He pointed at something over my shoulder, and I turned to look. I thought of something that Alex said to me once. On the happiest day of your life, where do you want to be?

Barefoot on the stone steps, a woman was running, so fast and so urgently that at first I was concerned, shouldn’t we call somebody, is she alright, is somebody chasing her, but she cleared the steps and launched herself toward us— not us but the crowd of us, standing there watching. The light reflecting off the windows and off of people’s cameras made my eyes water, but I craned my neck toward her, that beautiful bride, holding her frilly, flopping dress up so that the hem did not touch the ground.

All around her, the bridesmaids in their bright pink dresses were kicking off their running shoes, stepping into high heels. They ran here, I realized. Ran or walked from somewhere. The groom had her by the arm. Both of them were smiling.

On the happiest day of your life, where do you want to be?

She reminded me of a doll I had when I was a child, beautiful and blond and always smiling, only her smile looked real and I believed it like I had believed a lot of stupid things in my short, stupid life. I needed to believe it. People were clapping and she was spinning spinning spinning. The light off the windows in her hair, the groom, with his arms around her waist pulled her up off the ground into the air. The bridesmaids laughing.

On the happiest day of your life, where do you want to be? I don’t know. Will I know when it gets here? Or maybe this is it for me, I realized: standing outside beneath the cold, autumn sun, squinting next to a tacky, oversized landmark, watching someone else’s bride smile and twirl. So I clapped.

THINGS THINGS THINGS

the northward route — page sixteen HERE

do you care so little for me?

‘Please please please,’ she said, on the other side of the wall, and I pressed my palm flat up against the plaster and tried to feel her heart.

Outside, the world was on fire; I could hear the steady roar of the approaching rain, could see the leaves painted orange and black by the lamp Thomas had left burning on the porch. The rain flattened the cotton plants, far off, as I listened to her short, gasping breaths. Please please please. I held my breath, and then the storm was on us. The water pounded against the roof; the leaves outside lit up brighter, more orange even, sparkling and wet until the lamp went out, and everything went dark.

I lay there and pretended that I was in the next room with her, with her arms around me and her white, gauzy dress ballooning up until it smothered us both, and it was not until morning— when I woke with my hand outstretched and slack against the wall —that I realized that her room had never been next to mine. I peeked in, on my way to breakfast, and the room was empty, the bed neatly made, obviously untouched. I decided that I must have imagined the entire thing.

Not the rain though, or the lamp, or my longing. Just Margaret— please please please —wanting for something that was never quite enough.

LAUREN IF I DO NANO THIS IS WHAT ILL WORK ON BC FEELS 4 U

The drive was already overgrown on the day that I arrived, weeds and roots crawling out across the dirt, and I remember the sky, changing impossibly above me from pale pink to white to bright blue and cloudless, obscured almost entirely from view by the foliage and the rough, winding trunks of all those trees. The house stood at the end of lane, stacked three stories high. The porch jutted out from the front, up three white steps and furnished with two white chairs and a swing; the wind blew at my back and threw the dust up into my hair and rustled through the leaves and never touched that house, which stood there and was untouchable.

What I remember from that morning is not the sun on my face, not the taste of my dry, mediocre breakfast in my mouth, not the weight of my two, small bags, one full and the other nearly empty. It is not my own emptiness, which I never even felt until much later. Back behind the house, obscured at first by its mammoth bulk and by the trees, the plantation stretched on and on for five-hundred acres, and in them the cotton plants blew about and the tiny, far off silhouettes of some twenty men bowed in and out of view. There, someone was singing, in a rich, burgeoning tone, a song with words I did not know. It was not my song to listen to, but how it haunts me still.

I think of it, sometimes, lying awake in the middle of the night, in my quiet, one bedroom home where the walls don’t creak and no one is whispering in the dark. For me, it marked a crossroads, though I didn’t know it then, wouldn’t know it for years. I think of it, and I am climbing those steps again, knocking on the door. I am craning my neck to listen, one more time, and then Margaret pulls the door wide. I step inside, and it is gone.

‘This,’ Margret said shortly. ‘Here. For you.’ And she handed me a small brown box. I took it and opened it, too quickly, when perhaps I should have waited until later when I was alone. This, clearly, was what she has expected, because as I pulled back the lid she turned with a flourish and rustle of skirts and nearly fled to the door, before thinking better of it and whirling around to face me, smiling largely but woodenly.

‘Here,’ she said again. ‘It made me think of you.’

Inside the box was a nondescript gold chain, the kind that a woman might wear if there had been a pendant on the end. I wondered what it said, this gift, and her disclaimer of it, if perhaps I was as worthless as this flimsy thing, or if she simply did not know me at all, the way I thought I knew her, and that begged the question of why she had brought it to me at all.

‘Thank you,’ I said, and stepped away from her toward the door. At the last moment, I turned to face her, a question on my lips. I’ve long since forgotten what it was, as I never asked it. She had resumed her seat in the window and the sunlight, which shone through the glass behind her, blurred and obscured her features until I could hardly see them at all.

My mother was Greek and my father was Irish. I moved to Massachusetts the year I turned twenty-three. I was fired from a newspaper there soon after. It was for a job I came to New Orleans, found myself living in that house, watching my hosts move from room to room in the dead of night like ghosts. It was here that my temporary lodgings became permanent ones; I, always, was fitting myself hopefully into places that I did not belong. Their lives, so infinitely pointless, inspiring me to do all of the dangerous things that rose up from the bowels of that city and sought to snare me and succeeded.

At the time, I thought, foolishly that Margret could save me; that there was anything other than my own self from which I needed rescue. I thought that we were something of the same. I was right, and that turned out to be the problem. I was a blind man, asking a drowning woman to make certain that I did not sink.

thestarkinwinterfell:

the northward route — page fifteen HERE

when you ride into oslo and your keep, and put away your riding clothes for finer silks… how do the days feel?

the northward route — page fifteen HERE

when you ride into oslo and your keep, and put away your riding clothes for finer silks… how do the days feel?

Neither Thomas or myself ever spoke of where we went during the day, though I often wondered if I would pass him somewhere on the streets of the city and if I would recognize him, or if perhaps we had passed each other some thousands of times already without even noticing. Our casual, comfortable silence, when pressed by Margret, inevitably led to her gusty rage and her thin voice rising to an unfathomable octave while she lamented how trapped she was and swore to us that someday she would run and run and never look back. Thomas and I smoked until you could hardly see through the haze, and eventually she would calm down and sink back into her book.

Oddly, or perhaps not, none of the others ever joined us in the parlor after supper, and was often curious whether it was that our company was off-putting and unsatisfactory, or some feature of mine, that I turned out to be the strange one, that it was unacceptable and impossible that I had come into this house and fit myself into its owners lives, effortlessly, desperately, perfectly, without preamble and almost without introduction. I belonged here now, calming Margret in the evenings and waving goodbye to Thomas as I left for work in the mornings and hiding away my secrets so carefully that had secrets been something we spoke about they would have thought me a natural. Perhaps, though, not as good as they.

I remember where she sat when she first said it, tucked as she often was in the window seat, knees drawn up to her chin and nose pressed impatiently against the glass, as if after everything she couldn’t wait to fly again, like after years of not knowing it was possible and after one afternoon of realizing that it was she could never go back to the complacency and boredom to which the rest of us were doomed. She turned to me, and the light behind her eyes was a marvelous flickering fire, and she had never looked so beautiful, and I, who had wanted to kiss her since I the day I first met her, felt that I had never wanted it more than I did in that moment.

She said, ‘Rick, listen. I want to help people. I want to help people like they do in the comics.’ I knew, better than anyone, that she knew nothing about comics, that she had perhaps seen Superman referenced on television once or twice, and nothing more. She wanted to help people. ‘They do it in the comics,’ she said. ‘So why can’t I do it, too?’

I knew then, how it would have to end, how everything would have to eventually fal apart. I wanted to answer her question with the obvious, that they do it in the comics because none of it is real, because they can write it out so that it works however they want it to, and because drawings aren’t people no matter how much love and ink you pour into them. Because none of it is real.

But I watched her peel off one of her sneakers and hold it upside down so that something fell out of it into her palm—a pebble, the irritant that had been bothering her all day—and she crushed it between her thumb and finger into a thin flutter of dust. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say a word.

working on a possibly modern-day helen x paris if helen had super powers that she didn’t know how to deal with