I Only Dream of Thunder
Title: Sugar and Spice
Word Count: 380
It's so comfortable, watching her. She has the sort of joy that only the truly crazy can have, because as soon as you care about things like bills and mortgages and school and work and getting laid, you become jaded. Disillusioned. You forget about the feeling of sand squishing between your toes, or chilly water around your ankles, or the sun on your shoulders, or the wind in your hair. You forget what it's like to be some fucking retarded child, skipping around on the beach in front of strangers, not caring if anybody is watching or pointing and laughing at you. But Tiny, she hasn't forgotten that. She's just energy and giddiness and shade after shade after shade of pink, like her body is spun in cotton candy, light and feathery and sickly sweet. I can imagine running my tongue across her, getting high off the sugar on her skin, inhaling scents that remind me of easy days at the park or the circus or the fair, tearing out the whispering strands of her hair and stuffing her in my mouth, tangling her, sticky and syrupy, around my fingers.
She is singing some nonsense song, chirping like some obnoxious little bird, and it makes me think of those neon pink marshmallow birds my grandmother would give me for Easter. No longer cotton candy, no, not those delicately spun strings, not something to be carefully picked off a cardboard tube and held lovingly on your tongue until it melts. Now she needs to be driven through, needs something metal skewered into her skinny body, needs to be held over a fire until her outsides blacken and her insides turn to molten nectar that will stick to the roof of my mouth, burn my tongue. She needs to be ash and liquid, she needs to be seared to perfection.
She needs to stop looking at me like that, her happy smile fading to something cautious and dark.
She needs to look the other way.
She needs to realize that even though I'm the good kind of crazy, and the obvious kind, that even though I wear it on my skin, it won't save her. The good kind isn't really the good kind. All it does is give her a head start.
Word Count: 380
It's so comfortable, watching her. She has the sort of joy that only the truly crazy can have, because as soon as you care about things like bills and mortgages and school and work and getting laid, you become jaded. Disillusioned. You forget about the feeling of sand squishing between your toes, or chilly water around your ankles, or the sun on your shoulders, or the wind in your hair. You forget what it's like to be some fucking retarded child, skipping around on the beach in front of strangers, not caring if anybody is watching or pointing and laughing at you. But Tiny, she hasn't forgotten that. She's just energy and giddiness and shade after shade after shade of pink, like her body is spun in cotton candy, light and feathery and sickly sweet. I can imagine running my tongue across her, getting high off the sugar on her skin, inhaling scents that remind me of easy days at the park or the circus or the fair, tearing out the whispering strands of her hair and stuffing her in my mouth, tangling her, sticky and syrupy, around my fingers.
She is singing some nonsense song, chirping like some obnoxious little bird, and it makes me think of those neon pink marshmallow birds my grandmother would give me for Easter. No longer cotton candy, no, not those delicately spun strings, not something to be carefully picked off a cardboard tube and held lovingly on your tongue until it melts. Now she needs to be driven through, needs something metal skewered into her skinny body, needs to be held over a fire until her outsides blacken and her insides turn to molten nectar that will stick to the roof of my mouth, burn my tongue. She needs to be ash and liquid, she needs to be seared to perfection.
She needs to stop looking at me like that, her happy smile fading to something cautious and dark.
She needs to look the other way.
She needs to realize that even though I'm the good kind of crazy, and the obvious kind, that even though I wear it on my skin, it won't save her. The good kind isn't really the good kind. All it does is give her a head start.