The ceiling fans swept around like the propellers on a plane, their blades slicing through the air quietly in the background. A woman smiled down on him with airbrushed composure, long and slender, stretched for time, more and more to consume. The magazine paper was crisp beneath his fingers and the sharp noise of the pages turning pierced the stillness of the room. The air was warm and heavy despite the whirring of the fans above and James felt his eyes slowly losing the will to stay open as gravity pulled them downwards. They didn’t want to see anymore, they didn’t want to read, they didn’t want anything to enter.
His eyes closed, their lashes interlocking and briefly blurring the world before him. The lights became specs and pixelated the view before him, a kaleidoscope. The window behind James cast a steady golden light onto him, sifting through his eyelids and dying the skies of his dream a sanguine red. A hand above a bowl clutching the orange, squeezing the fruit and watching the juice fall like joyful rain to the curved glass ground below. Inside his eyelids, inside his dreams, their scenes were like abstract paintings that constantly changed. Reds, oranges, blues and greens morphed and swirled in shapes and forms as his brain fused reality with desire.
Down in the city, night behaviour had turned its back on the mother of pleasure. Nothing ever lasts, though remorse will help to decide if a wire woman is worth the money from the lens she fell from. Electric girls welcome a life but there’s none like wine.
The girl sat inside the glass awaiting the turning of the shutter and the spiral closing of a metal flower, its soft silver petals yet to press together in prayer. However, the electric girl did not want to remain in the camera for winter, cut the wire from her skin to the film, leaving only a negative. A high definition hand free from pixels began to beat on the lens, shuddering and buffering. Her hand was the steady thud on glass, beating a heart on display. Then one final beat, louder and the flower closed on broken glass.
James opened his eyes, expelling all traces of the freshly squeezed dream juice, and turned his head to the window. There was a small silver web imprinted in the glass, its jagged lines spreading from a perfect circle in the middle.
Had the girl gotten out, had she broken free?
He slipped from his bed, walked to the door and out into the yellow heat. His feet crunched through the gravel and sand as he made his way to the window’s exterior. Lying at its base was the crumpled body of a bird. James leant down to the broken animal and slid his fingers under the bird’s limp body. He cradled the head of the bird and looked into its vast peering eyes, eyes as living in death as life. Bird was dead, had to press stop forever.
Across a midnight bridge heads a light in film that won’t find her holding hands. It designed a thirst for the wolf juices inside the melting walls. A feeling will find them acting their best forever in a theatre room where the light has not yet crossed. Before then it could see her walking left hand in the right, lipstick cherry all over helping make the most of free lights that flash out backwards stares.
“I’m going now.”
She craved a sign to touch with the turning back clocks, to build a tower of hands. Even while they slept inside a nest of blonde hair sweet with her nature, everybody wanted to rule the past. The world was slowly slowing down and filtering out the new.
“There’s feels on the table.”
Big black boots wear a long hunting ground which runs down after taking on the world. Pandora’s snow white legs, dyed from the trip, slid into them escaping the blizzard, refuge from the force-fed dream.
“Join the river. Fall into the water and smile.”
A starving body smiling through the flashes of light against a bright sheet background. The hours of mirrored tears and reflected cries born from the play of curses for this. The scars inside and out, flipped around and made into art for the glossy pages and billboards in midnight city. All made bearable because of the river, because of the swallowing of sunshine. Smiling made it better.
“You’re the girl in the camera.”
Hearts stood still as mostly strings played to a misty field of neon heather and from the air above a solitary blue feather rises down to the purple bed below.
YOU ARE READING
A Broken Wing
Romance"It was just a little pill. What could go wrong?" A world on the brink of chaos. A world balanced precariously on a knife edge. All it takes is a little push, one bullet is enough. On a planet where the population is seven billion one life seems rel...
