Concerning the Canvas

 Flame so blue it was almost translucent spread slowly like a cat licking her lips, tiny mercurial droplets speeding down the glass like flaming seraphs. Kevin blew the wave out with a thin curl of smoke.
  They say you get to a point, cross some line like overcoming a threshold and you no longer feel the pain, just hear the leaden impact against a body you cling to the remembrance is yours. That’s a trifle deceptive. You don’t feel, because all you feel is a wall of pain. It’s like throwing paint on a canvas – it’s vibrant at first, stark as the color bifurcates the dusty white of the canvas, but after a time there is no more white, you’re just adding color on top of the same color.

Concerning a Certain Birth

 Kevin had survived an abortion. This was not his choosing.
  He had often been told that, respectively, God had some divine, ineffable purpose for his life, or his own inner consciousness had even in nascence asserted itself in Herculean manner. One was so much abysmal, relative hope in the face of evidence, and for that matter, God no longer held credibility either.
  Even now he looked as if he’d carried that mantle of death for seventeen years; consumptive, pale, eyes like a sunken grave, scarred more ways than one and prone to inexhaustible nightmares.
  He had developed a way to counter them, like he had the physical side to pain. It involved a tumbler of absinthe, a cube of sugar and a dollop of pills, all coruscated by a simple Blue Tip match.
  His father violently threw things like this out when he caught him, like he treated everything. Said he was going to hell. He was wrong though. This was hell.

Intermission

Thanks to all of our listeners. We will be starting a new twisted tale this month, having wrapped up Chiaroscuro, so stay tuned. This week however, taking a short break. Be sure to visit the rest of port-evenus.com for more tales and excitement.

Concerning the Music

   Out of the midst of nowhere Taylor remembered Eric. He looked about desperately. Eric. There he was, by the cairn. Taylor could see his brother had been wounded, moving waving like a fish trapped on the bank. He had to reach him, had to help him He pulled himself to his feet.
  Taylor stumbled, fell on a picnic table. He tried to drag himself across it, leaving a crimson painting. Eric was dying, he knew it. What he had wanted just an hour ago, and yet all the hatred he’d felt was washed away like so many times before in a wave of feeling beyond explanation. They were closer than brothers, and that transcended rules and where the rules fractured. Taylor tried to save him. But he was tired, his own time running. So tired. He made it to the cairn, and collapsed.

  Funnily, the Music cleared.



copyright 2011 BPLtd.

Concerning the Rest Stop, pt2

   Taylor looked at him a moment, then rubbed his nose. “Ride the dead horse,” he said.
  The haircut sighed. “What I was afraid of. Reeve?”
  Reeve went to grab him. Taylor jerked the knife from him pocket, slinging it open by the blade, twirling it through his fingers and slashing backwards. He caught Reeve cross the chest, just a shallow laceration, before someone else grabbed his arm. He kicked out wildly, hitting something that grunted in pain, then twisted his wrist back, gouging the knife into the hand that held him. The haircut drove a fist into his solar plexus. Gasping, the knife pulled from his hand, kicking forward again, shoving himself and Reeve backwards off the haircut’s chest, trying to pull away, and then another gut punch, and hot white lightning scorched through the bottom of his mouth like he’d just bitten a high voltage wire. The knife had gone through his bottom palate, the base of his throat.
  Reeve let him go. Taylor opened and closed his mouth, choking on the blood flowing down his throat. His glasses -- it seemed such a startlingly mundane thing to notice -- hand come loose in the scuffle, and dangled over one ear. He took a step back, tried to fix his eyewear.
  Sky. Focus. Trees, green. Reeve, now in vision. Focus. Reeve pulling a gun from his jacket, now cut open and red staining his shirt. Focus. Muzzle flash, a roar. Pain. Focus. Gunshot. Pieces of his own chest flying into his vision, splatter on his lenses. Focus. He dropped to his knees in the grass.
  Aware, still aware, of Reeve putting away the gun, the haircut considering him dispassionately, and the trio left, left him there, vanishing from sight.

Concerning The Rest Stop

   Shadows falling, rising, bobbing to footfalls. Three men overtook him. “Hey man, long time no see!”
  Taylor stopped, looked at them blankly.
  The cheerful one had ratty brown hair, that I-don’t-care-about-much-never-mind-my-hundred-dollar-haircut look. “Where you going, man?”
  “Salvation,” Taylor said.
  “Listen, Eric, we need to talk, man.”
  “Fuck Eric.”
  The orthadontal smile fell. “What?”
  “I’m not Eric. We just look alike, and Eric can fucking take care of his own shit now.”
  “Excuse me?”
  “No Eric. Just me.”
  The haircut turned to one of the others. “Reeve. Is this who you dealt with or not?”
  “Yeah. Little scruffier now, maybe.”
  “So what’s your game, mister?”
  Taylor sighed. “Look, I don’t care if Brutus here believes I’m Santa Claus, alright? We just look alike, and I’m not here to clean up after him.”
  “Heart-rending. We, however, are, so if you’d be kind enough to either produce my money or my merchandise, I’ve other things to do today, right?”
  “Told you. Not Eric. Don’t have your junk, man.”
  The hair swished as the head bent toward the ground. “Look, this is a serious career, okay? I can’t let any exceptions, else the whole thing crumbles, you understand? So what’s it gonna be?”

Concerning the Exit

  He stopped his telic hike only for a diner somewhere off of Highway 7, where three-fifty was too much for a dismal hero. It was the first food he’d eaten in an indeterminable while, and he promptly threw it up. He guessed that’s what happened to people with Problems. Either way, it seemed the only exit the sandwich deserved.




  Trudging on. Gravel beneath his boots, asphalt crumbles, valiant grass stalks, glass and garbage. Vehicles whizzing past with the sound of a cough. The shoulder widened out to a grassy roadside rest, small pavilion with a picnic table and cairn with a plaque honoring someone obscure. Taylor unconsciously moved from the ditch and into the grass, staring at his feet, staring at nothing. Trudging on. Leaving. Escape. Salvation. Redemption. The gravel-meets-rubber sound of a car pulling to a stop. Oblivious. Kept walking.
  “Eric!”
  To hell with Eric.
  “Eric!!”
  Eric lied, severed the bond, the sacred seal that bound, tied beyond temporal understanding for something as ephemeral as money.
  “Hey! Eric!”
  Eric was on his own now.