drabble - Famine/Susan, last part of Narnia/Good Omens crossover
Susan/Famine
previous parts: Adam/Peter, War/Lucy, Pollution/Edmund
cutline and poem excerpted from Civilizations by Carl Phillips
thanks to aqua_eyes for the prompt and be_themoon for telling me that this part of the poem is about Susan. :)
As he said to me
once, That’s all garbage
down the river, now. Turning,
but as the utterly lost-
because addicted-do:
resigned all over again. It
only looked, it-
It must only look
like leaving. There’s an art
to everything. Even
turning away. How
eventually even hunger
can become a space
to live in.
Alone, now, she starves herself of that spirituality. Alone (and yes it’s true, she has been alone for longer than she has been alone) she starves herself of presence, and of reality.
She makes a living.
Susan is thrift. She is efficiency. She is not frivolously concerned with makeup or fantasies, but wears her lipstick neatly and earns the respectful gaze of others, can work her way through society and hold a job, knows to be everything seen and needs nothing unseen. She can be at home at the end of the day, alone in her flat, open her mouth and hear the hollowness echo.
What she has to hold on to is morality, not spirituality. She holds it in her head without needing reference. A book, what good is it. All her thoughts are over and done with; all she is left with are conclusions, empty conclusions, held there in her mind. She resists turning them over, examining them, for fear of finding the cracks there. It is so easy. So easy to resist and do nothing, while working her fingers to the bone.
It’s not that she isn’t hungry. God. How she hungers. But it feeds her. Every moment of hunger is a reminder that she is alive; she has need and so she lives. She is a vacuum and so she exists.
Yet it pulls her from everything, too. She exists in missing so she can never not miss, she can never have or be present. She will always be displaced, no matter how placed she insists she is. Her drink is hard water. Her food is sand.
It’s been so long, she doesn’t remember what that food tasted like. It was richer, probably. When she dreams of it her subconscious represses any memory in the split second of waking.
If you were to ask her what she dreamed, she would say nothing and she would mean it.
She would powder her nose and apply blush to her pale sunken cheeks and turn away from you lying there in bed, not really away from you but only toward the next step, toward and out of the door. Toward the end of the day.
previous parts: Adam/Peter, War/Lucy, Pollution/Edmund
cutline and poem excerpted from Civilizations by Carl Phillips
thanks to aqua_eyes for the prompt and be_themoon for telling me that this part of the poem is about Susan. :)
As he said to me
once, That’s all garbage
down the river, now. Turning,
but as the utterly lost-
because addicted-do:
resigned all over again. It
only looked, it-
It must only look
like leaving. There’s an art
to everything. Even
turning away. How
eventually even hunger
can become a space
to live in.
Alone, now, she starves herself of that spirituality. Alone (and yes it’s true, she has been alone for longer than she has been alone) she starves herself of presence, and of reality.
She makes a living.
Susan is thrift. She is efficiency. She is not frivolously concerned with makeup or fantasies, but wears her lipstick neatly and earns the respectful gaze of others, can work her way through society and hold a job, knows to be everything seen and needs nothing unseen. She can be at home at the end of the day, alone in her flat, open her mouth and hear the hollowness echo.
What she has to hold on to is morality, not spirituality. She holds it in her head without needing reference. A book, what good is it. All her thoughts are over and done with; all she is left with are conclusions, empty conclusions, held there in her mind. She resists turning them over, examining them, for fear of finding the cracks there. It is so easy. So easy to resist and do nothing, while working her fingers to the bone.
It’s not that she isn’t hungry. God. How she hungers. But it feeds her. Every moment of hunger is a reminder that she is alive; she has need and so she lives. She is a vacuum and so she exists.
Yet it pulls her from everything, too. She exists in missing so she can never not miss, she can never have or be present. She will always be displaced, no matter how placed she insists she is. Her drink is hard water. Her food is sand.
It’s been so long, she doesn’t remember what that food tasted like. It was richer, probably. When she dreams of it her subconscious represses any memory in the split second of waking.
If you were to ask her what she dreamed, she would say nothing and she would mean it.
She would powder her nose and apply blush to her pale sunken cheeks and turn away from you lying there in bed, not really away from you but only toward the next step, toward and out of the door. Toward the end of the day.