Young Writers Society

I know this is prose...but I don't think we have a prose forum.


Sober. Sober, when was the last time she was sober? It’s laughable, how she slurs her way through MySpace bulletins, proclaiming the word of aluminum cans, gray, black, white, shades that sneak around in the uncertainty of her drunken mind. Then here, where will I make up my mind? A thousand hairpins shackle me to this unbidden life, a life with spray-painted cheeks and glucose lips. This world started too straightforward, I plunged headfirst with salvia and nastier fluids, ones that rock the boat of this tiny house and set me floating in oceans of emotion. With the tide, I wash up besides Athena. She’s unsheathed, nude but for a Madonna bra. Miss Independent blasts from underneath her fake nails, and she’s filled with bullet holes. Her cheeks have been blown open, what a perfect shot from pillow talk, what a point blank perfect, perfect shot. Farther down the beach, sands slip through my toes and I hardly feel the grains – is there a difference between each one? Do they vary, do they know each other, chat in the lonely night? Perhaps one day we will share their pain, shoulder to shoulder, sifted constantly under the sloshing wines of change. But farther down: armies, faceless with only smiles too wide, too bidding. They all point in the same direction (they always have) and, of course, I follow it. If people go that way, isn’t it worth going, worthwhile, worth the watch, the tick tock tick tock tick tock of time, just seconds, just redundant after all, worth it? Worth, worth in pennies or in bodies or in a thousand little girls named Penny who passed away. Were they beaten? Were they raped? Was it cancer, was it water? Yes, it must’ve been the water. Down the shore, the bottle lands up on the rift between dry and wet sand, so I scoop, just like it’s dirty, I scoop, I scoop it up – the note inside reads “Do you want to catch ghost moths by twilight and lick their wings, hoping for flavor like saccharine? The best place to snatch stars from the sky is where they are close in vineyard, ones Jesus used to walk. I think his footprints raise us higher to the heavens. Platforms. Jesus wore platform shoes and stilts. Anyway, he must’ve tilted down once and a while, taken a tumble, so what could lift him up but a little bit of ivy, a handful of grapes and a wooden cup of wine, wine. Wood is just a shade of gray.” [Wanna get drunk tonight?] Oh, Penny, when was the last time – do you recall the last time – Oh, sober. Sober. You were sober.