By E.H. (as a guest writer)
It is a windless night. Clouds persuade the stars to dim their shine. You pay no attention to the outside save for these celestial affairs, for in less than one hour, you are scheduled to meet your date. What accessory do you choose as a good luck charm?
c. Hair spray will do. You encourage volume into your tresses―fingers scrunched into the quick pinch.
d. A satin tie. The print swims against your hands as you tighten its body against your raised neck.
-----
At the restaurant, you both sit with little conversation done. The balloons wilt; your hands swelter; a bell’s tinny jilt hangs the air. Your eyes move to measure how tall your date is. Their body heightens, piercing through the restaurant’s roof, parting into a dusky continuum. Soon, they break past the night sky, the atmosphere, the sound barrier, then the sepia-divided hollows of space. They tear against reality’s fabric, which allows your date’s particular existence, but leaves no space for those mortal below. Your vision joins your date’s ascension, abandoning physicality, smearing past color and light’s worn tandem; there is only the sound of popping balloons.
☞ FIN
Interested in another date? Return to the beginning!
-----
Your date arrives a few minutes later than agreed, but you graciously accept their tardiness. For some reason, the direct memory of your date’s face revolves in constant change. Their eyes are either as wide as freshly minted coins or as narrow as rosemary sprigs. Their lips defy definition: for what is more noteworthy than their call? One cheek permits gravity’s influence; the other protests.
You both partake in a leisurely stroll around the park. There is the usual fare: benches of wooden split backs, willows exhausted by the anticipation of their weight, a lake serving as your reflections’ respite. Things are proceeding as they should until they don’t―a wayward gander bites your knee and snips it in half.
The pain obscures everything. You don’t recall falling yet now you’re on the ground, hands flailing against what is left of your torn knee. Your date spits silk and wounds it around you. They continue in their spinning, wrapping your body like an uneven spindle. A sting ruptures your back then recedes. You perceive nothing. The darkness ahead is not color’s lacking but absence itself.
☞ FIN
Interested in another date? Return to the beginning!
-----
You leave your home for a street corner by the neighborhood deli and liquor store. A breeze picks up, skirting across your knees. One car rumbles by then leaves you in the hazy bask of a stuttering streetlight. Sweat forms; you wipe one hand against your jacket. What is in your other hand?
c. A bouquet. Daffodils in mid-chirp, marigold rounds, bristling black-eyed susans, a sprig of holly.
d. A set of balloons. Their aluminum print crinkles from the pressure of the air and your expectations.
-----
Glass shatters and wood splinters―there is a roar, its churn and break, the scale of damage revealed once you uncurl yourself from the floor. A meteorite has crashed into your room; you are unharmed though your window, steam-wreathed and jarred open, is not. Later, scientists discover a rare mineral in the blistered stone. You receive a bounty of cash, but after a series of indulgences and hastily made investments, the money runs thin. There is just enough to pay your taxes―tis the season.
☞ FIN
Interested in another date? Return to the beginning!
-----
After dinner, you and your date order dessert. Your plates have been exchanged for a clean set: sterling cutlery, persimmon leaves encrusted by porcelain, a pregnant wine glass. Infused in the air is the scent of wax and rubbing alcohol. A waiter sets a pair of gloves on your plate. You instinctively put them on as your date lays themselves on the table.
They coax their shirt open, exposing their chest, skin receding like a flower’s petal-tuck, organs brought to reveal. Nothing raises your concern but that lush, beating heart, pale ridges of hardened muscle seizing along its chambers. The ridges shift and open―eyes of fallow cornea, pupils constricted to a tight-lipped gasp, veins burdened blue.
The heart blinks wearily and you no longer can afford mercy.
☞ FIN
Interested in another date? Return to the beginning!
-----
As pre-arranged, you stand at the lonesome gates of the neighborhood park. Nothing contains the park’s environs to itself: wild grass overstays its welcome along the sidewalk, dandelions mutiny against concrete’s stiff hold, ivy already declaring the brick wall border as its host. The asphalt reeks of the day’s sweltering heat. A fleet of motorcycles snarl past your figure, and two pill bugs along the street’s edge scramble for the curb’s safety.
What are you most worried about now?
-----
A stiffness overcomes your neck. You have become unable to move. From the sky descends a hand. It's larger than a blue whale, skin periwinkle, red-burnished stars present as moles. The giant hand moves past your vision, nudging forward a battered sedan. In its driver’s seat is another stiff-person. They sit in silence more proverbial than natural, hunched over the wheel, knuckle bone stretched against skin at all the right angles.
Pivoting behind you, the giant hand grasps your torso gently. Its nails glimmer like silver-festooned granite. A star-mole twirls in its spot. You are placed in the passenger’s seat, facing forward. The giant hand’s pressure upon your body retreats. You register none of movement’s kinetic energy, but the lines delineating the road shifts, disappearing beneath your eye’s rim.
☞ FIN
Interested in another date? Return to the beginning!
-----
A weight dips your head. You look up, eyes meeting not the line of store windows glistening of evening damp, but a roiling pasture of rooted laburnum. Its vine trails in reverse―cusping the opal toe of your boots, saddling stunt-limbed trees together, bowing before the starlight-vista above. Beyond the rim of your straw hat, your date motions at the tide of fletched yellow then at your hand.
You hold a sickle. You have never held a sickle in your life, nor appraised one, but you are familiar with its movement. And even if in your previous existence you have used a sickle, a willful ignorance capsizes your once predisposed knowledge. It is a knowing which supersedes your control, evading you like thunder’s gallop from its cry, only evident in wake and not body.
Reaching down, you twist a head of laburnum until its stem tenses and begin the harvest.
☞ FIN
Interested in another date? Return to the beginning!
-----
You, in fact, did not turn off the stove before you left the house. A different quandary renders this problem irrelevant. Bursting forth from the earth’s bellows is your date. The chasm launches spittles of fire throughout the vicinity, tempering flames onto trees and the unfortunately parked car. Burgundy outlines of bow-bodied hounds chase the bidding of open air, only to be held back by onyx leashes. A six-headed centipede pries its head forward and uses its powerful mandibles to clear a path between you two.
There is no time to fuss and deliberate. You grab your date by the hand and flee the scene immediately. Neither of you have any expectation for your next destination, obeying the street corners which goad both of you on. Rescheduling can wait―insurance does not.
☞ FIN
Interested in another date? Return to the beginning!
-----
The local botanical garden is sparse of a crowd. Simply put, the flora has eaten everyone up. You and your date have no fear of this. As long as you are not willing, no harm shall come, or so the sign outside says.
Among the serpentine pitcher plants and gap-toothed Venus flytraps is a glass walkway. Dirt, time, and the footsteps of many have wilted its transparent sheen to a musty brown. You both traverse this walkway―your date gestures at the sundews. Nestled in their discus leaves are a set of necro-memorabilia: a pair of half-digested sunglasses, the frayed edge of a turned-up collar, one pearling-tooth.
The walkway juts into a corner platform; you skip over the steps leading into its center. You extend a hand to your date and they accept it, following you down. Below is the manifest of a rafflesia, spiked core preened by flies, round petals fleeced in pink, stitch-like welts. Compared to its carnivorous kin, the rafflesia remains indifferent, neither acknowledging, approving, nor criticizing the carnage it has witnessed.
Deep within, you know there is an inherent wrong to this, but its colossus is one you cannot confront so easily. After a moment of chasing your dopple-shadows on the dirty glass, you and your date leave the rafflesia. It accepts your silence and all is right in the world’s stink.
☞ FIN
Interested in another date? Return to the beginning!
Comments