AHH!! My story “San Andreas Heaven,” a piece on grief through the lens of video game glitching, just got accepted by Cleaver Magazine! This is a dream for me. I’ve been trying them for years, and this story is an offshoot of my WIP novel The Brother We Share. Actual tears of joy.
It took a revision to get there, but we got there. I don’t know what else to say, other than I’m so glad I didn’t give up:
I’ve got a prose piece about grief & longing & fighting small town homophobia that I’m really proud of, just went live in scissors & spackle! Huge thanks to Jenny & Ariana & all the awesome folks at ELJ for seeing something in my words. 😊
So I just saw that my story “Down and Out Together” (originally in Twin Pies Lit) made it into Literary Horoscopes, the feature that Alyssa Jordan does for F(r)iction! I’m honored and super excited! It’s wild getting recognition from a writer and an imprint that inspire you. 😊
I wanted to see trees the way that you saw them, not just color and movement, classification and function. I wanted to taste the sun in strawberry, see myself in others and have something like a life before my death. I didn’t manage that, but I have managed to draft this here, now, which will just have to be my consolation. I am collecting all the pieces of me from when I was alive, trying to find the leaves that serve the tree.
I saw you at my funeral. I wanted to say something, but:
1. I couldn’t,
and:
2. What would I say if I could?
Everyone’s words arrived like a fugue, their contrapuntal compositions echoing, and none of them could hear the melodies they were making. I saw something in your eyes then that I’d never seen while alive.
This is not much different than when I was here. There’s not a distinct boundary or separation. It’s a gradual process, and you don’t always know when that process has begun. I was in the process of dying for a long time before they put me in the ground, and it’s still not over yet.
I realize now that I had glimpses of it. Moments waiting in line at the grocery store, realizing that these signs advertising products will be replaced, then will be gone. These people will one day be gone, and the store will be as well. Time will sweep its dust under the rug of the world, and there will be nothing at all to see anywhere. There will be not even the concept of nothing. It’s like that, being dead is. It’s a strong dissociation, but it’s not a severance. At least mine isn’t. It’s seeing yourself see yourself, till it feels like you’re looking into a mirror that’s facing another mirror, reflecting ad infinitum. And I’m pretty much tired all the time.
I realized as I was dying that I didn’t want to die, but it had reached an irreversible point in the process, so I resigned myself to the fact that I was going to soon be dead. It just became a fact.
And then I went away, and my body was a collection of buzzing, brilliant things, separated by color and shape and size and weight, so it was like I was seeing all my composite parts. And there was my idea of you, alone in an unlit room in what used to be my mind. I never saw the fine details, you used to tell me. I’d never miss the forest for the trees, but then I’d never really see the trees at all.
Think of anything you’ve ever seen, and then forget it. Forget that you’ve forgotten. Anything Anthropocene is gone. Anything natural is gone. There’s something there, but it’s more like a vague feeling than an actual presence. There’s not really color. I don’t want to talk about it too much.
If I focus, I can almost see a world outside of myself, outside of what I did. I can almost breathe again.
I dream memories. When I dream, I’m back in the world of matter and color and wind on arms and light in bleary morning eyes. It’s nothing pivotal. It’s the small moments, the ones we shared. It’s waiting in line at the grocery store and eyeing tabloids, dollar chocolate bars, gum, the hum of the conveyor belt and the mechanical hey-how-are-you when it gets to our place in line. It’s crunching through fall leaves, adjusting steps to coincide, and the warmth of the sun past the chill, past the gray, past it all, and feeling that there only is just this moment. Only ever will be.
I’m super excited to share this weird, dark piece of mine that just went live in Semicolon! Happy to be in such good company in this issue. 😊
I have a new story up in Volume One of Twin Pies Literary, and I could not be more excited to share it! Also, I’ll be reading this tomorrow for their first reading celebration! There will be Twin Peaks, pie, and weirdness. Prepare yourselves.
Translucent plastic box in the basement, plastic and lidded, light filtering through it, plants on top of it, sitting idly next to an old Windows 95 behemoth. Coming back home after so much time, now masked, taking precautions, and the last of your personal effects are in this box, the stuff you couldn’t sort through before leaving, the things that reminded you of him. Now just color values and physical description–blurry shapes of belongings past thick plastic, years of dust, incomprehensible lengths of time that don’t correspond to calendars, appointments, birthdays. You have moved on and yet here are these outcroppings of a you who hasn’t.
Opening the lid and starting right away, piles separated between keep, trash, and burn, and you’re surprised by just how quick that last category is filling up. The unending process of self-uproot, plant, water, uproot again. Of having no land to ever truly call home. Your roots are spread too thin, atrophying beneath you, crackling through sidewalk cracks in desperation.
When it all comes through, you’re lighting a barbecue of photos, mementos, hand-written love notes. Sketches of the two of you, his beard snuggling yours, not caricatured but on the cusp, and browning, curling paper, shifting down to deep black, ash clippings sprinkling themselves into grill ash, gray in all that red. All the little rituals we put ourselves through.
If you could find a way to Eternal Sunshine your way out of having to remember him, you think you’d do it, but it’d probably be an in the moment thing, impulsive, the Clem to his Joel, and even that movie is tainted now because of all the viewings the two of you had, watching it every few years, after the inevitable breakup and getting back together, seeing your mirror images committed to film, and vacillating between siding with Joel or Clem depending on the viewing, the season. Siding with neither, and wanting to erase your brain, to take it all away if it’ll mean you don’t have to live with this pain of being stuck in his mental and emotional orbit.
The early days, pre-coming out, when he was a good friend, then thinking it was “just” that you were gay, as if that would ever be a “just” where and when you grew up, and finding other people, other bodies after each break up, learning to fit yourself into the configurations you thought were expected of you, the shifting serpent of sexuality, probably looking just like the one from CCD as a kid, when they tried to convince you that we’re born doomed and need external help to be saved. You haven’t sat in a pew since the mid-2000s, have no desire to, but there’s that familiar old Catholic orisonic muscle in you still, even now, trying to get you to pray it away, give it over to god, and even turning that over in your mind makes you laugh away the sting, the frustrated tears, the way he made you feel and how that could be divorced from how much and how often he hurt you, what that consistent betrayal did to you in the end.
Or maybe it’s the change itself. The changing of colors, of minds. Taking something from one form to a very different other, and to be, somehow, surprisingly okay with it in the end, if that’s what it’s going to be for now. Because it’s as much the final shot as it is the repeat, over and over again, of that shot. It’s curling your farewells into the burning, till it’s all just goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
I am so very happy and honored to share this piece of mine that just went live in Anti-Heroin Chic. This is a flash distillation of the book I’m currently working on, a novel of the same name. Thank you so much, James Diaz, for believing in this story.
The dead friend shows up like a glitch in a poorly-tested video game, clipping through walls, lagging, animation wonky. He’d look real enough in a freeze frame, but in motion the physics are just off.
The dead friend shows up wearing the jacket he wore when he became the dead friend. The jacket is thick, and woollen, but its fibers cannot adequately absorb the blood from the dead friend. They were made for other things.
You can’t seem to get the attention of the dead friend, and you’ve tried everything. All that DF is capable of is to carry out glitched animations, cycling through the keyframes until he can start the next animation.
And here is the dead friend now, sitting on an invisible bench, talking into an invisible phone, asking inaudibly for help. And you can try to sit on this invisible bench with your dead friend, can fall back and onto the ground. You can crouch down beside him, get right in front of him, attempt a lip-read, wave in front of his eyes, call out to him. You can do whatever you’d like, but he won’t notice.
Your dead friend will come for you in the liminal states, too. Don’t think it will only be when you’re out and about. He will sit on your chest like some sleep paralysis demon you’ve seen paintings of, but you will only see the whites of his eyes, will only hear his underwater voice of regret, not words but still intelligible, because regret can never adequately be expressed in words anyway. How would you even begin?
Your dead friend has been dead long enough where the experience of being a person is clearly fading from his cellular memory. He has more in common with the fog coming up off the hills during your morning walks, sunlight breaking up the view through car windows as you pass, thinking always that you’ve seen him, that he’s seen you, that there is a way out of this paroxysm of grief.
Or maybe he’s not the fog, not the wind, but what’s traveling through it. A dream, something that’s been coming back night after night. Your friend is a kite floating on the wind. You are holding the string that is tethered to his foot. All of him has been hollowed out. He is paper-thin, and empty, and his eyes are holes that wind can get through if it must. You look up and the string you hold is tethered to two other strings. They connect to his arms, to the spots once cut, tethered to the places that untethered your friend from this world.
In the dream, you’re not sure how you know that things will be okay eventually, but there is this deep, all-abiding sense that that will be the case. You can bring your friend down and out of the wind, collect his string, and walk him back home when the conditions are no longer right for flight. You can both go back home.
