experimental literature
General creative writing
Yolanda stands at her easel, immersed in the colors and forms she is creating.
The seconds turn to minutes to hours.
To days.
Yolanda no longer sees the easel.
She looks around and sees nothing but the world of colors and forms she had dreamed.
Yolanda lives in a dream.
Linda stepped out onto the deck. Her legs were steady despite the rolling waves. The sun was warm, but the drops of water in the air were cold. She was happy to be wearing a coat.
A sailor approached and was waved away. She didn’t come outside to talk. “These damn men can’t wipe their own asses without asking me about it first,” she thought.
Looking up at the sky, and then down to the horizon the direction of travel, she knew the storm would begin just before making landfall. “A little rain never hurt anymore,” she thought. But she didn’t mean it. She knew it would hurt a lot.
When the ship came crashing into the dock on the storm surge, she was glad that she had not expressed the sentiment out loud, despite how banal the experience had become. All the same, she had no plans of going out to sea ever again anyway. She didn’t care what happened to the ship. She dove into the black water as the ship was dragged back out in the receding surge. Her and her crew had had to abandon ship at a port due to storm surge too many times to count. In this instance, she waited until everyone else had abandoned the ship before diving in.
When Linda first went to sea, things like this didn’t happen. She had heard things like this would happen some day, but the media and politicians all implied she’d be dead by then. They were wrong about how quickly the world she grew up in would deteriorate, along with just about everything else.
She clamored onto to shore and could see most of her crew had survived. “Human hubris is the root the of all evil,” she thought as she waded through the garbage.
Kafkaesque sadness, saffron authentic dress,
I don’t know at all.
Kaleidoscope gig, functional jig,
Jacqueline and James halting on drum skins,
and Haskell-made programs.
Lakes lie fallow, leering and hollow,
Kermit dufs unending shallow sheep,
and Ekhafni escapes again.
The paper is off-white or maybe cream. She has a steady hand. The charcoal stains her fingers as she presses against the page. It makes a gentle sound.
She looks up from the page.
She returns her gaze down, and bites her chapped lip.
She struggles to understand why she struggles to draw a completely straight line. Her hand is going where she wants it to. But the line is always sloped one way or another.
Part twelve of Twelve Stories.
Hakon and Courtney share a glance and silently decide it has become more than appropriate to begin running, as whatever lies ahead is likely to be, if nothing else, better than drowning, and at the silent thought of drowning, Hakon remembers everything – his silent childhood, his missing patient’s delusions of a coming zombifying plague and his investigation into it which brought him to the mediation retreat with Courtney and Maryl and the others on the beach filled with black crabs, how a blood sample he had no knowledge of how to do anything with and retreating to a cave with Courtney was all he managed to accomplish in his attempt to combat this plague his delusional patient had tried to warn him of, how frail he was in the face of the very zombies he felt he alone was prepared to encounter, and how, in the midst of everything, a storm surge or something filled the cave and he saw images of flowers and ceilings, and the sound of his and Courtney’s wet running feet becomes softer and softer and his field of vision dimmer and dimmer and he feels the cold water deep in his lungs and all around as he finds himself still trapped in the very same storm surge with salt water stinging his eyes and Courtney unseen as he drifts into the sides of the cave which don’t even harbor the slightest pocket of air, unable to control his body and the feeling of pressure and cold finally ends and he feels as though he has just awoken from a decades-long dream, no longer a being bound by flesh and gravity to a long-cursed planet, but true freedom on a level he had never known, feeling awake and for the very first time, ready to begin the day.
Part eleven of Twelve Stories.
The water rises in the tunnel or cave. All along the direction behind their backs, creeping higher and higher, it gets wetter and wetter.
Courtney clasps her hands to her face. Damp and dark, she wonders how it is she can see the water at all. The earthen cavity affords them seemingly endless space to move forward, their little fire long ago consumed by water.
They reach the foundation of what appears to be a fountain. Grasping at gilded golden railings, they now know they are in a tunnel and not a cave.
Hakon’s hands tremble at the infamous insignias coming into sight upon the walls. He wonders if the journey is just beginning. Kicking all Kafkaesque notions aside, limiting logic more morosely, no other notions remained in mind.
Solid concrete reveals itself underneath the sand, and gradually, there is no sand and only concrete and the sound of Hakon and Courtney’s footfalls reflecting off the walls of the concrete shell they traverse, forced unceasingly forward by the rising water, which seems to be gaining speed, their wet shoes adding an audible weight to their steps, all of which making it very simple for anyone to hear them approaching.
Part ten of Twelve Stories.
The sediment washes away from the land into the sea. A lone lily once stood upon a cliff here. The cliff is no more, it has become the shore.
An unremarkable cafe once stood upon the sand, and for a brief period, enjoyed the benefits of beach-side property.
But when the water level rose, the sea consumed more land, and the cafe, just as easily forgettable as it was, was easily forgotten. No one came to the beach for the cafe in the first place, and people wondered how they could stay in business, as seaside coffee struck most people as an unpleasant combination of heat and heat.
Sand stretched from the inland desert all the way to the sea now.
What was once grass was now all just sediment. Not one creature walking upon the sand had seen the greenery that once covered the land.
Hakon, in fact, had never even seen a lily.
Hakon is a human, one from a long line of what is called a civilization. Civilizations are what people call their communities over time, sort of. Hakon, like many others, assumed his civilization was the product of ages and ages of development – progress. Attending a meditation retreat on the shoreline of a great desert, it hadn’t occurred to him how the land had changed, how what was once the precipice of a cliff with a perfect lily was now deeply underwater, how many different people had enjoyed the same scenery over the ages, and how a select few had enjoyed it with coffee.
Cliffs had become picturesque beaches, the sand of the beach had met the desertification of the land, pushed back by the relentless rise of seawater, and different civilizations occupied everywhere Hakon had ever been. But Hakon could have never known that things hadn’t always been the way they were.
Hakon sits blank-faced on the soft sand of the tunnel or cave, for the first time considering how he has arrived in this situation with a strange woman who’s name he cannot recall, painfully aware of the feeling of having forgotten something important, questioning if things hadn’t always been that way.
Part nine of the Twelve Stories series.
Like so many ceilings in the US, the one in this cafe is white. Based on the ceiling alone, you’d have no idea where you were. Like, you’d probably think it was a house, as to who lived in the house, even if you lived there, you couldn’t tell.
You couldn’t do it.
It has those little ridges that oh so many ceilings have. There appears to be some indiscernible pattern in them. The overall pattern is mysterious, but there is some shape which seems to be repeating, although not entirely the same. Kind of like circles, but not a circle with a drawn perimeter, but with the circle’s area made of lines radiating out from the center at random angles.
A circle with a radius equal to one has a circumference of exactly twice the value of pi.
But these, again, aren’t perfect circles adorning this cafe ceiling. If you were to draw a border around each of those bunches of ridges, they would each be vaguely circular, but kind of oblong and irregular.
The ceiling has either been freshly painted, or is completely free of watermarks. Not the kind of watermarks that are used in branding, but the brownish, dirty kind that the word leads ones to believe are caused, somehow, by water. It, the water, has to pass through what could only be described as suspicious roofing (as keeping the elements at bay being one of the precise purposes for bothering to roof oneself), manage it’s way through the ceiling material of any attic space which may or may not lie above, if there is any, and then it, the water, must seep through while simultaneously being halted by the ceiling. Somewhere along the way, the water must become foul and leave a brown stain or something. The appearance of the cafe ceiling does not give any clear indication of the presence of other floors, or if this is the top floor of the building, or if there was some sort of attic, the lighting only revealing that a window or door must be open while eliciting nothing regarding a sense of elevation. No green glow of plant life reaches the ceiling, just the soft white light of an overcast sky or maybe a LED lamp or something. The ceiling is much too well lit for anything less than a tremendous lighting setup, so it’s probably natural lighting. The lighting makes shadows of the ridges of what is maybe paint, but reveals no lines of paint brushes or other tools. This alone, however, is not enough to rule out the possibility of paint covering watermarks on the cafe ceiling.
One could call the ceiling of this cafe unremarkable, in a way.
Part eight of Twelve Stories.
On a cliff on the western shore stands a lone lily growing in patchy grass. The dirt beneath looks like sand. Perhaps the cliff is made of this sediment, piled up over a span of time much greater than the lily could ever know.
The lily has yellow petals. with reddish speckles, with even more yellow and red coming pouring from the pistil.
Now and then, some sediment falls from the side of the cliff into the sea. The sea is about 85 meters (279 US feet) above the water. Despite the sediment-y composition of the cliff, there is no coast or beach below. The ever growing pile of sediment will get there someday. The lily will have been long gone by then.
The lone lily is frequently visited by bees, when the time is right.
In fact, organisms which can fly are some of the only ones who can even approach the lily. Land-bound creatures over a certain weight know intuitively that the earth of the cliff is too soft to support them.
Something like an ant can visit, though.
Like all lilies, this lone lily is a perennial – each year it comes back to life, blossoms, passes away, and is reborn.
But someday, it’s yearly cycle will come to a permanent, definite end. The cliff is crumbling, slowly, but surely. Someday, there will be no lilies upon any cliffs.
Part seven of the Twelve Stories series.
Hakon had kindled adequately.
Courtney stopped shivering.
Mesmerized by the flames, she couldn’t help but feel glad.
Hakon didn’t know where they were. His appearance, Courtney’s presence, all implied some continuity from the morning at the mediation retreat on the beach, trying to capture the glimmer of the sea behind his eyes.
But there seemed to be a gap in their memories. They were not underwater, but his memory leaps from sinking into the sea to adequately kindling a small fire in cave, or perhaps it was a tunnel.
“If this is a tunnel,” he thought, “which way did we come from? Did we come from the same direction?”
Courtney could see him knitting his brows. “So, what do we do?” she asks.
“I guess look for an exit. I don’t know which direction we came from.”
“I think you were here when I got here. But I don’t remember which direction I came from, either. How did you start the fire?”
“I have no idea.”
Silt covered the ground of the cave or tunnel. Like a lake or river bed.
“…What was your name, again?” she asks. “I want to say, ‘The Falconer,’ but that can’t be it.”
The quintessence of acquiescence, Hakon sat, green and garbled, consumed by confusion, no longer listening to Courtney.