
So we grabbed our coats and began walking toward the church. Patrick’s big, down, winter coat looked ridiculous, swallowing up his thin frame. He actually looked a lot like me, other than his thin frame. He had strawberry blonde hair, just like mine, but it was thinning, straight, and a shade lighter than mine. His eyes were gray-blue, darker at night, like mine. We’re both a mixture of Irish and Hungarian, but his features favor his Hungarian side, with a long hooked nose and thin lips. Patrick was a lot like me.
I met Patrick and Steph my freshman year of college. Patrick lived in my freshman dorm hall, Hanson. Steph was a year older than me. I met both of them through mutual friends, my roommate namely, and they met through me. I spent nearly every weekend with her or Patrick through all four years of my college life. We usually partied together, or went to trivia nights. Sometimes we went out to dinner, or went on walks. But my favorite memories with them both involve me breaking down into tears.
My sophomore year, I invited Patrick to polish off a bottle of gin in my room. We were laying on my bed, taking shots and talking about our lives.
“I’ve never had gin before,” Patrick commented right before he downed another shot. “It’s not too bad.” I took a shot after him and gagged. We laughed.
“I wonder what other people think about gin. Let’s google it!”
The consensus online was the gin made people sad.
“Pfft, yeah right. We’re not sad at all,” Patrick said.
Ten minutes later we were talking about our dead grandparents and crying.
There was a knock on my door. I sniffled, dried my eyes with my sleeve, and walked to the door. Our friend Jen was there. She had dropped by in the hopes that I had a cigarillo. She looked around the room, eyebrows raised.
“Is Patrick crying?”
Patrick and I looked at each other and burst into laughter.
We made it to the patch of grass by the church. There were a few other people laying in lawn chairs, smoking cigarillos and chattering. Patrick and I found a place far enough away from everyone else and plopped onto the ground.
“Have I ever shown you that I can stand on my head?” I asked him, grinning like a madwoman.
“No, I don’t think so. You can do that?”
“Hell yeah I can! Watch this!”
I got on my knees, tilted forward until my head was pressed to the ground and lifted myself up, my legs hanging in the air for a full 10 seconds before I toppled forward.
“I can do it for longer, I swear, but I’m way too drunk.” We laughed.
Patrick laid down and I sat beside him, running my fingers through the grass. After a few seconds I fell down next to him.We laid beside each other, silent, watching the stars. I was always brought back to the stars for some reason. I don’t think Patrick cared much either way, but he was drunk and went along for the ride. I kept staring up at them and something came over me, like the stars were begging me to open my mouth and not just talk but actually say something. I had been silent for way too long, stuck in my own head. I was depressed. I took a deep breath and broke the silence.
“You know my dad tried to kill himself?”
That’s one way to make conversation.
“Yeah, I know,” he answered, no judgment in his voice.
“I never understood why he hated his brother so much for going through with it. Suicide is hard. It means, like, you know,” I wiped my face with the sleeve of my coat, “Someone who kills themself thinks that things were so bad that they had no other choice. But now I get it. I get it because my dad tried to leave me, and I’m pissed. And, I don’t talk about it. I don’t ever really talk about it, but that’s how I feel. My dad, he was grieving after my aunt died and I get it, but I lost someone too.” By that point I was holding back sobs, but my body was shivering and my vision was blurry. I kept looking up at the stars, even though I could no longer see them.
“You know that I’m here for you if you ever need to talk,” Patrick told me. He turned to me and wrapped an arm around my waist.
“I know. I know. And it means a lot. Because I think about ending it too. I think about jumping in front of a train sometimes. And maybe that’s something that came out of this, something good; I could never do it because I know what it feels like to lose someone. And, and I don’t want my dad to go through that, or my sisters, or you and Steph. You guys make me feel important.”
“You are important.”
We went quiet again and I looked back up at the sky and the stars and held them there, for a moment, in my memory.
*
I
(a short poem by Tori Bloom)
“I can’t remember
When I laughed
So hard I nearly cried.
When I watched the stars
And noticed
That it was only I.”
*
It was a warm fall night, one of the last memorable ones that I had with my friend Steph before she graduated. We had drank way too many bottles of Henry’s hard orange soda, followed up by some cider we had stolen from the communal fridge. It was around 2 a.m. and, although I usually went back to my dorm around that time, I asked her if she wanted to go on a walk. She agreed, and we were off. I was practically dancing on the sidewalks, gliding smoothly. In reality I probably looked like a drunken, stumbling fool.
“You know what I wanna do when I graduate?” I slurred. “I wanna go! Just, go! Like, I keep telling people that I want to pack a bag and just start walking and they act like I’m crazy. Is that crazy?”
Steph laughed and shook her head a little, brown hair flopping in the wind. “Yeah, a little. Most people start working on their careers when they graduate. But I can see why you’d want to travel. I want to travel too.”
“I get that. But it’s like, my whole life I’ve been told to just keep going. A lot of us are told that— you know, fake it till you make it? And it sucks! It fucking sucks. We’re all gonna die one day so what’s the point? Why not just do what I wanna do? I don’t wanna find some shitty job, just so I can get experience to get another shitty job and have kids and a husband and teach them to be miserable too.”
We came to the end of the alley we were stumbling through and made it back to the sidewalk along Carlisle street. We turned toward the town square and stood for a moment, starstruck by the glowing lights on the Christmas tree in the middle of town.
My favorite memory with Steph was also sophomore year. We came back to my dorm after a night of drinking. I suddenly felt extremely dizzy and stumbled into my bathroom, sitting at the toilet. The next thing I knew, a waterfall was spilling from my mouth. I started to cry, my emotions overwhelming me as the alcohol swirled around in my brain. Steph walked into the bathroom and handed me a glass of pedialyte mixed with water. I lifted my head up from the toilet seat and took a sip, only to immediately spit it back out into the toilet.
“Is there vodka in that?” I gasped, feeling sick all over again. Steph took the cup from me.
“Yeah. It seemed like a good idea at the time,” she informed me. I was laughing, but tears were still stinging my eyes. I puked again.
I started to whine incoherently about my mom, about how abandoned I felt, and how depressed I was. Steph rubbed her hand on my back.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked, trying to soothe me.
“Can you play One Direction? Play Take Me Home by One Direction! That’ll make me feel better.”
She brought my laptop into the bathroom and began to blast that album. We both sung along, messing up all of the words, crying and smiling at the same time.
We were on the move again, heading toward the town circle.
“Which way should we go?”
“This way!” I pointed to the right and we continued our journey.
Something in me, maybe the booze, maybe something else, pulled me into the street. I started skipping, gesturing for Steph to join me. She hesitated, pushed her glasses up on the bridge of her nose, and shrugged before she walked out into the street too. We laughed as we ran through the empty streets.
“This is so stupid!”
And it was stupid, but also unforgettable.
***
I was about nine years old. My family and I were on our yearly camping excursion. I woke up in the early afternoon and everyone was sitting around the simmering campfire. They were trying to get the flames going, but the sizzling crack of the wood and the pillar of smoke weaving between the trees was a sign that all of the wood had been soaked in the rain the night before. The sky was still gray, but there was a slight glow peeking out from behind the clouds, glinting off of the leaves in the nearby woods.
“I wanna go to the park,” I announced, walking over to my younger cousins, Kelsey and Julie.
“Oh, we just got back from the park,” Julie told me, not moving from her seat by the fire.
I was hurt, as though their trip to the park was a betrayal of the very worst kind. To a child, it might seem that way.
“Fine, I’ll go by myself. Is that okay, mom?”
My mom gave me the go-ahead and I was off. I marched through the woods, toward the giant slabs of stone, organized like a bunker in the woods. I climbed on top of one of the slabs and looked out through the spaces between the trees. I could still see my family, blobs shifting around in the distance as they moved around the campsite. I climbed back down and headed toward the park.
When I got there, the first thing I did was climb onto the tire swing. I spun in circles, staring up toward the sky and laughing, alone. Except, I wasn’t really alone because I had imaginary friends. One of those friends was a girl named Sarah, a mean blonde who I rarely actually got along with. The first time I imagined her I was only five years old. She sat by me on the bus, because no one else would. Sarah became my crutch, someone who calmed me down and made me brave. We shared a pet bear cub named Tootsie. They both stood beside me as I swang, just watching me twirl around until my stomach was twisted up in knots.
I climbed out of the tire swing and moved to the seesaw. Sarah got on the other side and I began pushing myself up and plummeting back down. I didn’t get very high off of the ground because my imaginary friend weighed a measly zero pounds.
“Sarah, come on! You’re not even trying to seesaw with me,” I complained. Sarah rolled her eyes at me and that was that. “You know what? I don’t wanna be friends with you anymore. Tootsie likes me better anyways. Just go, go away! I never want to see you again!” And she left. I watched her walk off, in my mind, and I didn’t try to stop her. I needed her to go.
I don’t think I ever played with ‘Sarah’ again after that. My imaginary friend was gone. Although, I suppose, she was never really a friend to begin with, just someone to be there for me when I didn’t want to do things alone.
There’s something about the wild, about railroad tracks and mulberry bushes, starlit nights and trees, that opens me up, even when I don’t want to. I feel free running from trains and falling into the grass. I feel connected to my past, to the days that I walked with my sister in our trailer park and when I used to climb the tree beside our home. When I run down empty streets I feel opportunity that I have never found in the pages of a textbook. Because railroad tracks, fields of green grass, the moon hanging low in the sky, the trunk of a tree decades older than me, none of those things care about my day. They don’t even care about my existence. And still, I exist, at this exact moment in time— at the same time that stars light years away are exploding into brilliant light, and rivers are flooding and changing course, and mountains are literally moving beneath our feet. Nature is chaotic, but it is beautiful chaos, organized chaos, chaos like me. Through the years, I’ve felt chained, out of control, a slave to my own mind and body, but when I lift myself up with my hands and feet, feeling the world around me, experiencing it as it exists right now, I am free.
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Episode #45 — "The Pond" by Aimee Ogden
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Episode 45 is part of the Summer 2017 issue!
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  The Pond
by Aimee Ogden
  Laura almost misses the first message.
A screaming match with Sana has driven her out into the frost-rimed evening. The baby’s cries and Sana’s frustrated shushing chase her across the yard; Ifrah is not an easy infant like her brother was. Laura and Sana’s relationship is not an easy one like it was back when Christopher was born, either.
Laura stops to cram her skis onto her feet only once she is far enough away to shut out the sounds from the house. Her only illumination comes from the headlamp clipped to her hat; the moon hides behind thick, dull clouds. It would have been so easy to race past the windswept pond without a second glance. But the headlamp glints on the dull frozen surface, and two stark words etched beneath catch and hold her eye: HELLO MOMMY.
[Full transcript after the cut.]
  Hello! This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing this story with you. Today we have another GlitterShip original and a poem. Our poem today is “A Seduction by a Sister of the Oneiroi” by Hester J. Rook, and our original story is “The Pond” by Aimee Ogden.
If you enjoy this story and would like to read ahead in the Summer 2017 issue, you can pick that up at glittership.com/buy for $2.99 and get your very own copies of the winter and spring 2017 issues as well.
Finally, the GlitterShip Year One anthology is still on sale in the Kindle and Nook stores for $4.99, and you can pick up the paperback copy for $17.95.
  Hester J. Rook is an Australian writer and co-editor of Twisted Moon magazine, a magazine of speculative erotic poetry (twistedmoonmag.com). She has previous prose and poetry publications in Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Liminality Magazine, Strangelet and others. She’s on Twitter @kitemonster and you can find her other work on her site http://hesterjrook.wordpress.com/.
  A seduction by a sister of the Oneiroi
Hester J. Rook
  The night is velvet warm, mosquito pricked. There is prosecco through my tongue and pear juice sticky down my wrists. Her mouth is sugar rich and cream softened, velvet dipped in moonlight. “We are goddesses already,” she is wine voiced and dusk cloaked, autumn leaves behind eyes translucent as cathedral glass. “My heart is wraithlike sour, bitter as lemon rind and my realm soft-surreal and afraid. But you you taste of marzipan at sunset earthen-toed and iron scented, like a storm. A goddess already.” She ties back her dream-soaked curls and lights up each star, palm raised high and fingertips aflame. “Come back with me.” And, fizzy-tongued and plum sweetened, I do.
    Aimee Ogden is a former science teacher and software tester. Nowadays, she writes stories about sad astronauts and angry princesses. Her work has also appeared in Apex, Shimmer, and Cast of Wonders. Aimee lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where you can find her at the gym, in the garden, with a faceful of cheese curds at the local farmer’s market, or, less messily, just on Twitter: @Aimee_Ogden.
    The Pond
by Aimee Ogden
      Laura almost misses the first message.
A screaming match with Sana has driven her out into the frost-rimed evening. The baby’s cries and Sana’s frustrated shushing chase her across the yard; Ifrah is not an easy infant like her brother was. Laura and Sana’s relationship is not an easy one like it was back when Christopher was born, either.
Laura stops to cram her skis onto her feet only once she is far enough away to shut out the sounds from the house. Her only illumination comes from the headlamp clipped to her hat; the moon hides behind thick, dull clouds. It would have been so easy to race past the windswept pond without a second glance. But the headlamp glints on the dull frozen surface, and two stark words etched beneath catch and hold her eye: HELLO MOMMY.
Snow crunches when she hits her knees beside the pond. Her ankles twist under the torque of the skis, but she is paralyzed by the cruelty carved into those two words. Her heart throbs in her chest. Which of the neighbor’s teenage children could have, would have done such a thing?
In spite of herself, she reaches out and puts one hand on top of the words. Through her thin gloves, she can’t feel the ridges that the prankster’s knife should have left in the ice. Impossible. She lays both hands flat over the words, squeezes her eyes shut, as if her hands can erase what has been done.
When she opens her eyes and parts her fingers, the words are gone.
Relief and panic wrestle for control inside Laura’s chest. After this awful year, is she finally losing her mind? Maybe the heat from her hands has melted the ice and erased the words.
As she struggles for a grasp on reason, new lines appear in the spaces between her fingers. Her hands curl into claws around the new letters: ARE YOU MAD AT ME?
And Laura is lying on her side on the ice crooning to a carved question from a dead little boy: “No, baby, no, sweetheart, never. Never. Never.”
When she finally drags herself to her feet, there is a long, shallow indentation in the ice from the warmth of her body, and pink light seeps over the horizon. Her body is stiff and cold, and there have been no more messages but those first two, but there is a smile on her face as she walks back to the house.
Sana emerges from the bedroom with crusty eyes and mussed hair as Laura tiptoes up the stairs. “Were you up all night?” she hisses, and Laura shrugs. “Well, I hope you got your head clear. You can have the bathroom first; I need to go make the baby a bottle.”
“Thanks,” says Laura, and Sana gives her a look that cuts deep, probing for insincerity under that solitary syllable. Whatever she finds, she grunts, and brushes past Laura onto the stairs.
Laura turns the shower on as cool as she can tolerate and stands beneath it as long as she can. The more alive she feels, the more distance stretches between her and Christopher. She wants that space to shrink down again, to a few narrow inches of ice. A distance measured in inches is still too far, but it’s better than the entire universe.
She ignores Sana’s first bangs on the door, but when Sana shouts that she’ll be late for work, she finally kills the flow of water and reaches for a towel. Her fingers, still half numb from her night on the ice, only start to tingle with life when she finally steps out and begins to rub herself dry with a towel.
Her office at the back of the hospital lab is a welcome refuge from home. No noise here, except the distant chatter of the technologists out front and the regular whir of the pneumatic tube. Reports to write and biopsies to result: this one cancerous, this one benign, this one missing margins and in need of re-sectioning. No patients to see today, and Laura has mastered the art of speaking to the techs as little as can be politely managed. Right now she can only deal with small chunks of humanity: a twenty-millimeter cube of breast tissue, a fraction of a gram of liver, a two-minute update on a test result from Dave or Xue.
  When she arrives at home, both Sana and the baby are napping: Ifrah in her swing and Sana sprawled along the length of the couch. Dark rings are smeared under her eyes, and a half-eaten bowl of instant soup cools on the floor beside her. Her full, hard breasts stretch the fabric of her stained shirt, either she or Ifrah will wake soon to make sure the baby gets fed. The puckered, soft flesh of her belly peeks out from under the hem of her shirt, too, a sight Laura is both disgusted by and grateful for. Sana has carried both of their children. To Laura, the development of a fetus, pushing and groping for space inside its mother’s viscera, is too much like the growth of a tumor, unseen and unknowable and somehow obscene.
She slips out the back door without a sound.
There are more words etched into the pond today. Laura is almost running by the time she gets close enough to read them: DO YOU MISS ME?
She gets down to her knees more carefully today than yesterday, afraid of breaking the ice under her weight. “I miss you more than anything. You took my heart with you when you left us.” Can he hear her? Laura seizes a stick poking up through the snow, but it’s too soft to scratch the surface. Panic sets her heart thumping wildly in her chest as the question melts back into the ice, but then new shapes form. I MISS YOU TOO, MOMMY.
The words pour out of Laura then, memories of family weekends and long vacations, favorite meals, books shared under the covers on quiet Saturday mornings. And of that fearful diagnosis, the one that Laura understood long before either Sana or Christopher could.
When she finally lapses into silence, the pond is as blank as the cloudless sky. The words skitter out a line at a time, scattershot with hesitation. IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT.
And Laura kisses, just ever so briefly, the frozen surface of the pond, as if she can force her love through the layer of ice with the pressure of her lips.
  Sana is on her hands and knees beside the couch, scrubbing spilled soup out of the carpeting. She looks up at the creak of the door as Laura steps inside. “There’s dinner in the fridge,” she says. “I didn’t know when you’d be home. Did you…” The rag twists between her hands. “Did you have a good day at work?”
“It was fine.” Ifrah is on her belly on a blanket on the floor, grunting as she works to lift her head off the floor to watch what Sana is doing. Laura puts a teddy in front of her so the baby has something to look at as she walks past to the kitchen.
She takes a plate of cold morgh polou with her into the office. Out in the living room, Sana is reading to the baby, one of those tiresome books with an ounce of story stretched over a pound of pages. Laura shuts the door and sits down at the computer, where she opens a private browsing session.
There are thousands, millions of hits for people claiming to have been contacted by the dead, but Laura can’t find anything comparable to her experience. Sad, desperate people reading messages from lost loved ones into lost-and-found objects, oddly-timed sounds, piles of soggy tea leaves. She closes tabs one by one until she’s only left with a blinking cursor on an empty search engine field. She types: how to bring back the dead.
Sana is already in bed by the time Laura turns off the computer and trudges upstairs. She unbuttons her pants and slides out of her bra in the hallway before sneaking into the bedroom and slipping beneath the covers. But Sana rolls over anyway, putting her mouth beside Laura’s ear. “I’m worried about you.” Her whisper is too soft to disturb the baby, but blunt enough to batter at Laura’s heart. “I know this time of year is hard for you. It’s hard for me, too.”
“I’m fine.” She could tell Sana about the pond. She could tell Sana what she saw on the Internet. She doesn’t. This secret is all hers, twisting darkly in the corners of her heart. “We’ll all be fine. I promise.”
“Laura, I think you should—”
“You’ll wake the baby.” Laura knots her hand in the blankets and pulls them with her as she turns onto her side. The warmth of Sana’s body lingers behind her, and then she curls away from Laura, turning toward the corner where the bassinet rests.
  A pink-fingered dawn is reaching through the blinds when Laura wakes. Her alarm won’t go off for two more hours; she turns it off and crawls out of bed anyway. The blankets are tangled around Sana, who has been up and down feeding the baby during the night. Laura tucks a flap of the comforter over her wife’s bare feet, and pulls jeans and a sweater from the pile of clean laundry on the dresser before slipping out of the bedroom and down the stairs.
A greeting is waiting for her on the surface of the pond. GOOD MORNING MOMMY.
She sits cross-legged in front of it and traces each letter with one gloved fingertip. “Good morning, baby,” she says, and yawns curling steam out into the morning air.
YOU’RE TIRED.
“Yes. I didn’t sleep well last night.”
BECAUSE OF THE BABY?
Laura flinches. Neither of them has made any mention of Ifrah till now, nor Sana either. “No … no more than usual. I was up late, that’s all. We don’t have to talk about the baby. I have something I want to tell you about.”
But the words on the ice drive all the air out of the lungs, all the air out of the space around her. DID YOU HAVE HER AS A REPLACEMENT FOR ME?
No, thinks Laura, and her mouth silently shapes the word. But her finger traces a different word on the surface on the ice: YES.
There is no answer from the pond. Laura shifts as the cold gnaws at her ankles. “We thought … we thought we needed someone to take care of. To keep us from falling apart without you. She doesn’t fill the hole that you left.” And Ifrah isn’t enough to keep Laura and Sana from falling apart, either, but Laura can’t make herself say that aloud. “We missed you so much. We were so lonely.”
I’M LONELY TOO.
Tears burn Laura’s cheeks. “I’m sorry, sweetheart, I’m so sorry. But baby, listen, I have an idea, I was doing some research, on how we can be together again.”
YOU’LL COME WITH ME?
“No…” Laura drags the back of her hand across her face, trailing tears and snot. “No, honey, I think it’s possible that I can bring you back here. To live with us. Me and Mama Sana and—and the baby.”
COME WITH ME. The words repeat themselves: COME WITH ME. COME WITH ME. COME WITH ME. The lines crisscross and fold back on themselves until they are unreadable.
“Christopher!” The palm of a tiny hand slams into the ice right beneath Laura’s knees, making her scream. She scrambles backward off the ice, falling elbow deep into the snow just as the ice cracks under the place where she was sitting. “Stop!”
The words vanish, leaving only the white lightning-strike pattern of cracks behind.
Laura stands alone in the yard with her arms wrapped around herself until the sun heaves itself up over the horizon. Then she puts her head down and hurries back to the house.
  She spends the day at work responding to Xue and Dave in odd monosyllables. Her queue of specimens grows and grows while she buries herself in a new set of web searches, fruitless ones. When she looks up, the lights are off in the front of the lab and she is alone. There’s no amount of research that can give her the answers she’s asking for, and there’s nothing on the Internet that can make her accept what she already knows in the pits of her heart.
The house is dark when she comes in: no cries from Ifrah, no kitchen clattering or TV noise. She finds Sana in the office, scribbling on a pad of paper. The grocery list, maybe, or a list of chores for her and Laura to ignore. Laura clears her throat. “I’m going out.”
Sana’s head bobs up, and a tremulous smile swims onto her face. “Okay,” she says. “Everything is going to be all right, Laura. You know that, right?”
“Sure.” Laura looks away. “I’ll see you in a little while.”
She makes one stop before going out to the pond. She stands at the water’s edge, and the weight in her hands reassures her that what she is doing is right.
MOMMY?
Laura hefts the axe and brings it down into the ice.
The impact judders her arms up to the shoulders. The impact crater left by the axe head is like a broken mirror, reflecting spiderwebs of words: MOMMY NO, MOMMY NO, MOMMY NO. She raises the axe again, brings it back down, chops until she can see gray water between the floating chunks of ice. She is in water up to her knees as she reaches the center of the pond, her feet are numb. Everything is numb. But she keeps working until a scream splits her in half.
It’s not the child’s scream she expected. It’s the scream of a woman grown. She turns to see Sana, clutching a shawl around her shoulders with one hand and holding the baby carrier in the other. She’s staring at the axe in Laura’s hands. “What did you do?”
Laura fumbles her way into a lie about being afraid of the ice growing thin and the neighbor’s kids falling through. But Sana’s eyes are wide and unseeing, and the words die in Laura’s mouth. “What did you do,” Sana repeats. “What did you do?”
She drops the carrier and runs into the pond. But not toward Laura, and Laura’s name is not the one she cries out as icy water splashes up to her knees, to her thighs. Ice floes in miniature batter around her waist, deeper than this little fish pond has any right to be. Laura reaches out for her, but Sana chooses instead the embrace of the water. She disappears beneath the surface.
Laura climbs up onto the bank. The ripples in the water grow still. The broken bits of ice tinkle gently together. In her carrier, Ifrah pumps her little red fists and wails.
But the pond is silent.
END
  “A Seduction by a Sister of the Oneiroi” is copyright Hester J. Rook 2017.
“The Pond” is copyright Aimee Ogden 2017.
Assorted dog noises are copyright Finn, Rey, and Heidi, 2017.
This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.
You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes.
Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with a reprint of “Nostalgia” by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam.
Episode #45 — “The Pond” by Aimee Ogden was originally published on GlitterShip
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