Skip to main content

Leaving a Room

I took two breaths and was out the door. I left it open. The church bell was caving in like wind blown down through a chasm, leaves sweeping across the floor while the flag hangs, lifeless.
I've heard the same four sentence story now more times than I can count. What the nurse said, what he said. There's no telling really. I'm dead these last four years and she has been too. There's nothing changing. There's nothing going on.
The only difference is that she always did the talking. I just listened and waited for the end. What difference do the words make anyway? They just float off like smoke when it's all said and done.
The bubbling noise though, the gurgling, that said something louder. Those two pieces in my ears, that round circle on her chest. It must be cold, she wants it off, wants the people to stop listening for a change.
She'd rather the warm embrace of a darkness, the eerie silence of a bell...

Comments

Anonymous said…
Thanks for the link back. I like the writing in here, very raw, very real sounding.
cbeck said…
Your welcome. I'd say the same about your own work. I've been a long time fan.
Constance said…
This is dark, poetic, inscrutable. Good writing. I feel like I'm coming into the middle of a mystery, which I am, in a way. Yet there is something familiar about the experience you immortalize here. Keep safe in this dark space.
Blessings,

Popular posts from this blog

Boxing Day

Countless times, on the weekends when you are here, you leave for me a stream of yellow in the bathtub. Something angled wrong in this 160 year old building. Sometimes you hit the tiles, as you whip your dick to the left to spray. Do you hold a finger over your pisshole? Do you laugh inside your head? I don't want to know. She bathes in there too.  I have been kind even letting you here. It is only because I love your father.    It is May or June, I don't remember. As sickness washes over me and the rest of the planet too, it can be easy to lose track of time. We tend to the plants, stroke their leaves and name them all. We watch the cat grow fatter, as she lolls in the sun on the stolen chair cushion she's dragged to the hard cement balcony floor. I feel like I know Gamer Chad better than myself and she complains about Jordan Peterson. She can't stand his voice.  But I am more tired and angry on weekends. I tell my her so. I tell her my solution. She tells me she...

Unending Paper Chase

You check in on me when you get your break for lunchtime now. You never used to. You ask me, "Are you all right?" You breath in and out hard once through your nose, like it is a chore to even ask. It seems to me that for you everything is an obligation, even holding my hand. Everything you do doesn't feel like anything more than surveillance now. I don't want the days to end and it is getting harder to sleep at night. I am starting to feel sick, like I have the flu. I'm always cold. But I haven't eaten much lately. My stomach is filled with acid. I smile at you anyway. I write two letters a day. One to keep you smiling and one that tells of the truth, but they both look the same. You do not know that I form certain words and sentences in a way that triggers me, in a way that reminds me of what is real. It is something that I started doing in grade school for tests, so that I could easily remember the answers, and then later, so my mother would not underst...

reruns all become our history

"You are ignoring my question. Still." She's angry, 45 minutes later. She is always angry after the friends leave. It's the same old shit. He's fucking tired of hearing her voice. That accusatory voice. That shameful voice. The one that demands the answer to a question he's forgot. How did this all start again? Instead, he walks over to the sofa and sits down beside her. He takes her hand in his. He just wants it to end. "They are our friends." She shakes her head no. But she keeps his hand in his. Her phone goes off. It makes its sound. What's the name of that song again? it feeds, it grows