[x]

saudadeLast week, you showed up with the thunder on my doorstep.

Your voice was so drenched with the rain that I almost didn't recognize the way you said my name. It hung in the air like an incomplete sentence, like something unfamiliar, like you were so lost from trying to find everything we left behind and piece it back together that you couldn't find me in your heart anymore. It was pouring and the power was out and I was so tired of watching the world fall apart from outside my windows that I let you back inside my arms and inside my senses, and your bones were shaking as you clung to me and told me how good it felt to come back home.

There wa

THAT Woman     First they said, "No wind chimes outside the cottages. Three warnings will be given, then you are subject to eviction."
     My Granny said, "Humph. I like my old bamboo windchime. I can't even reach it no more to take it down. It's gonna stay, dammit, and I will too."
     I told Granny, "Not if they evict you, you won't. I can take it down."
     She looked at me over her reading glasses, with that Look she has.
     "If anyone's evicted, you can go with em, Sonny. I'm stayin put. Me and that damn windchim

MorningsMornings After the End of the World

I am woken in the middle of the dawn's light
By the sound of the butcher's knives going "swack"
In the apartment below
And the sounds of something tapping on the glass at my window.
It creaks at me, and whines and howls
But cannot break through uninvited.
Some rules still apply, even after the end of the world.
The tree rips up its roots and stalks away, unsatisfied.

There's a vampire on the phone
"Have you thought about life insurance?"
I tell her I'm not interested, one life's as good as another.
"Have you thought about eternal life, then?"
"Don't those two things cancel one another out?"
"I

The Stellar Void"Can you kill me, please?"

I must have looked startled because her expectant gaze saddened a bit.

"I'm sorry. What?"

"Can you kill me?" Her face brightened as she repeated the morbid probe.

Confused, I couldn't help but notice her rather familiar clothes. Faded pink jeans, knock-off Converse shoes. Little black hoodie with a torn right sleeve.

"You just looked a bit angry and I figured you'd be the best person to ask."

I stood next to the bench. My backpack dug into my shoulder and I shrugged it off. It'd be awhile before the next bus came anyway.

"Why?"

She looked down the street. The dim lights barely revealed the closed shops and l

Billy's PterodactylsBilly was in what his mother called 'his dinosaur phase'. He'd been firmly ensconced in this phase for the past six months, ever since his Dad had taken him to see the Natural History Museum in Oxford. The first thing he'd seen on entering was the huge bones of the Tyrannosaurus Rex glaring down at him, and that was it; he'd been hooked ever since.

In the time since then his entire room had been re-decorated with a Jurassic theme. Dinosaurs were on the bedsheets, the curtains, the posters on the walls, and little plastic ones covered his floor to the point where it was dangerous to walk across it. Unless you were Billy, of course. No dinosau

Mechanical DeathEven mechanical things can live.

It stirred, steel tendons and synthetic muscles twanging like sad music in the cold silent dark. In turn, the dark hissed back, a noiseless sound from the furthest depths of blackest space. The thing with the tendons of steel and the skinless hide glistening with oil twitched and spasmed and trembled, the mess of electric synapses it called a mind confused by the notion of life.

It felt. And what it felt confused it, for it had never felt before and it did not know what it was to feel. It felt cold and hot at the same time, two extremes of temperature that at a point became inseparable with each other. It fe

She Wasn't Born This WayShe Wasn't Born This Way

You never mention the word "disorder" in certain company.

That's a defense mechanism, rewriting song lyrics in my head as the uncomfortable silence drags on. Not that it's really silent, ever, in a hospital. Machines whir in the background like insect hives, nurses flit (or stomp, depending on inclination) from bed to bed, and some janitor or orderly inevitably rattles by the room with a bucket of vomit or cart of soiled bedding.

So not quiet, then, but certainly uncomfortable. She avoids my eyes, fingering the roses on her lap. Everything in hospitals is blue-and-white, a sick, sterile periwinkle that I suppose i

Runner's Death
   December twenty-fifth.
   Christmas time.
   In other words, the time of the year my parents put their everything's-alright smiles on and Anabelle fills the toilet with puke so that she can pretend to be filling her stomach with food when all our relatives come over--the time of the year we all pretend to be normal.
   It's also the anniversary of Runner's death.  But, like they always do, my family has covered the events of December twenty-fifth, one year ago, the same way they did the cracks in our living room wall--in a layer of brig

GrandfatherGrandfather, I've heard that there's a little lump of cancer
lying in your bed, resting its head
between the bed sheets, where it curls
against your side like a bloated alley cat; close enough
to finger every heartbeat
that races through your pale blue veins. I've heard
that it comes a-knocking in the night like a stranger,
wandering door to door along your ribcage
and running its hand down the thin paper walls
as it looks for a quiet place to sleep away the stars.

I've heard that it comes into your bed
and peels your eyelids apart
and roots itself inside your dreams, silent
as a secret. The tumors grew within your pancreas
like

Of Half-Filled WordsShe is not a flutterbird.
Her fingers are skittish,
her smile is not.
Do not fear that you will
drive it away.

Sadness is her fumbling limb.
It is unwanted, yet
necessary.

When it is January
she will tell you,
"I am still struggling.
And I am becoming so many people
all at once.

A conglomeration of beauty that
I have managed to mangle.
Please, do not be sad for me."

Sometimes her sorrow is
meant for you. But mostly her.

Those specks and spots
of ocean storm lulls
reveal her truths:
ones she does not want
to extract from herself.

Her heart is not a rabbit.

When it beats
faster, faster, faster,
you need not
run harder

Sad Blue EyesWhen I was little, my mom used to carry me everywhere. She would cradle my pudgy pale body and rock me back and forth, watching me as I cuddled close to her warm body. My mom's eyes were big and blue, but were always terribly sad when they saw me. On the days when her eyes would become so glossy raindrops fell off her face, my mom would roll up my dress sleeve to reveal a delicate bangle resting around my wrist. "Your number suits you…sweet like berries…" she would coo in my ear, "Palmer and Rodney don't have numbers as sweet as yours." Her voice would weaken and shake whenever I asked what my number was.

I didn't understand why it

Metastasis98.00

Autumn is the season when everything dies.

The leaves shrivel up and your lungs go with them, tiny dejected organs drying out inside your sternum, crinkling under our footsteps. The doctors pronounce their diagnosis as the leaves fall, listing medical terms and percentages and something about medication options.

The disease is metastatic: it has bored its way out of your lungs and into your bones. Dissatisfied, it's going for your organs, your liver, your heart. The prognosis says Christmas is a pipe dream, likely as the sun ceasing to set.

You promise it anyway.

94.00

November comes and I am a fish, breathing through makeshift gi

the hanged manThis little red book you call the human body:
take it up and shake it. Shake the flaking pages
out of it, shake it from endpaper to endpaper
until the last of the phrases are gone; shake it
until it's aching and empty, the soul of a bird.

I will give you new words.

a picture of a plane.The day her daddy got sent away, the whole neighborhood fluttered with closing curtains and eyes watching through cracked doors. His wife called it a mistake, the cousins called it rape and said he was a pedophile.

And she just kept dipping her fingers into paint and dreaming about kites and the eyelashes on dolls, because she didn't know what any of those words meant.

A year later, he came back, and she washed the sidewalk so he couldn't see that she was drawing their secret in light blue and petal pink chalk.

-

"Those are nice pictures, baby," her daddy would tell her, but she hated it, because he always sounded sick, and he would rub h

Desolateif you are parched tonight,
the pale of your lips cracked
with thirst for that which
will not claim you;

if you hunger -
the deep and shallow collapsing
into slivered vibrations;

if blindness rejects you, says
no, watch now.
this is the way of it;

if you are breathing the world
into cinders, inhaling each poison
on purpose, striving
toward an apocalypse
because that is chaos
we can categorize,

then you may understand.

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How To Say Goodbye

by ^pullingcandy, Mar 5, 2012, 10:53:04 AM
Literature / Prose / Non-Fiction / Letters

Dear Unborn Child, Whom I Let Go;

When I was thirteen and four months old, and you were thirteen years younger, I decided to let you go. You squirmed in opposition beneath my ribcage, up against my pelvis, and I licked my lips and tried to smile while I leaned my forehead on the cool glass of the car, hellbound.

I remember sea weed insertion, dilation, cramps and bleeding. Orange smoothies from Dairy Queen that I threw up, and I hoped you were mingling in the remains of my summer day treat, so I could put this behind me. Pretend I was 'moving on'. I laid in the bathtub of a hotel room for six hours, trying to melt you away in scalding water from a rusty tap, yet you clung on, holding tightly to the walls of my pelvic region. Wiggling upwards, towards my throat. Past my teeth. You're trying to get out, but my family has decided you won't breathe when you're released from your bloody shackles; you may as well settle down now, sweet son, settle down.

The rest of this, to me, is a blur. There is a car ride, and protestors. I know you had finger nails, eyelids, heft and weight. I know how you were created. I am (was) just stupid, and I knew (thought) I was in love with a deviant, and a bastard, but after you are expelled I will go back to him. I think we both knew that. There is a chair, and an elderly woman, forceps, an injection. And after...there is a hazy forty-five minutes where I believe that I have died. Hope I have died. Realize I have not, and blink slowly under the glare of clinical lighting.

I caught a glimpse of you, my boy, before you were completely removed from this world; bloody chunks quiet and gleaming, no longer moving, no longer clawing your way up my windpipe to exit through the gaps in my teeth.

I don't know if I will miss you.

Antibiotics. My mother cried as she handed me the bulky package. I don't know if she cried for you, or for me, or for herself at my age. I will never know, I won't ever care. I don't even know why I remember that she asked me, after, if I was sure. I believe the proper question would have been are YOU sure, Mother. Are you sure the steps you've taken in your life that have brought us to this point were the ones you intended. Are you sure?

I remember you, small being, as I hold my daughter's hand, now. In a crowded mall, or sweeping dust bunnies from the floor in my kitchen. When my youngest wears blue, I wonder if she looks like you would have, and when my eldest stares at me in that unsettling way, that way only children know how to do, I believe that somewhere, somehow, you're staring at me like that too.

Always;
Your Mother

How To Say Goodbyeby ^pullingcandy

Literature / Prose / Non-Fiction / Letters

How To Series

I love you
Like little flowers
Love sunshine

Ahem:

This was my experience to share. Not yours. So please:

I think it is sad I need to make the below exclaimer.

This was my life, my experience, and I get to choose how I write, and what I write about. No more notes, please, and no anti-abortion propaganda on my work. And no more religious viewpoints, either. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but you should not force yours on to me, no matter how well you mean.

I'm not trying to say that all commentary HAS to be sparkly bunnies and unicorns, I don't mind comments in any form. I just don't think it's fair to shove it down my throat.

Some things to consider before you leave me an inflammatory comment:

1) I didn't ask for a DD. I am pleased as all get out to have received one, and very humbled. But I didn't ask for it.

2) Yes. I have a religion. I'm Catholic. No...I don't practice any longer. That doesn't mean I want a new one. Thank you.

3) I'm pro-choice. No matter what, that won't change.

4) I am 31 now. This happened when I was 13. Not yesterday.

5) Thank you for reading it. That's the most important thing, no matter how it touched you - thank you.

Some commentary has been hidden as per the commenting deviants request.

Daily Deviation

Given 2012-04-12

How To Say Goodbye is a personal, striking, and honest piece of non-fiction by ^pullingcandy. ( Suggested by `Exillior and Featured by $wreckling )

~~fear 0 0~~

!gg8helperReborn May 11, 2013 New member Student

Did you want the child (lets say you were allowed)?

This is sad. I'm so sorry for the both of you.

^pullingcandy May 13, 2013 Hobbyist Photographer

The part of me that is now 32 says, "Yes, of course I did."
Some part of the 13 year old me also says the same.
The logical side of me, at 13 AND 32, says/said, "I wasn't ready for the emotional and physical, as well as financial demands a child would have brought me, nor was my body ready for childbearing."

I'm rather torn as to whether or not I would have wanted it. Had I had a better option, I do think I would have put it up for adoption.

Thank you for taking the time to read my work.

~lonelynightrain Mar 21, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

Wow.

^pullingcandy Mar 30, 2013 Hobbyist Photographer

Thank you for taking the time to read it.

~lonelynightrain Mar 30, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

You are very welcome, Pullingcandy. I was reading another person's story, when yours caught my attention and I knew that I had to read to find out more what it was about.

~Genoveva612 Mar 11, 2013

OMG this is damn touching, well written. i'm amazed.

^pullingcandy Mar 30, 2013 Hobbyist Photographer

Awe, thanks for reading.

~Genoveva612 Apr 14, 2013

you're welcome

~DemolitionPrincess1 Feb 17, 2013 Hobbyist General Artist

This is beautiful. I'm guessing that it also took some courage to upload, but I'm glad that you did. It's just so real and beautiful.

^pullingcandy Mar 30, 2013 Hobbyist Photographer

It did take some, but it was worth it. It was a letter unsent, and now I feel it has reached who it needed to.
Thank you for taking the time to read it. I appreciate it.

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