What was she even supposed to do with the thing? It wasn’t a doll to play with, and she certainly didn’t want to set it on a shelf to look at. It was creepy. But not quite creepy enough somehow. Had it been really and truly haunted, and come to life to stab at her in her sleep, now that would have been something. She could have explained that to Jeremy and Tom the next day, in the woods behind the house. They’d have listened with rapt attention as she’d described how she defeated it with craft and cunning and swiftly thrown blankets. How she’d bundled it up and stuffed it down the laundry chute and heard the screeching of its tiny knife against the aluminum as it slid to its concrete-floored doom.

Their eyes would have been large and incredulous as they were for all her stories and then they’d have jumped their bikes across the creek until one of them fell off into it and had to go home and change out of their wet clothes. But no. This thing only looked creepy, and was not actually creepy. It was not about to come to life or provide interesting stories. If it came to life it probably wouldn’t be able to move in that ridiculous dress anyway, it was way too puffy. She was sure if she took it out to the creek behind the house and blew it up with firecrackers they would find out and then she would be in trouble.

She stood silently behind her closed door and listened to the low hum of them talking to each other contentedly in the other room. She wondered what to do.

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This work by superBadGirl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at thegrandconspiracy.org.

Lately I’ve been pondering a lot of things about love and connection. Lost loves most of all. I think because there’s this monumental, eternal quest to find the person who fits you, who loves you, who makes you feel safe – I always wonder what happens if you find that person only to lose them? I read and hear so many stories of loss – every day is filled with so many deaths. How does anyone stand it? How does anyone find their person and then survive the loss of that person? It’s all quite beyond my limited emotional scope I think, to conceive of going on in the face of that. Empty space where once stood someone you love – how is that to be borne?

I’ve also been listening frequently to the Watson Twins cover of The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven.”  (It’s on the True Blood soundtrack, which is pretty awesome in its entirety.) When the Cure does the song it’s bouncy and driven. When the Watson Twins do it, it’s mournful and full of loss.

And upon reading them more closely I realized that the lyrics can be rather nonsensical or they can be lonely – and here they’re lonely. And the line “I found myself alone, alone, alone above a raging sea.” lingered with me particularly for the first time in the 20+ years I’ve been loving that song. And then I realized why someone was alone above a raging sea, and how sad it was.

Anyway. I think we’re going to a once per month posting schedule over there, which I hope to be able to maintain. Hope you enjoy the piece.

We love a world of observed drama, you and I. Storms from which we are protected. We love to watch our friends go about their whirlwind lives and listen to their stories and be glad we aren’t them. We love to stay inside near the windows when it snows, cozied into blankets with movies we’ve seen a million times playing in the background while we talk about many consequential nothings. We love to take walks in the rain, our boots waterproofed, our jackets lined with flannel, our inner world cozy and safe while the outer world does what it will.

That’s why we took this walk today. The storm coming in looked to be magnificent, and storms along the coast are more beautiful than most. You watch them roll in from so far away, and suddenly you’re in the middle of it, dune grass blown horizontal, green and blue and black waves crashing with white foam. I like to think of the marine animals all hunkered down deep under the water, waiting for the calm to come again, and wonder if it’s peaceful down there where they are. I like to stand in the cold with your warm hand holding mine and let it be my only connection to anything. That feeling, my own calm center in the midst of cacophony, is the thing I love best. Maybe the only thing worth loving.

And now my hand is empty and I find myself alone above the raging sea. Even in this green-hued darkness I can see your body laying on the rocks below me—contorted at an angle that does not support life. I know you are gone. My brain knows this thing. My unconscious mind, ever working, is making a list of the things I need to do. Call emergency services, report the accident, learn how your body will be recovered. I need to call your family and mine. I need to arrange a funeral, where will that be? We’re too young to have ever considered these things. My brain works over these mundane tasks as my eyes stare down at the blur of color that used to be you. Any moment you will stand up, this will not have happened. There’s an undo here somewhere. There’s a version of this story in which you do not lose your footing. Do not stupidly lose your footing on the edge of a seaside cliff and fall to your death. That’s a movie. That’s a movie I wouldn’t watch. That’s a book I wouldn’t read. That’s not my life. That’s not our life. You need to take my car in for an oil change next week – you always do that because you know I hate it. You can’t be gone. Who will take the car in? If you’re gone, then who will understand me? Who will hold my hand?

Process, process, process, my mind whirls around insurance claims and lists of phone numbers. Your phone is in your pocket, down there below and I don’t know if I have contact details for all your cousins. I turn to ask you if those numbers are written down anywhere, but there is no you there. I look down again, the waves are approaching your body now. Your body. When did you transform from being you into being a body? This minute? Five minutes ago? Will you never be you again, only a body on the bottom of a cliff on the edge of my life?

I do not understand who’s going to hold my hand.

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This work by superBadGirl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at thegrandconspiracy.org.

I shook Brian’s hand distractedly, balancing with one ass cheek on the barstool and one foot on the floor. I examined my escape routes and looked for friends standing near me who might serve as possible distractions. Where the everliving fuck had everyone gone?

“Great to meet you.” I stretched a smile out of the morphing elastic of my lying mouth. I paid no attention to his response as I was trying to both take in and make sense of his choice of personal scent. Troubling.

“It’s SOOOO good to see you!” The female gobbled and babbled and bounced around as she spun some long-winded tale of days of goth yore in my direction. She was truly horrific, a spectre of whorish bad taste and consummate whining annoyance. I contemplated picking up the beer bottle that was next to my drink on the bar and smashing it into her face. I imagined the broken shards sprinkling down, raining through her horrible frazzled hair. Maybe they would tinkle sweetly down like tiny amber raindrops, right before the jagged bottle edge sliced open the bridge of her shiny, shiny nose. My mouth tightened in pleasure at the thought, and perhaps she assumed I was smiling at whatever banality was spilling from her wizened little mouth. I watched the crusty edges of her lipstick stretch and crack as she continued with whatever the fuck she was carrying on about.

My eyes narrowed as I contemplated the horror that was this female person. Her orange-foundationed jawline. Her low-cut printed rayon shirt. Her squinty, slitted eyes—her cheeks were threatening to swallow them completely. Why was she still existing, when I so obviously wanted her not to? How was it that we could physically cohabit the same space? Like matter and anti-matter, our combined presences in this place should not be possible. And she should definitely be the one exploding into nothingness.

“So Brian and I were wondering if you’d be up for a little three-way action later on tonight?” My attention snapped back in her direction, though I was loathe to move away from my almost erotic musings on her gory destruction. Stabbed in the face with a bottle and explosion both worked for me, actually.

“Sorry, what?” I was praying she had not had the blond balls to actually proposition me. Her and skeevy little Brian, who grinned expectantly at me in a quite trollish fashion. She giggled with feigned nervousness. It was clear she thought her revolting offer would be welcomed.

“Well, I hooked back up with Brian tonight, I haven’t seen him in YEARS and he’s so hot…” Another one of those repulsive giggles erupted from her mouth. “…and I thought maybe we’d go back to my place. But he says he’s not up for it unless I can find a third.” She pouted at me, and stupidly her curls continued bouncing around as she blathered and blathered. She had now forcibly inserted a truly horrific mental image into my brain and I gagged a little, swinging around to grab my sweaty pint glass from the bar to give me some time to think of a response that didn’t end in violence. I turned around just in time to see a thick globule of palpable desperation drip from her brow. It landed on my foot and rolled wetly across the black leather of my shoe. I kicked it away in disgust and watched it splatter against the wall.

“I really don’t think so.” It was all I could grit out between lockjaws. Brian sidled up closer to me and I realized that there was some rubbing of body parts I didn’t want to know about against my leg. I considered kneeing him in the crotch and wondered if it would get both of us ejected from the bar, or just me.

“You sure? It would be totally hot.” His breath swamped us in a beery, smokey cloud and I saw a hand snaking out toward me. Abruptly I stood. Fuck it all, I was abandoning this stool. I was abandoning this bar, I would abandon this body if that guy touched me.

“So very sure. I need to go, actually.” I grabbed my bag and made to move away, scanning the crowd again and wondering where my people had got to.

“What the fuck, you ugly cunt? You think you’re going to get a better offer?” He reared back, angry and sneering at me now. His cockblocked, dipshitted threesome partner stared in doltish dismay at this unexpected turn of abstinence. This was my least favorite part of the conversation, the part where the rejected male turns viciously on the female who somehow owes him both gratitude and pussy.

I looked at him, standing there all wide-eyed and limbs-akimbo, ready to attack me further with any small provocation. I looked at her, the fuckwit who’d brought this mess into my life in the first place. Her crusty lower lip trembled at the thought of going home to an empty bed without the fucktard. I sincerely hoped that at no point in my life “together with fucktard” would look better to me than “alone.” I looked around at my friends, laughing and talking to each other—presumably not suddenly submerged with me in my world of hookup horror. I looked longingly back over my shoulder at my bar stool, the place where just ten minutes ago I’d known peace and contentment. Then without another word I walked away.

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This work by superBadGirl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at thegrandconspiracy.org.

They take bites out of you that I’m not even sure they know they’ve taken. One after the other, flesh torn from bone until you’re shredded in places that you can’t hide with your clothes anymore.

I guess it’s not their fault, really.

I think that maybe they’re starving. They certainly seem to be. You fill them up, they want some more. Like naked craning baby birds they gape, open-mouthed, famished and squirming.

They look at me all hollow-eyed in the shops and in the restaurants. When they embrace me, I imagine that I can feel them estimating exactly how much they can consume. They poke at me online and I wonder if they have their ovens warming.

They telegraph their hunger, they broadcast it everywhere. They turn my brain inside-out with wanting to feed them. It seems so simple and right to give them what they need, until you run entirely out of you.

But share and share alike, right?

I don’t like to blame them. It’s just that it can get painful, to be devoured in this way. (They do it to each other too, it’s not just me. Oh, the chunks they tear out! I don’t know how they survive it. I have to look away.)

I can do this though. It’s fine as long as I rearrange a little. It’s totally worth it because it makes you so happy. I see that I can be whole and alone, or in pieces with the rest of you, and I choose you. Honestly I do. I really don’t mind.

It’s just that people are so neverendingly hungry here.

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This work by superBadGirl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at thegrandconspiracy.org.

Not at all a kids movie from what I could see, I would think young children especially would find it confusing, dull or disturbing. But then again it’s been a long time since I was a young child, so maybe they’d see something different in it than an adult would. The monsters were pretty amazing, all fur and snot and a plodding kind of fierceness. That in itself must be enchanting to children.

The movie dealt with themes of wildness, relationships, loving someone so much you push them away, loving someone but being unable to tolerate them, loving someone and having them mistreat you, conflict resolution and rage and loss. And several of those things have been on my mind quite a bit lately—especially the idea of wildness, and whether we have space in our civilized adult lives to be loud and wild anymore. I know I don’t have much. Between my home with shared walls and my office and other public spaces, the need to be respectful of other people’s right to peace is usually paramount. Only in my car do I experience some level of freedom to sing or scream or just listen to music that gets as loud as I need it to drown out my own thoughts. Which is why I look like a total nutbag, belting out angry songs at the top of my lungs as I listen to my iPod on my way to work. But I don’t care. In terms of things I owe other drivers on the road, the ability not to see me singing  like a freak is not high on my priority list.

As far as love and rage and loss, all those things have been very heavy on my mind. Love is very hard. Families are hard. People are hard. Love can be destructive as easily as it can be nurturing. Obsession walks hand and hand with love sometimes, and obsession and wildness are the themes that came out in my writing for The Grand Conspiracy this week. What do you do when you love someone and they don’t love you, and those feelings can’t be made to go away? Do you ignore them, accept them, or do you rebel? Do you demand what you want from people, take it when they won’t give it? It’s our instinct to take what we want, what we can’t stop thinking of. But of course that isn’t permitted when what we want and can’t have is another person. But the instinct remains all the same. This piece is about someone whose obsessive desire for someone else rips through every polite barrier that society has constructed—and I feel sympathy for her, no matter how much she scares me.

Anyway, that’s what’s on my mind lately. I do not wonder why I can’t sleep.

I thought it would take some time to convince him to help me, but once I made contact I realized almost immediately that he would never help me, no matter what I said to him, no matter the tactic I employed to persuade him that I needed what he had. In the end I had to resort to other methods.

His cabin was sparsely furnished and filthy, his isolation profound. The few things he owned were neatly stowed away, but the layers of grease and dust and other unspeakable grime coating every secret divot in those walls had taken years to develop and would have taken years more to erase. Fire was a better cleanser than anything else I could muster, so I immolated his body and all traces of his solitary life after I had extracted what I’d come for. Silver and leather and whispered charms and the proper receptacle—the hive mind can help you learn to do anything.

Now I’m back in the city, our city. This place with hot showers and clean towels and boots with heels that were never meant to experience mud. This place with dimly lit restaurants where warm bodies bring you rare steaks on white plates. You can saw delicately into them with sparkling knives and sate your craving in plain sight. I’m back in this place with dark lights and cold winds howling down lonely streets blown with garbage and wasted lives. This place I have both loved and hated. This place with you in it.

I have to admit that this was not always my plan. I thought at first I would ignore the pain ripping into me. I thought I could rise above it, but it turned out that I couldn’t. I only wallowed in it until it sickened me. I worked harder, I changed my tactics. I tried to let it enfold me, to experience it fully—feel it sink in and saturate every corner of who I was. I thought if I lived in it I could understand it, accept it. But it was too big, I couldn’t possibly absorb it all. I laid in my bed and thought of you and all the things you’d said to me, the things you’d done. I puzzled over them, I sought to unravel them into a pattern that made some kind of sense. But I couldn’t, it led me nowhere.

I thought then to destroy myself, to erase myself from the picture, to punctuate our story with clarity and finality. But that seemed at once too hard and too easy. It ended everything but solved nothing. So I was frozen, drifting, lost in a wasteland of confusion you had constructed for me. No solution appeared to be the right one—until this came to me on yet another sleepless, moonbright night.

Having a plan made it so much easier to go on. It took up most of my days and all of my nights. It took my mind off of the way you smell, the sound your laughter makes over the relentless buzzing of the crowd. It kept me from lurking in smoky bars waiting to catch sight of you, waiting for you to change. And then finally the maps were drawn and my knowledge was complete and it was time to go. As I drove away I felt a tugging at my back, like some vital part of me was trying to return to you as the distance between us lengthened. You felt nothing, I know. But it didn’t matter, I felt it enough for us both.

I’m back now and I can’t wait to see you. I thought I might have forgotten your scent while I was away, but now I smell you everywhere. The places you’ve walked, the things you’ve touched, the people whose hair you’ve stroked instead of mine. I am overwhelmed with your essence no matter where I go.

She won’t be calling you back, you know. She might have, I do believe she intended to before I took her fingers. And her ears and her sweet, soft lips. And then she was quite dead. So there’s very little chance you’ll hear from her. I hope you don’t  feel rejected when your phone lies dormant in your hands, when there are no tiny lights blinking up at you to indicate that you’re necessary to someone. I want better than that for you. I don’t want you to ever be lonely again.

Anyway, now it’s just waiting. Only six days more. You don’t know it, but we’ll be together then. We’ll be together forever. I don’t know why it took me so long to realize that I need you to be a part of me. Inside me. You won’t take me in your arms, but I’ll take you in mine. I’m on your trail now, and when the moon turns I will take you. I will rip open your skin and gnaw at your flesh and tear out your heart and suck at your bones and finally you will belong to me, only to me.

We’ll haunt the streets here forever, you and I. We’ll walk in companionable, eternal silence. Better than whispered promises, better than clinging to each other’s hands, better than stealing meaningful glances from each other’s eyes. You will be in my eyes. You will be in my gut, you will be in my heart and my lungs and my every single aching breath.

And finally, since the first time you touched me, I will know peace.

This work by superBadGirl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at thegrandconspiracy.org.

So as of tomorrow – we edit! If you see me not-working you have permission to scold me, but please do not kick my ass, I am a wee bit fragile at the moment.

I’d like to think at least things can’t get any worse.

Florence + The Machine “Hurricane Drunk”

With the word "forever" ringing in her mind, Carolina braced herself to take the last step into the gray.

(Please click to see full size)

This work by superBadGirl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at thegrandconspiracy.org.