Stolentelling

(...Edited for Television...)

The trains had left her behind. Not sure what city or town she lived in now. The smell of the murky waters, the imagined sound of their lapping in and around the outer shores. Strippers danced in peacock dresses upon clouds in the might of the sky. The surrounding birds ran a hunting party over to the sailor's lofts and the street vermin, nestled in after a long run, inside their newspaper feather beds, wishing on reduction.

We are not the realization of ourselves, and no one wants to do the mathematics to build the final equation - bruised, dirty, full of might and cowardice, turning round and round in a fire pit of ego and need, while the tribe encircles us, dancing and praying and breathing through the storm in our paper cuts. A couple, broken in sacrifice, going to their communal death for the good of all, fucking into eternity, burnt into the wood's natural etchings, as the town ate and drank. Lift up your faces, look skyward - kick up your heels and spread your legs. The colours will bleed through the cracks in your eyes whether you want them to or not.

Admitting they'd turned into whores, the strippers continued to cackle in the clouds, smoke in their curls, stink from their knees, love somewhere deep inside their broken hearts. So much love buried in the black hole found at the tip of a needle. Out of it flies their first blood, their empty rooms, and the can-can they did at the age of 5. If only it was as it used to be.

I found myself sitting in a cheap, checkered cotton dress in premature spring, just over a week after holding my father’s clammy hand, warming me for the last time and catapulting me into adulthood in an excruciating blink. I sat with Jack, the one who made me forget, in my shell-shocked, drunken bare feet, dirtier on his floor than on my own. Danced every step, downed every shot – all the sunsets and family albums alive in a brand new way. A way I didn’t show to most people. Somehow, though, I got to showing him. I was in mourning; I wasn’t all there.

Compartmentalization can get you through, or ruin you - all the fluids of our grounded universe are something the angels never see, or taste. The birthing bed is the death chair is the graveyard or the office cubicle, as the lipstick and spit stains decorate a whore’s sheets. Jesus was born in the shit and the straw, and so saves the world and we enter the Kingdom as it enters us, in the blackness of night, in the dimness of a star, wet between the edges of light. After we melt away from whiskey ice cubes and old rotted shoelaces, ruined from the rain.

In this room with Jack’s hair down and his economic strength at play, I was removed from the world. It was about to be my second night there, again, and this was about to become a joining of worlds that I wasn’t at all sure about. Milling the corn with the dollar bills, stirring orange juice into the cake- it was just off. I sighed, without the foresight of lack of grief to focus on any real decision making. Right brain fell asleep, left brain was drowning in the shallow waters. I didn’t even gun my next decision through my intellectual drain pipe for a second. A ventriloquism act on behalf of my lascivious id. I stayed a second night, matter of fact.

People see your insides; they just don't bother to try. They can rip you to shreds, dress up in your entrails, play dice with your fears and arouse your sunshine to see-saw time. After the sacrifice, the couple gets back up again, putting their strewn limbs back on, reacquainting themselves with the spaces beneath their experimental skin. The whores in the clouds will tell you that strippers never keep anything on; that rituals the very first time bear a different name; that a home becomes a house once the windows are clear. That it wasn't what they thought it would be. Not even close.

The payout is shroud-like, lost in the shadows of a gun barrel. It's more than you can imagine. Piles of invisible cash in empty briefcases, littering a dry, straight highway. Always just waiting for the sun to break free from behind a cirrus cloud. He's too busy making time with those dancing girls. They enact their superstition, leaving your belly wrapped tight around childhood. Sweet leaves blown through trees, you were so young and could do anything. The sun shone differently then. It always broke through clouds of painted ladies. Their feathers shone fresh and bright, their feet quick and fancy-free; no one ever knew about their cuts and pregnancies, their ineffectual starry eyes, wanting to borrow some gold of sunshine before the next go around. They'd let you have it back; they can't manage two things at once at that distance.

Jack and I ate up the dust in the air, swallowed the bed sheets, snorted the grime from our feet and devoured the whole damn place, turning on even the stars that watched from behind the window.

You yourself return from the ritual embers, thinking that the humblest hearts make the largest, near silent sacrifice. Passed out, with sideways tears that glide down your neck with each crisp, clean feeling of memory. It serves to reinforce the constant void, lapping and retreating as the waves of this mystery border town outside the window - filling with appreciation, Christmas dinners, silent car rides and warm, low-lit stories, falling away to the worst road, the future one.

Jack is just a shade in my memory now, but the burning, breathing times still survive. I tell this story to the girls who, touched, wipe a tear with their grandmother's embroidered handkerchief, take their pills and wash their underwear in the sink. Lastly, they fill up their wet eyes with the black dirt shadows of everyone else's family secrets. One sip of waterfall whiskey rises in the smoke of the dance hall of jousting erections, life plans demarcating napkins and the glimpse seen of a way back home, through the eyes of a girl whose head is forever soaring above the clouds in the colours of the mythologies that stand beside, watching and wondering how the story will end, what side of the coin will the gypsies win and steal at and what strangers will be stretched out on the fire escape when the hangover passes, and your realize you missed the daylight again. When the light hits your face, and you’re brought back into your body, your life, your father…The sands will stay white, your homeland truer than you remember it.  And I promise to breathe, to walk, to give, to taste and to love of everything you gave me, of everything I am. He is the reason I believe in the might of gods, in the morality of the wise man, in the faith for the hero. Then, just the terror of stillness, the romance after a mighty squall.

The girls, still small, innocent and dreaming manage to gawk, shake off their ashes and smile. He's telling them a story. He'll be off to tell you one next time you sleep, or smell firewood or think of home without a place. And the waves continue, leaving an old faded photograph on the shore.

The trains blew noise in the distance.

~M. Lucia