The Day of Discordant Discombobulations Wherein We See Ourselves For The First Time And Steal A Boat From Some Old Man By The Sea

[A short story, written especially for Kentari]

She crested slowly, rhythmic sensuous curves undulating in the azure world, pale as sky me the verdant, broad and sprawling ocean and as the earth nestled with the heavens, suspended between substrates as water funnelled from fish and we froze, Japanese tourists with camera faces staring, the world turned to paparazzi flashes.

Then we came down, like a zipper creasing into folds, stick and moving, the spears of our destiny stabbing into flesh and blubber and the whale died, reminding each of us in one poignant yet somehow meaninglessly shallow empty moment of our in-laws and gaping maws and poetry disguised as prose but why, for what -- no one knew. Knows.

We killed her quickly, her children watching, frozen, blood curses in whale song a sound that still haunts my dreams, sounding like child molesters, in the shower, singing as they are shivved; the tourists never stopped clicking, prisoner to their terrible plan, sucking away our souls by pieces -- but we had paid them away long ago.

Under other stars and distant suns seen once and never again under eyelids we sold ourselves, our souls, our lives, for just the pursuit of happiness and never its possession -- and so, waving, we carried the whale home soulless, feeding our families in bleak homes for another year, another turning of seasons and the relentless pitter-patter of time

falling down the stairs.

"Honey," he said, his voice breaking the silence like cheap dinner plate therapy on a basement wall, "why do I call you that?" in a quizzical, confused tone that implied in an implicitly explicit manner akin to the exoteric esoteric way of spouses something his darling wife entirely failed to notice.

"Call me what?" she asked languorously in a voice like rough sandpaper scraping over an open wound, her eyes the colour of limpid swamp water with a body that had not tasted solid food in a week of desperate dieting to fit into a reunion dress for someone six inches shorter that lay, moth eaten, in an upstairs wooden trunk filled with her lost hopes and a small, lonely tic tac.

"Honey," he said imperatively with the slight, hesitant whine like the drone of a biplane, the voice of all men ho are right but not in the eyes of their wives (a voice Hitler used, asking about the Jews, saying they might not be good people but at least they kept to themselves to a wife who was tired of hearing how they threw the best bar parties for children), and he beheld at her and froze, not unlike a bowling ball floating in the water.

"Yes?" she snapped snappishly, her voice skeletonizing his ego like a piranha, a whiplash of failed memories and corroded vows skittering over his flesh like hungry ghosts.

"The word. Honey. It - doesn't suit you," he noted miserably, his voice fluttering between notes, a song in need of a singer to free it from the entrails of time and the broad expanse of the gulf that nestled between them like the deep ends of the couch.

"How now? How not?" she exclaimed, correcting herself with a moment of mental whiplash, her eyes, steely-eyed like ball bearings, dared him to comment from their dead, cold, desiccated and mysterious depths that he had yet to grasp the courage to plummet and swan dive - or, perhaps, belly flop - into the abyssal abyssness of night and - oh! - her abs, that glistened with years of work like oil-stained rags.

"You aren't a bear," he smiled, the expression a fractional upturning of lips falling into the Shrodinger laugh that was not funny or morbid yet until a reply is made from the box of anothers being; neither living nor dead, trapped between reply and answer as unto a butterfly hovering above a jar of ether.

"You begin to bore me," she flounced, her voice slate-pale-grey-green as she turned and appraised him, hands on hips like the wife of some mighty Ice Giant of halcyon days of yore waiting for an explanation for the party that kept him up, not buying Ragnarok as an excuse again.

"I am sorry," he whipped in whispered words warbling whitely.

"Good."

November Note

I won't be online much at all during the first week, and likely not during the second either (the first is guests, the second is NaNoWriMo :)). After that, should be on and will likely begin Low Life towards the end of month/beginning of December.

Low Life is going to run Day X (undetermined, as yet) Time Y (ditto) once a week. For this game, there shall be NO side sessions. For a change, basically :)

The game will likely run 3 months or so, and LOLAD 2 run after it. After THAT, I may run Haunted and/or UA, players willing. No plans for whatever follows.