No more singing, no more laughing, no more sunny days
*It’s a churning sort of night; an upset stomach split open and peeled back, visceral acid-carved lining congealed and blackened toward ruffled hills. Everything is half-digested grass and half-digested air and half-digested details. Fuzzy, unfocused breaks in the uniform pattern which seem to waver and disappear. They play on peripherals and press against skulls - a tightening headache, an incubating cold, blotches of something not-quite solid against the skin. The ward is self-assured like that. It isn’t terribly heavy; it doesn’t expect to be found.
But it does leave plenty of warning. A parameter of low humming and naked birds nesting in their own feathers - of the distinct and deeply unpleasant feeling of disinfectants scrubbed raw against pores, of being pressed through a sterile, plastic vein and squirted into existence on the other end.
Most of all, there’s the house, rising up like a stooped vagrant, unsteady, indigestible and perpetually alive, alive with meaning and history and, more recently, light. It bounces across windows, causing rooms to come alive and die in scheduled, choreographed bursts. There are walls in between of course, constricts of time and space and drywall that are going ignored, but the house and the family that built it have only rarely followed the rules.*
But it does leave plenty of warning. A parameter of low humming and naked birds nesting in their own feathers - of the distinct and deeply unpleasant feeling of disinfectants scrubbed raw against pores, of being pressed through a sterile, plastic vein and squirted into existence on the other end.
Most of all, there’s the house, rising up like a stooped vagrant, unsteady, indigestible and perpetually alive, alive with meaning and history and, more recently, light. It bounces across windows, causing rooms to come alive and die in scheduled, choreographed bursts. There are walls in between of course, constricts of time and space and drywall that are going ignored, but the house and the family that built it have only rarely followed the rules.*