Skip to main content

Night Drives

 We sit in the car awhile. It’s quiet. Dark. The rain runs down the windshield in little rivulets and rivers, an intricate little geography that draws in so much of my attention that I don’t realize she’s talking for a full minute. 


I don’t ask her to repeat herself, much as I want to. She talks when she’s nervous, fiddles. I can see her rubbing her hands together, clasping and unclasping, looking out into the darkness. A lone streetlight down the road throws amber light over everything, everything wet and dark. More droplets racing down the glass. 


She kisses me. I don’t fight it, or press back. I can feel the fear in it, this moment of reaching out. It feels like falling. Her big, brown eyes are damp. I’m afraid too. We watch each other, face to face. She looks tired, so tired— do I look like that? Is this what happens to people who—


The streetlamp flickers, and dies.  We’re plunged into darkness. I can feel my heartbeat pulsing, my mouth is dry. I realize I can’t hear the rain falling on the car anymore, or see any tracing rivulets. 


And then, from everywhere, is light.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monsters in the Age of Men

 I saw a woman in the grocery store.  I saw her true shape, beneath raven black hair and pale eyes. She bore great wings, wings that carried endless plains across them and above roared storms, bruised clouds cracking and howling. Lightning split the sky into so many shattered pieces. She stared back at me, surrounded by the tiny people who so long ago had feared and worshipped darkening skies, crashing crescendoes.  We found each other out in the night, behind the building where trees and grass and vines grew untamed like in memories of vanished wilderness. I felt electricity when our lips met, felt spiking painful potential when I caressed her bronzed skin. In my ear I heard thrumming and pounding, shrieking wind. Building and building up into the sky, strong enough to crack mountains and scatter the stars.  I gave her the sea, brine and crushing depths between every kiss. I unfurled myself beneath massive wings, sprawling and armored and impossible, flashing colors...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Moons that Hunters Must Walk

 The Five Moons claim the sky with blood and cosmic violence. Crimson-saffron light splashes across the huge storm clouds beneath their fierce visages, and turns the world eerie. Dreamlike. Haskes, the Moon of Windfall. Storms curl into whirlwind frenzies across the bone-colored face. It is the place of howling furies and hellish nightmares, where hunters must walk across the Stormchasm to stand strong against endless wind-- or be thrown into bottomless abyss. Ahnios, the Moon of Waves. Hunters know the Tidesong, a deep welling howl of sorrow and exultance, the song to be sung out when those worthy sailed out across tsunamis vast enough to sunder continents into crushing abyss. A moon of an ocean untamed, beautiful, and unforgiving. Khinq, the Moon of Dunes. Those beneath the chaotic sky know the Blood Passage as a time of fear and annihilation, a time when the Moon of Endless Sand has returned from distant void to once again reign among its brethren. Red glows like silent, crawlin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Rite of Spring

  Fear rises up and out into the night. The horned face emblazoned with markings like terrible, piercing eyes thrusts forward and out. Guided by instincts with the force of a living locomotive. Steam billows out of gaping nostrils. In the dim brain of the Triceratops it is gripped by awful, primeval terror. Fight. Live! Fight! Live. Fight. Live!  Jaws crashed down. Heavy, impossibly heavy. Fatal. Moonlight catches impaling teeth, massive blunt daggers meant to pulverize bone and concuss flesh, pulling giant chunks from still living prey. The Tyrannosaurus is Death in the Cretaceous world, it is emperor and regent over all living things, it is the epitome of annihilation born in flesh. Its black hide almost glows in the night, darkness on darkness. So fast for something so huge. Blurry. A mountain astride legs, legs as thick as the cedars of biblical Behemoth. Step. Step. Step. Bite.  Horns reach. Push. Sweep. Jaws crack, close, yawn open to a furious gullet. The titans da...
Post a Comment
Read more