Project Stapes: A Metamorphosis

Mar 02, 2009 09:42

Hi everybody!

Here's your story. Fully on time. :)

A Metamorphosis

The short of it is clear. She wants to be something else. A crate of cobalt wine flutes; two willows linking arms; a sparrow, laughing.

Or someone. The mailman with his cap and creases; the girl down the street with blue glass eyes and a laugh like promise-keeping; the artist who gets paid. These people suit her fine. Such as these know how to line their misery up like a shooting range, like dates in a calendar penciled between sleep, eat, work. Sleep, sleep-that is all she knows better than her palms and the tumble of her blankets. Sleep like hammers falling on her hands. Oh, she would give what little she has to be anything else than sleep and messy.

Anything. Just not this sack of sorrow. Not slumping into tears congealed, not carbon paper scrawls of drug and symptom, drug and symptom, the hospital door’s squeak and the deep electric shock.

Not this thing.

She has always been defined by what she’s not. Not lilac breeze or robin flight; not song humming in the pits of violins. Not girlfriend, mother, wife or best friend, either. Barely even daughter. Only then because a birth cannot be taken back.

How she wants to take it back.

Instead, there is this silence. And this god. She found him in the yellow pages, under C. For change. She was surprised to see his listing. These days, after all, gods come in such short supply. (more needed here?) The sign over his shop, however, looked legit. He was another story. Neither tall and marble-graceful nor white-headed as a thunder cloud. Still, he had eyes that looked both ancient and all-seeing. As if they could pierce right down into her cells and draw out gold, monsters, heroes.

They watched her as she browsed the catalogue.

Anything in particular? He stood close as she thumbed through the woodcuts of laurel trees, nightingales and stags. The laminate flashed beneath high fluorescents as she passed each by. His breath was warm and sticky in her hair. It smelled of old cigars and thunderstones.

She opened her mouth to tell him no, nothing, not yet. The words poured out instead like rusted water from an unused pipe.

Make me, she whispered.Just make me.

And he did.

She was not happy with the classical. She flowed nicely enough as a clear stream, but the plash and play against pebbles seemed too much like crying. As an echo, she felt even more vanished. Laurels were just tedious, having little else to do but shudder in the breeze, or bend.

Not this, she said. Not this.

The contemporary seemed more fitting. As a pair of shoes she wandered cities near and far, every day a new texture, a new smell. She jangled in the wind as slim brass pipes and slammed through poet’s veins in milligrams. When these did not suit, she tried on different skins: the greased mechanic, the well-fed judge, the bored starlet wearing too much eyeliner. But each time, the same hollowness, that ache like wearing too-tight leather: No, not this. Not this.

Gods do not have it easy anymore. As paper yellows and parchment shakes to dust, they have had to learn some patience-and more, to compromise. Blessings come in short supply these days, and everybody wants them. Wrath is now a clinical quandary, and punishments don’t pay the rent. As his client shifts through different limbs and angles like a discontented Proteus, he bites down his disgust. Before he bought Birkenstocks and permitted hippie-kitsch to appropriate him, he tells himself that people knew their place, and those who would not learn - the dread of spiders’ legs, the waver of a ghost reflection.

These days, they want so much. They are mouths, devouring themselves at every end, elbows and knees bashing themselves like Titans’ hammers.

And they want so much.

Maybe nothing has changed, really.

There is a terror with each transformation. It is a little bit like switching drugs. Oh, there may be more choices, but there still must be an end. The day the books are closed, the carbon paper scrawled, and the truth is clear: no matter the skin, the shape, the form you are still trapped inside, complete and inescapable. This puzzle terrifies her like a maze; the laminate offers no solution, either. At least, not until she thumbs to the last page.

From his cluttered desk, the god eats his noodle cup, thinks on the times he’s done it, and recalls the weeping queen. She reminds him a bit of her: sorrow wide as oceans, broader than the death that started it. But money and fashion have also made him less merciful: This is a transformation she must perform herself.

It is easy-all too easy-when she realizes this.

She wanted to be sun, and gardener, and lumbering train. Turning to stone is the opposite. It is not hope or want for hope: it’s null and chill as the silvery veins of lapis. Maybe just as perfect, she thinks as she shuts her eyes and wills it all away: wine flutes and sparrows, two trees linking trunks; the mailman and the artist and the girl with her fulfilled laugh; shoes and streams, hospital doors and paper. Want itself, into a pool that churns like the gullet of a beast.

Bit by bit, atom by atom, she feels her extremities harden, her eyes cloud up like granite.

The long of it is clear. She wanted to be something else. Anything. Just not this sack of sorrow.

At his desk, the old god shrugs and picks his teeth.

----

Remember, Project Stapes is offered free, but donations go towards helping the author pay her bills. Ten percent of donations until further notice also go towards helping s00j take care of some emergency medical bills (for more information check out saveours00j).

Thanks for all of your support, folks! Especially those of you who donate regularly <3. So far, I have raised about $3.10 for S.J. (remember, 10 percent of what I receive). Since I don't think it's worth the paypal fees to send her a payment until I have at least $20, I'm holding off until I do. Please consider donating if you liked this story. Every dollar helps.

Also, it seems that I may be facing a very scary financial situation in the near future. I can't really go into details publicly, especially as there's a chance it may not happen. But regardless, if you like the story and would be willing to donate, it would be deeply appreciated.

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