Friday, August 20, 2010

Sternum - Short Story Excerpt


God created sex, exercise and cleaning for girls like me mourning the loss of men like you. When my limbs are moving, when I’m full on someone else, you don’t live inside me, banging on my ribcage. Without them, your fists hit my solar-plexus echoing like drums. Your fingertips slide down my sternum ringing like bells.

I move with music and men and moments, all strung together by your not being there. In motion, time rides a continuum. No one second feels so different from the next. No one second is so different from the next.

I tap dance, hard metal on soft floors, left then right, back then forth, up, higher than humans should jump propelled by change and lonesomeness. I kiss, hard and stupid and mean, arms over my head, legs wrapped tight, squeezing the breath out of someone else. I scrub and sweep, hoping the bleach and its pretty lemon smells will seep into my veins, hoping the cleanliness will permeate me.

I move angry, fast, without thinking. I don’t stay still. Not even when I’m sleeping.


When I stop moving, there's a stabbing pain, a violent silence. With the quiet, I feel glued to the concrete of some new place I’ve never been. Its some city I don’t recognize, somewhere I can’t stay, not for a moment. It is so sparse and I don’t see anything but grey. When I breathe my body is filled with cold, hard air. The coldness freezes so deep that it stops my heart, it puts my lungs in an ice suitcase, it buries my legs in a heavy snowdrift. When I feel the coldness coming, I move again, kicking and screaming my way home. I hurt myself, manic and unhinged, to be warm again.

Can you feel my heart beating from a million miles away?

On Being A Writer



I’m sparked, waiting for the light to hit.

I feel you, a hot whisper on my neck all the live-long day, only hearing you when the moon rides high, when most people won’t speak, except in guttural, human noises; a nightmare’s cry, a lover's call.

But you, you scream my name in the nighttime. Your noise is deafening. I don’t want to listen, but what I mute becomes so loud that I can’t keep my eyes closed. I toss and turn in my bed, strangled in sheets. When you won’t stop, I get up, bare feet on a wooden floor, sliding towards the sound like new shoes on shiny, untouched ice.

I can’t turn you away; scared that if I don’t listen to the words, if I don’t strain to hear the voice that’s not mine, I’ll blink and miss the moment, blink and miss what will finally show me to myself. You are like a cicadas; buzzing and incessant. You are like a piano, dusty and haunted, played by old hands. You are like a lady-singer, sweetly pretty, hurt and poetic, with a voice so sad that she could never have loved herself.

You are something bigger than me. I don’t know where you come from. When you’re gone, I don’t know where you go. When you come back, you tell me of your travels, whispering stories to me, letting me keep them as my own. I am a woman possessed, spending my life waiting to hear what you have to say next.




When you speak to me, we live somewhere else. Where the world echoes like harps and violins, where the wind moves, choreographed, like a prima ballerinas, where strangers look like black and white photographs. Here, with you, there are beginnings. There are ends.

We are selfish with each other. You don’t speak to me when other people are around. When you leave me lonely, I study them, wondering how to describe their voice, how to write their face, how to tell them to you later. You set me on fire. You drown me with rocks. You drive me miles from home, spin me like a top, and leave me to crawl. Together, we jump from buildings. We fly like sad sparrows. We dance like Fred Astaire. We kiss, chests cracked wide open; lungs touching hearts, organs touching bones.

I can never get it all out, I have never said it right. The words have never sounded as truthful as they feel. And so, I keep digging, piling thick mud into a hole with no bottom, waiting for you to speak again. I will wait, forever, listening for the petals to unfurl, waiting to hear the sound that’s made when hope blooms.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

And I sit; like the man counting the seconds until the guillotine falls, like the woman, stranded and miles from her umbrella who just heard thunder, like the teenager, drunk for the first time, struck by nausea that starts in his toes, waiting for this to hit me.

Like a soldier with amnesia, I can’t remember the good times even when I try. But one night soon, I will dream reminders. I won’t be able to hide anymore, cowering in the corners of my skull that weren’t yours yet.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Swelter - Short Story Excerpt

This is an excerpt from a short story I just completed, called "Swelter." It is written in the voice of Louise, a seventeen year old girl who's friend Colin has just died. The excerpts are not consecutive.




The funeral felt really long, like it stretched out for hours, days, weeks, months, years, miles, kilometers, continents, oceans and equators. The heaviness that sits on a bunch of people that are mourning the death of a young person weighs trillions of pounds and it crushes your bones. There’s this quote I just got tattooed on my ankle and it says, “Inside each man there is a poet who died young.” Colin died when he was still the poet, but after he died, that poet died in me, that poet died in us all. We felt the poems dying that day. Growing up is realizing that everything about life is unfair, and the most unfair part is that it ends. Life kicked the childhood out of me that day. Once you’re gone you really can’t go back.




We ended up in his bedroom. He pushed me up against his wall and he kissed me. He’d kissed me before, always at parties when he was drunk or high, but this time, it felt different. He meant it this time. He tasted like those white tic-tac’s, kind of vanilla and kind of mint. Pure delicious. I knew then he’d planned it.

“Let me move in you,” he whispered in my ear.

And before I knew it we were having sex, real sex, for my first time ever.

When he finished, I’ll be honest, not that long after we started, he kissed me, really tender, like boys always kiss girls in movies and rarely in real life.

“I love you, Louise” he said before we had to put our clothes on because his parents were home. I felt so pretty when he said that that I started crying and then I couldn’t stop.

He let me sit on the handlebars of his bike and he drove me home the long way. It would have been awkward sticking around his house when his parents were home. I could hear his Mom crying too when we snuck out the back window. So instead, we drove through town dressed all in black, like morbid Amish people during a parade. All I needed was a bonnet.

Later that night, I wondered if all that happened because he wanted to feel closer to Colin. Then I thought, maybe we’ll get married because we have this in common. No one else is going to know Colin, not how we did, and by pledging ourselves to each other for eternity, we would, in some ways, be staying close to Colin forever.

Funny how history works.




I had my headphones on. I listened to the C.D Francais as I had taken to calling it. The music pushed the leaves from the trees, the clouds from the sky, the blue from Heaven, and I could see all the planets. I could see silvery Pluto, the beautiful red Jupiter, and then yellow Venus. I could see the infinite blackness and all the beautiful orbs of colours that populated it. I reached out and touched Neptune. It felt like cold water.

I think I even saw Colin waving at me.

“This town is so severe and silent. I wonder if a person can die from it, choking to death on things they always wanted to but were never able to say,” he told me the week before he died. We’d just gone out for breakfast, the two of us, because everyone else slept through it.

It was a pretty insignificant thing, coming from him. He always said shit about life and death, waxing poetic about unanswerable bullshit. The boys called him Socracock.

It’s only because he’s gone that all those trivial little things from the past echo on and on and on, but I wonder if maybe it was the silence that killed him. Maybe he had died, choking on the silence, seconds before the train hit him. So on his death certificate it should say that the cause of death was “peace and quiet,” not railroad misadventure.

Or maybe the silence killed him metaphorically. Maybe he saw the train coming and decided not to move.

When I went inside, still shivering, I put the kettle on.

The water boiled while the day was on fire, and I watched it, patiently waiting like a bird on a wire.

Sunday, August 15, 2010

An Open Letter To Men Inspired By All The Other (Hateful) Open Letters To Men I’ve Read On Blogs Lately.




Dear Men,

Thank you.

Thank you for being my brother, my father, my ex-boyfriend(s), my ex-husband, my boyfriend, my nephew, my cousins, my uncles, my grandfather, my best friend(s) and my future son.

Thanks for being different. Thanks for the late night talks where you provide a clarity I can’t find in myself. Thanks for trying to understand what you most likely can’t, what can’t really be understood to begin with. Thanks for being a shoulder, and thanks for the rare times you want to cry on mine. It doesn't make me think you're a pussy.

Thanks for being the same. Thanks for the look in your eyes when we both realize that’s the truth. Why do we pretend we’re so different? We aren’t, are we? Our society is sick with the insanity of believing we aren't alike, that you are impossible to understand. You men feel the same things, right? Lonesome and united, happy then sad. So anything we think was all your fault, wasn’t. Women need to look in the mirror a lot more often, and that starts with me.

On that personal note, thanks to the dudes I’ve dated. You were, and I’m sure remain, a good kisser. Maybe we didn’t make each other happy, but thanks on behalf of the girl you will. I’m not mad at you. People fuck up and we hurt each other. If you’re mad at me, I understand and I probably deserve it. Thanks for the heartbreak, the rejection, the euphoria. One of the few truths in this world is that we make what we want of what happens to us. I hope you’ve made something good of me because I’ve made something good of you. I realize now that if you didn’t like me its probably because I didn’t like myself.

Besides, its easier to make art from you, from us, from what we became, if we aren't together anymore.

Thanks for calling when you say you will. And thanks for not calling when you say you will, because let’s be real - women do that, too. What we teach each other by being dishonest is, usually, a lot more valuable than what we could have learned together. If I’m obsessively checking my phone in hopes you’ve texted me back what I need to be checking is my self-worth.

Ultimately, thanks for the experiences we’ve shared, good or bad. The love and loss, tangled together, are the most defining moments my life. Thanks for defining all the other ladies, too, and thanks for letting us define you.

Thanks for being so fucking funny and smart. Thanks for telling me about cool music I didn’t know about before. Thanks for walking me to a cab or the streetcar late at night. Thanks for making the house feel safer when you’re in it. Thanks for loving my Mom, my sister, my friends - even if things didn’t work out. Thanks for the challenges. Thank you to gay dudes...well, to gay people in general. Your contributions to society make life more worth living for me, for my children, for my children’s children.

To the men who create, thanks for the songs you write about us. They're my favourites. Thanks for Daisy in The Great Gatsby, thanks for Annie Hall, thanks for (the t.v. version of) Carrie Bradshaw, and thanks for Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Men created all those women and in them I've seen the truest reflections of myself.

To the dudes who are having a hard time with us right now - I don’t know why we like the assholes. We should like you. Take solace in knowing that you are someone’s asshole, that someone who you can’t love could’ve loved you, if only you’d been willing. We all play foolish games and we’re all reckless with each other’s hearts. For better or for worse, know nothing is permanent.

To men in general, thanks for letting me think about you so much. Thanks for collared shirts. Thanks for how boss you look in a suit. Thanks for your blue jeans and Converse shoes. Thanks for the way you look at us. Thanks for nice things you say about our bodies, and thanks for how those nice things make us feel. Thanks for hollering at me on the street. The psychology of that is a little fucked up, but from here on out, I’m assuming that you are doing it with the most human intentions, that you just want to tell me the world is a little better with me in it. Thanks. The world is better when people are kind enough to remind me.

To the brave men that ask us out on dates, thank you. I can’t even imagine how terrifying that must be. It shouldn’t be all on you but it is. I’m really sorry. Thank you for the leap of faith. Trust me when I say that you’re doing good.

To all these notes to you on blogs - give me a fucking break. Like women have any idea what works and what doesn’t, like we all aren’t just running in circles. These women who are writing to you are missing the point. You aren’t doing anything wrong. The thing is, we’re all doing shit wrong, all the time, but that’s not what really matters. The right one for you, like the right one for us, isn’t going to care, not about anything at all, other than seeing in you what isn’t visible to most people. Writing judgmental open letters to you comes from feeling bad about ourselves. I'm guilty of all this blame but that was about my shit. Never yours.

Thanks for putting up with all those commercials on T.V. where you look retarded, and where the wife/Mom looks hugely superior to you. Thanks for putting up with it when women say “Eugh, men!” or talk other shit about you.

You aren’t all defined by you’re gender. You’re like us. We aren’t all any one thing. You aren’t all stupid, or frustrating, or mean. It’s lame when we pretend you are. Being a dick has nothing to do with having a dick. And, ps. thanks for dicks. And sorry for books like, “He’s Just Not That Into You.” The world, and peoples actions in it, are infinitely more complicated than we want to think and cannot be explained in a six-word catch phrase.

Thanks for living in a fucked up time in society for men. It was probably a lot easier when there were rules for being a man, when everyone’s parent’s didn’t split up, when cowboys were little boy’s sole role-models. I’m sorry. But I think we’re moving in the right direction, that everyday we’re a little closer to understanding each other.

Thanks to old men. There is nothing funnier than your jokes.

Thanks for marrying us. Thanks for fathering our children. Thanks for staying the night even when it doesn't work out. Thanks to those men I don’t know yet because I’m really looking forward to the time we'll spend together.

Men, you don’t know how lovely you are because we don’t tell you enough.

Katie

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Sympathy for the Devil - Personal Essay Excerpt




It was a hot summer. The humidity was suffocating; it made your hair curl, your nerves itch, and your every thought pressed up against you like a nervous lover. Sleep was fleeting. Woken several times by nothing in particular, always wondering why the sun took so long to rise. On nights like that men who have been friends for years leave parties dukes up, fighting for blood. Anything can happen.

Everything did.

In the days leading up the end, I could feel the hysteria, impatient and merciless, like a wasp trapped under my blanket. It was like a spell had been cast on us all and suddenly, we were no longer our own. I could feel gravity bending in the air. I knew not exhale too quickly. One wrong move and nothing is how it used to be.



Tuesday, August 10, 2010



She'd never known him, not at all.