LJ Idol - Week 1: Here There Be Dragons
you don't know quite what you're in for.
that's what she said. Miss Doll-Eyed in the fourth row. I thought I pegged her for a balanced (if not a little neurotic) twit. but here she was. telling me about the New World. here there be dragons.
that's not a sentence you can take lightly.
I began to understand what she meant after the third week. the third week of rolling over in my bed. looking through the slits in the windows, seeing the fog trailing like breath against the fiery lights outside. or perhaps it was smoke. people smoke here. they say you should be more than twenty-five feet away from the building. but I suppose that's equivalent to the feet on a centipede.
the days were counted out in numbers, but the numbers became part of the system. ten o'clock no longer meant 10:00, but Oh-My-God-I-Fucking-Hate-Derivatives. everything was a classification. a scale.
like those polished scales that pricked me in the lab. we procured several smells, stains, and punctures. DNA tests proved that I was normal, but the smog in the middle of the night. not so much.
the day was a haze, articulated by the dead of night when the mind was allowed to race through whatever boundaries these white walls let down. I saw the ceiling as a conveyor belt for the light slits, and the smog a a dancing dervish. and the clock would smolder with the numbers eleven-fifty-seven. and all this represented were the deadened senses of the world faltering into a whimper. there were several whimpers.
the third year was when the paddock loosed itself. third year, on a third floor. I'd opened the door one evening in the pitch black. it almost smelled like pitch. the empty bed on the opposite wall came as a relief, and I flung the window open. so freeing after stifled pitch. and everyone, like dots along the sidewalk. and the sidewalk but a paved ocean. my skin was dry against the cold wind and for a minute, I could feel my heart beat to the rhythm of the kiln breathing in my chest. if I could find that dragon anywhere but inside these walls, I'd be able to leave that window, and cross the ocean.
but that ocean was not an ocean.
and that dragon was locked inside these walls.
that's what she said. Miss Doll-Eyed in the fourth row. I thought I pegged her for a balanced (if not a little neurotic) twit. but here she was. telling me about the New World. here there be dragons.
that's not a sentence you can take lightly.
I began to understand what she meant after the third week. the third week of rolling over in my bed. looking through the slits in the windows, seeing the fog trailing like breath against the fiery lights outside. or perhaps it was smoke. people smoke here. they say you should be more than twenty-five feet away from the building. but I suppose that's equivalent to the feet on a centipede.
the days were counted out in numbers, but the numbers became part of the system. ten o'clock no longer meant 10:00, but Oh-My-God-I-Fucking-Hate-Derivatives. everything was a classification. a scale.
like those polished scales that pricked me in the lab. we procured several smells, stains, and punctures. DNA tests proved that I was normal, but the smog in the middle of the night. not so much.
the day was a haze, articulated by the dead of night when the mind was allowed to race through whatever boundaries these white walls let down. I saw the ceiling as a conveyor belt for the light slits, and the smog a a dancing dervish. and the clock would smolder with the numbers eleven-fifty-seven. and all this represented were the deadened senses of the world faltering into a whimper. there were several whimpers.
the third year was when the paddock loosed itself. third year, on a third floor. I'd opened the door one evening in the pitch black. it almost smelled like pitch. the empty bed on the opposite wall came as a relief, and I flung the window open. so freeing after stifled pitch. and everyone, like dots along the sidewalk. and the sidewalk but a paved ocean. my skin was dry against the cold wind and for a minute, I could feel my heart beat to the rhythm of the kiln breathing in my chest. if I could find that dragon anywhere but inside these walls, I'd be able to leave that window, and cross the ocean.
but that ocean was not an ocean.
and that dragon was locked inside these walls.