the3williams

[the3williams]

"Untitled" by Laura Makabresku

[the3williams]

eyes shut

When she looks at him, it's hard not to see the man she works beside day in and day out. She sees her partner. Her partner who's trying to get her off.

[the3williams]

five things that never happened to dana scully

There is a room. There is smoke and mirrors and men.

“What about this one?” Blevins asks, and tosses the file to a man with a cigarette. “Scientist, young, works at Quantico.”

The man examines it. “No,” he says. “Pick someone else.”

[the3williams]

alchemy

He remembers why he does not trust her. Should not. Will not. Suddenly he's angry. At her guilelessness, her logic, her graceless suits. He's angry that he notices her mouth, and the way his office feels different when she's in it. The way he feels different. Most of all he's angry at the way she listens to him. How dare she listen to him? How dare she not just dismiss him like so many others have for so long? How dare she make him feel this real?

[the3williams]

"I have a life", he said with bags beneath his eyes, day old stubble from a night in jail, mouth full of free food and eyes full of childlike wonder.

[the3williams]

aquinnah

He spends the meal telling her how the Aquinnah Wampanoag believe Martha's Vineyard was created. Even though she has spent the day reading these tales, she lets him tell her again without interruption. In his voice as he relates the genesis tale of this place that seems enchanted, she can hear the how of the man he has become, this seeker of myths and oddities.

[the3williams]

the great beyond

Of course, I'm his fucking father, Mulder wanted to scream, still wants to scream. Why the hell else would I be here twenty-four hours a day, living here, sharing her Goddamn bed, kissing her when no one else is around, getting up with the baby in the middle of the night, if I'm not William's father?

What is he at all these days if he's not William's father?

[the3williams]

ashes to dust

Still holding the picture, staring out over snow covered monuments, he reflects Winter is only remembered for its bad times. Summers are different. They stay jewels in memory, seasonal diamonds that bookmark the forgetful haze of age.

The time frozen in his hand was the best summer ever, one of those that comes once in a lifetime to the lucky. That summer, youth and drive meshed seamlessly with heat and surf. The warm evenings wrapped leaf-green fingers around their hearts, filling them with fire, back when the stars were still their friends.

[the3williams]

my turn

In the basement it was just me and her, her and me, the outcasts, the rejects. The FBI's most unwanted, segregated from the Chosen Ones, hidden from the sunlight. Devour and regurgitate, that was us. She'd consume me and I'd gnaw on her from the inside out, and by the time I got far enough to see the florescent lights over my desk she'd start chewing on the pieces of me that emerged. She was all I really needed and I was all she had the energy to pursue.

[the3williams]

yellow balloon

It isn't like a fog exactly. More like she is watching things with binoculars, or talking over static, long distance. More like she became unhooked, somewhere, from her life. This cannot be her, spewing the metaphysical at every turn. She has become someone else, someone she doesn't recognize, a bundle of sluggish synapses, ineffective education, tears.

She is dim Rapunzel cloistered in the tower, waiting, waiting. She isn't sure what to do. Her walls have always been of her own making.

[the3williams]

still life

Sometimes at night she wonders if the two of them just blinked into existence fully formed like this, which is to say she wonders if they’ll never change. If they’re just here to play these parts. The streetlights whistle through the blinds like film noir and here she is in his bed, on his bed, next to him but not touching, with whiskey on her breath. Tomorrow or yesterday she’ll put on red lips and they’ll work another case they never solve.

Agent Scully is already in love, Agent Scully does nothing about it but still asks Agent Mulder to sleep beside her. Agent Scully keeps going and going and

“Did I die?”

“Scully.” He leans closer. “Never.”

[the3williams]

knowing

[link]

She knew she was well. But well and whole were not the same thing.

[the3williams]

Was there something in here with him? He paused, face expressionless, his entire body listening. No ... probably not ... definitely not. This time there was no thrill along the nape of his neck, no prescient frisson of intuition and warning to make him reach for the gun, as he sometimes did, and prowl carefully around his lair, searching for signs of unwelcome visitors.

After running through his wake-up routine, he drifted a bit, gaze spooling absently across the littered surface of the coffee table, where case files, congealed pizza, a half-empty beer bottle, and a damp TV Guide reflected a stark but grayish strobic light, their irregular cover blanketing a lower strata of older and dustier debris—skin mags, mostly, shuffled in with stacks of comics. Vamperotica. Squee. Sisters of Mercy. The latest Fortean Times, bookmarked with a section of last Sunday’s Times, folded open to the crossword, fully filled in with anal-retentive ink, annotated with a cryptic "18 m" along the margin. A Patricia Cornwell novel. The Complete Works of Gaius Petronius. An egg of Silly Putty. A water pistol realistically modeled after a police handgun. Two empty burrito wrappers. The Washington Blade, opened to the personals, dotted with red balloons and doodles of flowers. A necktie dotted with goldfish and tomato stains, still loosely noosed.

Is this me? Mulder thought.

[the3williams]

“I’m glad to see you haven’t lost your sense of humor,” she said.

He sighed, a little shakily. “Scully, if I ever lost the ability to point at the world’s stupidity and laugh,” he said, “I would probably never stop crying.”

[the3williams]

“Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.” - Herman Melville

[the3williams]

"He takes," she said. Her voice sounded faint and disused. "That's what he does. That's how he writes. He eats pieces of you."

[the3williams]

Travers' eyes were racooned, like a man who hadn't slept for days, maybe weeks. A dark stubble of beard roughened his face, but it was those eyes - burning, Nostradamus eyes - that gave Mulder such a chill.

That, and the blood on his hands.

"Lew?" Detective Cooper had gone very pale, very still. She drew her sidearm in a gentle, quiet motion and held it down at her side. "Lew, it's Detective Cooper. Is that blood?"

"Huh?" Travers looked around. A red drop glittered on his glasses, slid down and dripped on his white t-shirt. "Where?"

"On your hands, Mr. Travers." Mulder had drawn his gun, too, but he followed Cooper's lead and kept it pointed down. "You have blood on your hands."

He looked down, shrugged, and wiped them on his t-shirt. Bright red smears, handprints. When he was finished, Mulder's chill had become a real cold shiver down his spine.

"It's okay," Travers said. "It's not mine."