jdparadise
She fences like something possessed, controlling the centerline at times with what seems like pure will alone. It's been hours and the challengers keep coming. She takes them all. None will bloody the proud flag of her glorious hair.
Good fences make good neighbors, the saying goes. I don't believe in fences, myself. That way I can just walk on over to your house anytime I feel like it, let myself in, help myself to your beer, and feed your monkey when you're out of the house. Or I can wait just in your bedroom for you to come home...
Options: None. What remained was not choice, it was inevitability. The button would be pressed. The explosion would come. The deaths would be uncountable.
The gun at the nape of his neck was warming to the temperature of his skin, intimate. The voice in his ear was hot and strangely cheerful.
She was an ex-nun, tough as nuns come but with tattoos and a crucifix that may have just been inverted if you looked close enough. How does someone go from one to the other? From piety to sacrilege, from serving the ineffable to having the mundane tattooed on her flesh?
Soldier boy, he was. Sharp. Focused. Willing to kill, down to his name. Perfect.
Until it came time for him to do something other than kill. Because when he started he was someone different, someone just _named_ soldier, but they made him a machine, made him an instrument of violence, took his name and gave him a number that meant the same damn thing.
Far from here, far from anywhere you'd know, there's a man on a throne made of thorns watching over us. He thinks of himself as near but he's millenia away and getting farther by the moment. We can't blame him; he's always been a bit delusional.
But it would be nice if he were nearer.
"It's always what we made it out to be," he says. "It's nothing more or less."
"Than a collision of stars?" I asked. "Isn't that kind of dangerous?"
He looked at me like I was an idiot, which, you know, I kind of am.
"Only if you're standing in the middle. We're way out here."
I don't know; stars colliding doesn't sound too healthy to me, no matter how far away.
Ribbons hang in the water, red of course. The attack had been sudden and silent and Joey Hillman had become half the man he'd used to be in less than half a minute.
Half a man is good enough to do the job, she told me. Half is all you need.
So I cut a man in half. With the right enticements he walked and talked and danced a foin Irish jig. But he wasn't good enough for what I needed, so I quartered him.
And eighthed.
And sixteenthed.
But no matter how deep I cut and how many pieces, there were never enough of him to get the job done.
This is the path that you take to get where you are going, he said. You will not be fulfilled until you tread every step.
But I do not wish to tread every step, nor even many of them. I want to skip, I told him.
You can skip. You can dance, you can sing. But you have to follow the path.
I didn't want to whine, but I didn't want to go down that path, either.
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writing since 2010 · 11 entries · 10 days shown up
each square is a day—lit means Jon showed up.
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the words Jon reaches for
halfpathfarfencesredtreadstepskipjobcutmatterlessstarssoldierkillname