Snapshots from Last Saturday
Nov. 11th, 2001 11:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinueHer eyes are white, as though they'd been dipped in bleach to remove the staining iris. They resemble nothing so much as marbles rolled in milked vaseline, but with all the flexibility of a grape. I can see only the rims of them, small waxing moons above her cheeks as she bucks her head against the floor and spasms. I half expect her tears to be white as well, but they are clear against her cheeks so that I hardly see them. Or perhaps they are not hitting her cheeks at all -- her eyeblades flutter so quickly that they may spatter everything. The pillow, the couch, her mother and me. I think that her mother is the one she is mad at, (over? with? by? against?) but of course it is me. She may be dying.
* * * * * *
The wrought iron gates of Fair Park are on my left, ageing testaments to an old world's fair and a style called "nouveau." To my right, steel dinosaurs, patchwork of mirrors and bumper cars. Tottering before me, flocks of people caper to the sunset like zombies only recently freed of graves, still dressed in their finest burial clothes. The air is filled with beetle clickings of high heels against tarmac, a preliminary applause to anticipation. Under my skirt, a battered pair of walking sandals; but no-one can see them beyond the ballgown.
* * * * * *
The theater is dim in reflected spotlights and the red pallor of a picture frame. The curtain arises on the field of a flag, and voices strain to match it in an anthem not made for human voices. As the pitch rises, voices drop out, right hands still clutching their hearts and the stalwart screaming high g. We are all standing, facing the darkness, and I am caught in the arms of George Orwell.
* * * * * *
It looks like a throne, the chair that I bought her, the chair with no back and no front. I have no chair, a child of the earth. She is telling me something important about wanting to die, wanting to kill, wanting to own; but I am hallucinating again and she is Judy Garland with a poppy field behind her, thrown on the walls by a movie projector, distorted by the frame of a door.
* * * * * *
The wrought iron gates of Fair Park are on my left, ageing testaments to an old world's fair and a style called "nouveau." To my right, steel dinosaurs, patchwork of mirrors and bumper cars. Tottering before me, flocks of people caper to the sunset like zombies only recently freed of graves, still dressed in their finest burial clothes. The air is filled with beetle clickings of high heels against tarmac, a preliminary applause to anticipation. Under my skirt, a battered pair of walking sandals; but no-one can see them beyond the ballgown.
* * * * * *
The theater is dim in reflected spotlights and the red pallor of a picture frame. The curtain arises on the field of a flag, and voices strain to match it in an anthem not made for human voices. As the pitch rises, voices drop out, right hands still clutching their hearts and the stalwart screaming high g. We are all standing, facing the darkness, and I am caught in the arms of George Orwell.
* * * * * *
It looks like a throne, the chair that I bought her, the chair with no back and no front. I have no chair, a child of the earth. She is telling me something important about wanting to die, wanting to kill, wanting to own; but I am hallucinating again and she is Judy Garland with a poppy field behind her, thrown on the walls by a movie projector, distorted by the frame of a door.
