i used to dream my heart was beating
i used to dream my heart was beating
PG13 for squishy love stuff
gee x frank [anyone, really]
for we_are_cities march 13th prompt
a bit confusing...
There’s no such thing as magic.
It’s one of those lessons that is drilled into his mind--through his temples, past his memories, take a left at his subconscious and there it lies--day after day after day, to the point that he could recite it in languages he doesn’t know and doesn’t care to learn. It’s one of life’s unfortunate truths, the dismal “because I said so’s” that seem to make up the majority of the substance of his existence. And he never questions it. He thinks there’s something important about his lack of wonder, doubt, what-if. He thinks that maybe the blatant absence of the interrogative means that something is terribly, terribly wrong here. But he’s never been one for worrying--not even when his father walked out the door, mumbling about how sorry he was and that he’d write every day--so it really doesn’t make any sense to start now.
His childhood was not built on the foundation of fairytales and dreams, like those of his peers, and for this he is thankful. His mother never lied to him and told him Santa Clause would find a way; she just placed the few meager gifts she’d managed to accumulate in front of him and apologized for the fact that the money wasn’t coming in this month. He thanks her for that sometimes, when her back is turned and she can’t hear him over the running water of the sink. Because his dreams will never shatter or crumble before him, since they cannot be destroyed if they don’t exist. For this he is thankful.
The walk home from school holds no barely-veiled majesty. He doesn’t see the splendor in the setting sun or the beauty of the shimmering city, a million multi-colored tea lights dancing along the skyline and the myriad high-rise buildings. He doesn’t think any of it is different than ordinary, nothing special enough to merit commitment to memory or stories for a later generation.
The tree springs up so suddenly that he almost trips over the roots, stretched out and spreading through the cracks in the pavement like they’re making themselves comfortable, expecting to stay for awhile. And since he does not think in terms of wishes or sorcerers, he does not start off wondering where the tree came from or why it is there and wasn’t moments before. He only mutters about how a tree in the middle of the street will block traffic, perhaps he should call someone to come and yank it out of the pavement.
He stares at the branches for a moment, at the green-yellow leaves creating luminescent patterns of light and shadow across his skin and the cement, and he bites his lip and blinks and then there is the boy.
The boy is more alarming than the tree, because while he’s uninformed and sort of stupid about flora, he knows people. He gets people, and in his heart--left ventricle, dull ache that might be doubt, might be a clogged artery--he understands that people don’t just appear in trees. There’s something wrong here.
He takes a step forward and the boy shifts down a branch, glancing at him from beneath a curtain of raven-dark ebony hair, and it glistens in the afternoon sunlight, in the dancing shadows cast by the leaves. There is blue around his eyes, shimmering. Pieces of it fall away when he blinks.
“Who are you?” he asks the boy, but the boy doesn’t answer, just smiles and pulls back a little further into the hideaway his mane provides.
“Where are you from? Why are you in a tree? Did you bring the tree with you, or is it the other way around?” And suddenly all of the questions he never asked are spilling past his lips with torrential force, tearing away the lining of his esophagus and burning his taste buds with acidity. He wants the answers, now. He wants to understand all of those things he doesn’t comprehend, like why can’t people fly and what’s the story of Aladdin and why aren’t there any gypsies left and what happens if you follow a rainbow to its end and are there such things as dragons? He asks, and the boy doesn’t answer.
The boy holds a hand out and he can see the miniscule grains of glittering blue stuck to the crevices that tell the future--love line, life line, criss-crosses and arches and swirls--and he hesitates because there is no such thing as magic. He grips the boy’s hand and the boy pulls him up into the tree and he thinks that maybe he was wrong.
Because he’s not on his street, on his way home from school, anymore. He’s next to the boy, and their fingers are still intertwined and there are a hundred million branches stretching out above them and below them and as far as the eye can see in any direction. He closes his eyes for a moment because he’s dizzy and that’s when he hears it. Singing. Barely on-key and faint enough to suggest an underlying well of self-doubt, and he opens his eyes and looks at the boy’s lips as they move, pursing and arching. He thinks that if words could be silk, they might sound something like this.
The boy looks at him--his eyes are gold then green then yellow then hazy blue then brown then honey back to gold again, both lined and overwhelmed with the sparkling midnight blue--and smiles again, and he finds himself returning the gesture even though a small part of him in the back of his head is screaming that he’s maybe possibly been kidnapped. The branch shifts beneath them and he holds the boy’s hand a little tighter, and the boy starts to sing louder, and then the wind is rushing by and the light is so bright that he almost can’t see. And there are fingertips on his cheeks and then a mouth against his and it’s warm and inviting and the polar opposite of the wind--biting him with its icy teeth, unforgiving and cold.
He kisses back until he can’t breathe and his vision is turning black in the corners. He feels himself falling and there is the scrape of teeth and the pull of hands and then nothing, and he can feel gravity at work and he imagines the flat of the ground coming up to meet him.
He jerks awake. The clock reads 4:15, Tuesday morning.
The sheets are mostly on the floor, a desperate corner tangled around the muscles of his calf, and he’s breathing like he nearly drowned. There are beads of chill sweat dotting the surface of his skin, and he closes his eyes for a moment, presses the heels of his hands against them hard enough that stars explode across his field of vision, tiny fireworks that make him want to throw up.
He takes a moment to recollect himself and his jumbled thoughts, all shattered like light through a prism, and he doesn’t remember anything important. Just black and blue and a brilliant tree. He lets the images fade into oblivion, because his life is not built on dreams and he refuses to let it become such. He ignores the pang in his abdomen as it dissolves and rolls over and closes his eyes again and prays to anything that exists that his slumber won’t be plagued with anything, benevolent or otherwise.
When his mother comes in to wake him hours later, she purses her lips and frowns at the blue glitter streaked across the corner of her son’s face, down the curve of his shoulder. She plucks the leaves off his pillow--one from his hair--and lets them flutter into the wastebasket. She uses a warm washcloth to rid him of all other evidence, all other reminiscence, and she doesn’t blink or cry as the blue spirals away down the rusted-steel drain.
He wakes more somber than usual, and over the course of the next week his notebooks become littered with doodles in the margins--a pair of eyes, barely visible; a tree; cracked sidewalk and gaggles of branches. She watches while he doesn’t eat and she wonders what could possibly be wrong with him, her mind flashing to illegal substance abuse and depression and the other titles the population gives to boredom, and she worries.
And she never once thinks back to the leaves in his hair or the glitter on his lips or the smile on his face. She cannot be blamed, of course. For, as far as she knows, there is no such thing as magic. All there is are the remnants of dissatisfaction lurking beneath the surface of her son’s face, and the chasm that grows steadily between them.
He spends his days wondering what sunlight would taste like if it were edible and how one goes about finding nonexistent trees. She spends hers wondering what happened to her baby boy when she wasn’t looking, where the transformation came from and who’s to blame for it; what she did wrong, if it was her fault.
Because, of course, there’s no such thing as magic.
on to part 2
PG13 for squishy love stuff
gee x frank [anyone, really]
for we_are_cities march 13th prompt
a bit confusing...
There’s no such thing as magic.
It’s one of those lessons that is drilled into his mind--through his temples, past his memories, take a left at his subconscious and there it lies--day after day after day, to the point that he could recite it in languages he doesn’t know and doesn’t care to learn. It’s one of life’s unfortunate truths, the dismal “because I said so’s” that seem to make up the majority of the substance of his existence. And he never questions it. He thinks there’s something important about his lack of wonder, doubt, what-if. He thinks that maybe the blatant absence of the interrogative means that something is terribly, terribly wrong here. But he’s never been one for worrying--not even when his father walked out the door, mumbling about how sorry he was and that he’d write every day--so it really doesn’t make any sense to start now.
His childhood was not built on the foundation of fairytales and dreams, like those of his peers, and for this he is thankful. His mother never lied to him and told him Santa Clause would find a way; she just placed the few meager gifts she’d managed to accumulate in front of him and apologized for the fact that the money wasn’t coming in this month. He thanks her for that sometimes, when her back is turned and she can’t hear him over the running water of the sink. Because his dreams will never shatter or crumble before him, since they cannot be destroyed if they don’t exist. For this he is thankful.
The walk home from school holds no barely-veiled majesty. He doesn’t see the splendor in the setting sun or the beauty of the shimmering city, a million multi-colored tea lights dancing along the skyline and the myriad high-rise buildings. He doesn’t think any of it is different than ordinary, nothing special enough to merit commitment to memory or stories for a later generation.
The tree springs up so suddenly that he almost trips over the roots, stretched out and spreading through the cracks in the pavement like they’re making themselves comfortable, expecting to stay for awhile. And since he does not think in terms of wishes or sorcerers, he does not start off wondering where the tree came from or why it is there and wasn’t moments before. He only mutters about how a tree in the middle of the street will block traffic, perhaps he should call someone to come and yank it out of the pavement.
He stares at the branches for a moment, at the green-yellow leaves creating luminescent patterns of light and shadow across his skin and the cement, and he bites his lip and blinks and then there is the boy.
The boy is more alarming than the tree, because while he’s uninformed and sort of stupid about flora, he knows people. He gets people, and in his heart--left ventricle, dull ache that might be doubt, might be a clogged artery--he understands that people don’t just appear in trees. There’s something wrong here.
He takes a step forward and the boy shifts down a branch, glancing at him from beneath a curtain of raven-dark ebony hair, and it glistens in the afternoon sunlight, in the dancing shadows cast by the leaves. There is blue around his eyes, shimmering. Pieces of it fall away when he blinks.
“Who are you?” he asks the boy, but the boy doesn’t answer, just smiles and pulls back a little further into the hideaway his mane provides.
“Where are you from? Why are you in a tree? Did you bring the tree with you, or is it the other way around?” And suddenly all of the questions he never asked are spilling past his lips with torrential force, tearing away the lining of his esophagus and burning his taste buds with acidity. He wants the answers, now. He wants to understand all of those things he doesn’t comprehend, like why can’t people fly and what’s the story of Aladdin and why aren’t there any gypsies left and what happens if you follow a rainbow to its end and are there such things as dragons? He asks, and the boy doesn’t answer.
The boy holds a hand out and he can see the miniscule grains of glittering blue stuck to the crevices that tell the future--love line, life line, criss-crosses and arches and swirls--and he hesitates because there is no such thing as magic. He grips the boy’s hand and the boy pulls him up into the tree and he thinks that maybe he was wrong.
Because he’s not on his street, on his way home from school, anymore. He’s next to the boy, and their fingers are still intertwined and there are a hundred million branches stretching out above them and below them and as far as the eye can see in any direction. He closes his eyes for a moment because he’s dizzy and that’s when he hears it. Singing. Barely on-key and faint enough to suggest an underlying well of self-doubt, and he opens his eyes and looks at the boy’s lips as they move, pursing and arching. He thinks that if words could be silk, they might sound something like this.
The boy looks at him--his eyes are gold then green then yellow then hazy blue then brown then honey back to gold again, both lined and overwhelmed with the sparkling midnight blue--and smiles again, and he finds himself returning the gesture even though a small part of him in the back of his head is screaming that he’s maybe possibly been kidnapped. The branch shifts beneath them and he holds the boy’s hand a little tighter, and the boy starts to sing louder, and then the wind is rushing by and the light is so bright that he almost can’t see. And there are fingertips on his cheeks and then a mouth against his and it’s warm and inviting and the polar opposite of the wind--biting him with its icy teeth, unforgiving and cold.
He kisses back until he can’t breathe and his vision is turning black in the corners. He feels himself falling and there is the scrape of teeth and the pull of hands and then nothing, and he can feel gravity at work and he imagines the flat of the ground coming up to meet him.
He jerks awake. The clock reads 4:15, Tuesday morning.
The sheets are mostly on the floor, a desperate corner tangled around the muscles of his calf, and he’s breathing like he nearly drowned. There are beads of chill sweat dotting the surface of his skin, and he closes his eyes for a moment, presses the heels of his hands against them hard enough that stars explode across his field of vision, tiny fireworks that make him want to throw up.
He takes a moment to recollect himself and his jumbled thoughts, all shattered like light through a prism, and he doesn’t remember anything important. Just black and blue and a brilliant tree. He lets the images fade into oblivion, because his life is not built on dreams and he refuses to let it become such. He ignores the pang in his abdomen as it dissolves and rolls over and closes his eyes again and prays to anything that exists that his slumber won’t be plagued with anything, benevolent or otherwise.
When his mother comes in to wake him hours later, she purses her lips and frowns at the blue glitter streaked across the corner of her son’s face, down the curve of his shoulder. She plucks the leaves off his pillow--one from his hair--and lets them flutter into the wastebasket. She uses a warm washcloth to rid him of all other evidence, all other reminiscence, and she doesn’t blink or cry as the blue spirals away down the rusted-steel drain.
He wakes more somber than usual, and over the course of the next week his notebooks become littered with doodles in the margins--a pair of eyes, barely visible; a tree; cracked sidewalk and gaggles of branches. She watches while he doesn’t eat and she wonders what could possibly be wrong with him, her mind flashing to illegal substance abuse and depression and the other titles the population gives to boredom, and she worries.
And she never once thinks back to the leaves in his hair or the glitter on his lips or the smile on his face. She cannot be blamed, of course. For, as far as she knows, there is no such thing as magic. All there is are the remnants of dissatisfaction lurking beneath the surface of her son’s face, and the chasm that grows steadily between them.
He spends his days wondering what sunlight would taste like if it were edible and how one goes about finding nonexistent trees. She spends hers wondering what happened to her baby boy when she wasn’t looking, where the transformation came from and who’s to blame for it; what she did wrong, if it was her fault.
Because, of course, there’s no such thing as magic.
on to part 2