Jack of Hearts
01-21-2011, 05:15 AM
NB: (Written for English, senior year of highschool.)
"There he is…"
"Look at him, what a weirdo!"
I could hear their malicious jeering from every dark, icy corridor of my mind. They were speaking blatantly in the small dark space within my heavy head- fiendish, laughing hyenas ripping apart the dirty, coarse fibers of my soul. The hellsong of the acoustics vibrated too intensely for such an enclosed space and surely something would shatter. There he goes, they say, there goes the guy with the internal monologue of a noir detective film.
It was my metallic cross to bear and I lived for its cold, pseudo-velvet touch; the subtle amounts of pain enticed me like a harsh, straight shot of heroin to the kidneys. I first discovered the dark narration arising from within me last week at McDonald's.
"Do you want fries with that?"
The girl gave a tentative look as I garnered a malignant insight into her soul via her blue eyes- I was taking a swim in an ocean of death. She was my own personal Lucifer, tempting me to fall from grace with the insidious superficialities of the "real" world, a lacerating burden that would crumple any mortal man, provided the proper timeframe.
Not that time couldn't do the job by itself.
"Oh, no thank you," I replied, looking upward toward the blackness of the roof and at Nietzsche's dead God, "I would like… uh, what is it? You know, the ice cream things with the little pieces of fruit in it?" I snapped my fingers as the thought barreled through the steely doors of my mind like a legion of hell-hounds fleeing the infernally blazing gates of Hades. "Oh, a parfait!"
But that's all part of the grim, dark past- ideas that belong solely to the ages. They're all dead now… or at least working at another McDonald's, but I can still hear their sardonic voices mocking me. Sometimes the complexities of life destroy even what would seem to be infallible and concrete. A Hershey bar becomes a Butterfinger.
To ease my mind off the burden of my past, I went to classes and attempted to be reawakened to a sunlit world of multi-colored butterflies where I am not subjected to the hellish grasp of… uh… laughing hyenas ripping my soul apart… again… but with fire this time- hot, burning fire. Senior English was my mistress of the all-consuming black night, and I'd shoot her into my veins of metal until they collapsed in upon themselves like so many post-glorious black marble pillars. Even after the veins left, I'd inject into the pink, supple flesh, building the blackness up until it consumed my entire body, and I'd never have to wear clothes again.
"Hey there Heathcliff! How are you doing today?"
I grunted, brushing past the spectacled teacher and her subtly stylish brown hair.
"Would you like to go get some water?" She asked me. "You sound like you've got a bit of something stuck in your throat… Go on, before the bell rings. You can make it."
She was trying to send me away, like the prodigal son, so I could return and be thrown to the wolf-pack that was the death of her mercy. I would have none of it, and instead claimed a depravedly colored brown desk close to the door and against a wall- it was as much a prisoner of this bland and devouring classroom as I. I could rest easy- there would be no assault from my six o'clock and a quick getaway was available, should things turn for the worst.
Ambience. I could hear the pencil sharpener start its violent cycle of cutting away the old, useless wood- it had served its pathetic purpose and was now obstructive to progress, or "c'est la vie" as the French say. The more I heard the sweet, poetic chopping of the writing implement, the more I thought about love and what it had done to me.
I met her between recess… uh, I mean nutrition break, and Seventh period. She had a math book that could slap your mother in the face and run off in your Dodge Ram holding your father's hand without so much as a single glance backward. Why, daddy?
Hair and eyes as dark as the soul of Dick Cheney. A body like a long, lonely highway; curves in all the right places, that my fingers hungered to take at various speeds. She wasn't a woman, she was a weapon.
I knew I loved her when she sat down on the plastically grated bench with me at lunch and said she hated the band Chicago. Or maybe it was the city, I wasn't really listening. True love is hating the same things. Suffice to say, with my dashing good looks and Robert Redford-like charms, we were swapping fluids before the souls in Hell could proceed with their next lament of lacking ice-water.
"Bless you," I said while wiping my face and handing her a snowy-white Kleenex along with a bottle of hand sanitizer. When you're in my line of work, you've got to keep both your nose and your hands clean.
"Sorry," she replied with red eroticism in her cheeks and a suggestive, fluttering wink, "these damn allergies…"
"Baby, I'm your medicine," I said in baritone and with inscrutable manly bravado. Ten minutes after she left. Not that the effect of my charm was totally lost- a passing group of freshmen, who fell within earshot at the integral moment, re-routed and took a longer way around to wherever it was that they were walking. Where do they go, anyways?
Time had passed and I still thought of her, it kept me up into the waning hours of the infinitely empty night-I hadn't slept for a week, and it would be eternities before I saw her again. The next day, at school, she was hand-in-hand with a dark skinned Indian boy that I had never seen before. I refused to believe the woman I loved could be so unfaithful. I rose to confront her, every muscle in my back clenched with animal rage and the fury of a burning world in my eyes.
"Oh, hi Heathcliff!" She said to me as if nothing were astray, casually trying to lightly play the stomach-wrenching scene off. I could immediately see right through the sickly-sweet venom that ladled out from her cute tone of voice, "This is Raheem."
Outsourcing had gone just too far. I wiped the sticky residue from my pale mouth, dropped the warm bottle of whiskey in my stilled hand to the ground and disinterestedly watched the liquid-brown explosion turn into a million meaningless pieces- then I callously turned away, brutally cutting all my decaying losses off like a plagued hand covered in the black-crimson of gooey, open sores. Or, at least, I would have done all of that if I were old enough to buy alcohol.
I felt a warming in my cheeks, so I took the lighter out from my back pocket. There was a tremendous amount of heat coming from beneath my eyes, as well- it must have been the sun; it was a really hot day and not a cloud invaded the deceitfully serene sky. "Uh… hi."
She pointed to my clenched fury of right fist, to what I really was holding, a bouquet of flowers, "Wh
o are those for?"
"Uhhhh…," I droned, searching the brilliantly twisted labyrinth of my mind for the next line, "They're for… uh, my dog. He died."
Little did I know that specific line was the standard for ending almost all conversations. It was like a thousand fiendish hyenas ripping my soul apart or something.
As soon as they had left, I decided to ditch the added weight of the bouquet. It was limiting my ability to move or take action, and if I got stuck in a tight situation, I could kiss my *** goodbye.
It was the damndest thing. Right when I dropped those flowers in the trashcan, I felt drops of rain on my face.
"Play it again, Sam."
"Heathcliff! No talking! You should be doing a thinking log!"
The screeching, hellistic war-cry of the disgruntled teacher brought me back to my unwelcoming, rejecting senses. Little good it did, focus came to me like a cheap, fickle prostitute with one ear, and soon enough I was back in the past, owing money, waging wars and fighting battles already lost. Like the night Murray died.
I held him in my arms, screaming like I was being jabbed in the fleshiest parts of me with a sharp, h+ot poker. Help never came to us there, under the unrelenting rain and in the middle of the forsaken road. Night blanketed his face and I could see less and less of him as he slipped away. I ran my ice-cold fingers through his soft, angelic hair and stared into his fading dark eyes for as long as I could. Finally, I buried my numbed face in the lifeless corpse and sobbed into the hollow darkness, "I'll miss you, boy."
"Heathcliff! Why didn't you do your thinking log!?"
When I look up, it's with rainwater enveloping the shiny coins of my eyes and sincerity seizing all of my features. Bittersweet reality claims its place in my words,
"… I can't turn it off…"
"There he is…"
"Look at him, what a weirdo!"
I could hear their malicious jeering from every dark, icy corridor of my mind. They were speaking blatantly in the small dark space within my heavy head- fiendish, laughing hyenas ripping apart the dirty, coarse fibers of my soul. The hellsong of the acoustics vibrated too intensely for such an enclosed space and surely something would shatter. There he goes, they say, there goes the guy with the internal monologue of a noir detective film.
It was my metallic cross to bear and I lived for its cold, pseudo-velvet touch; the subtle amounts of pain enticed me like a harsh, straight shot of heroin to the kidneys. I first discovered the dark narration arising from within me last week at McDonald's.
"Do you want fries with that?"
The girl gave a tentative look as I garnered a malignant insight into her soul via her blue eyes- I was taking a swim in an ocean of death. She was my own personal Lucifer, tempting me to fall from grace with the insidious superficialities of the "real" world, a lacerating burden that would crumple any mortal man, provided the proper timeframe.
Not that time couldn't do the job by itself.
"Oh, no thank you," I replied, looking upward toward the blackness of the roof and at Nietzsche's dead God, "I would like… uh, what is it? You know, the ice cream things with the little pieces of fruit in it?" I snapped my fingers as the thought barreled through the steely doors of my mind like a legion of hell-hounds fleeing the infernally blazing gates of Hades. "Oh, a parfait!"
But that's all part of the grim, dark past- ideas that belong solely to the ages. They're all dead now… or at least working at another McDonald's, but I can still hear their sardonic voices mocking me. Sometimes the complexities of life destroy even what would seem to be infallible and concrete. A Hershey bar becomes a Butterfinger.
To ease my mind off the burden of my past, I went to classes and attempted to be reawakened to a sunlit world of multi-colored butterflies where I am not subjected to the hellish grasp of… uh… laughing hyenas ripping my soul apart… again… but with fire this time- hot, burning fire. Senior English was my mistress of the all-consuming black night, and I'd shoot her into my veins of metal until they collapsed in upon themselves like so many post-glorious black marble pillars. Even after the veins left, I'd inject into the pink, supple flesh, building the blackness up until it consumed my entire body, and I'd never have to wear clothes again.
"Hey there Heathcliff! How are you doing today?"
I grunted, brushing past the spectacled teacher and her subtly stylish brown hair.
"Would you like to go get some water?" She asked me. "You sound like you've got a bit of something stuck in your throat… Go on, before the bell rings. You can make it."
She was trying to send me away, like the prodigal son, so I could return and be thrown to the wolf-pack that was the death of her mercy. I would have none of it, and instead claimed a depravedly colored brown desk close to the door and against a wall- it was as much a prisoner of this bland and devouring classroom as I. I could rest easy- there would be no assault from my six o'clock and a quick getaway was available, should things turn for the worst.
Ambience. I could hear the pencil sharpener start its violent cycle of cutting away the old, useless wood- it had served its pathetic purpose and was now obstructive to progress, or "c'est la vie" as the French say. The more I heard the sweet, poetic chopping of the writing implement, the more I thought about love and what it had done to me.
I met her between recess… uh, I mean nutrition break, and Seventh period. She had a math book that could slap your mother in the face and run off in your Dodge Ram holding your father's hand without so much as a single glance backward. Why, daddy?
Hair and eyes as dark as the soul of Dick Cheney. A body like a long, lonely highway; curves in all the right places, that my fingers hungered to take at various speeds. She wasn't a woman, she was a weapon.
I knew I loved her when she sat down on the plastically grated bench with me at lunch and said she hated the band Chicago. Or maybe it was the city, I wasn't really listening. True love is hating the same things. Suffice to say, with my dashing good looks and Robert Redford-like charms, we were swapping fluids before the souls in Hell could proceed with their next lament of lacking ice-water.
"Bless you," I said while wiping my face and handing her a snowy-white Kleenex along with a bottle of hand sanitizer. When you're in my line of work, you've got to keep both your nose and your hands clean.
"Sorry," she replied with red eroticism in her cheeks and a suggestive, fluttering wink, "these damn allergies…"
"Baby, I'm your medicine," I said in baritone and with inscrutable manly bravado. Ten minutes after she left. Not that the effect of my charm was totally lost- a passing group of freshmen, who fell within earshot at the integral moment, re-routed and took a longer way around to wherever it was that they were walking. Where do they go, anyways?
Time had passed and I still thought of her, it kept me up into the waning hours of the infinitely empty night-I hadn't slept for a week, and it would be eternities before I saw her again. The next day, at school, she was hand-in-hand with a dark skinned Indian boy that I had never seen before. I refused to believe the woman I loved could be so unfaithful. I rose to confront her, every muscle in my back clenched with animal rage and the fury of a burning world in my eyes.
"Oh, hi Heathcliff!" She said to me as if nothing were astray, casually trying to lightly play the stomach-wrenching scene off. I could immediately see right through the sickly-sweet venom that ladled out from her cute tone of voice, "This is Raheem."
Outsourcing had gone just too far. I wiped the sticky residue from my pale mouth, dropped the warm bottle of whiskey in my stilled hand to the ground and disinterestedly watched the liquid-brown explosion turn into a million meaningless pieces- then I callously turned away, brutally cutting all my decaying losses off like a plagued hand covered in the black-crimson of gooey, open sores. Or, at least, I would have done all of that if I were old enough to buy alcohol.
I felt a warming in my cheeks, so I took the lighter out from my back pocket. There was a tremendous amount of heat coming from beneath my eyes, as well- it must have been the sun; it was a really hot day and not a cloud invaded the deceitfully serene sky. "Uh… hi."
She pointed to my clenched fury of right fist, to what I really was holding, a bouquet of flowers, "Wh
o are those for?"
"Uhhhh…," I droned, searching the brilliantly twisted labyrinth of my mind for the next line, "They're for… uh, my dog. He died."
Little did I know that specific line was the standard for ending almost all conversations. It was like a thousand fiendish hyenas ripping my soul apart or something.
As soon as they had left, I decided to ditch the added weight of the bouquet. It was limiting my ability to move or take action, and if I got stuck in a tight situation, I could kiss my *** goodbye.
It was the damndest thing. Right when I dropped those flowers in the trashcan, I felt drops of rain on my face.
"Play it again, Sam."
"Heathcliff! No talking! You should be doing a thinking log!"
The screeching, hellistic war-cry of the disgruntled teacher brought me back to my unwelcoming, rejecting senses. Little good it did, focus came to me like a cheap, fickle prostitute with one ear, and soon enough I was back in the past, owing money, waging wars and fighting battles already lost. Like the night Murray died.
I held him in my arms, screaming like I was being jabbed in the fleshiest parts of me with a sharp, h+ot poker. Help never came to us there, under the unrelenting rain and in the middle of the forsaken road. Night blanketed his face and I could see less and less of him as he slipped away. I ran my ice-cold fingers through his soft, angelic hair and stared into his fading dark eyes for as long as I could. Finally, I buried my numbed face in the lifeless corpse and sobbed into the hollow darkness, "I'll miss you, boy."
"Heathcliff! Why didn't you do your thinking log!?"
When I look up, it's with rainwater enveloping the shiny coins of my eyes and sincerity seizing all of my features. Bittersweet reality claims its place in my words,
"… I can't turn it off…"