they write on me with their cocks and their tongues, with their dirty fingernails digging into my hair. harry knows, harry says he knows and he looks at me like i’m a piece of shit but he doesn’t know anything. he smirks like he knows when he knows nothing of it, he knows nothing about it but he tries, goddamn how he tries to look right through me. and my cunt answers to him like he’s calling it to his fucking fingers, like all he has to to do is snap those coarse fingers of his and it should just fucking jump to his whim. i push him onto the bed because he doesn’t fucking know like all the rest but he’ll do for now, he’ll do because he fucking tries. even when he gets it all wrong, his fingers get it right.
Category Archives: words
project snowflake: notes
do any of them know? does someone need to know? should there be a confidante? no. no confidante. although the idea is appealing, someone to interject some (version of the) truth of amanda, possibly bring in some history, i.e. the sumerian king and his punishment of bashing the offending woman’s teeth out with a tablet of clay.
harry knows, or suspects. doesn’t care? accepts? another twist. no, no. too many.
points to hit-
1. meeting each husband
2. her death
3. each husband meeting the other
4. each husband identifying the body
5. scenes from her childhood
6. on the set of first movie
7. premiere of first movie at festival (?)
not necessarily in that order, nor conclusive
from Moviemaker’s Master Class by Laurent Tirard, the section on John Boorman, “Directing is really about writing, and all serious directors write.”
voices, voices everywhere and overrun her, they write their stories on her and she eventually frames, puts them in the picture. they write and talk about her, all over her, their words on her skin, they skin her alive, and she puts them in the frame, mocks them, seduces them, uses them, discards them, over and over, they talk and she gets them in the shot, shoots them all down, scripts them until they no longer see themselves, stupid and blind with their talking, with their pointing, their figuring of her, as if they could figure her out and she’s got them all splashed across the screen, she’s got them in 35mm.
write about him
write about the cold and wet, the chill and the unshakable feeling you’ve been here before you’ve grown tired of it. write about the sound of this voice as it gurgles up what you so desperately want to hear but cannot make sense of. write about the feel of his limbs, the flap of skin as it wraps around the bone as you grab hold of him before he goes. the soft feeling of new leather that’s been beaten over rocks and casino tables and the touch of women who forgot his name. write about the few strands of hair stuck to his skull and impossible to clean. everything begins with a promise he breaks but ends with you keeping it.
project snowflake: 3. storylines: amanda
amanda is an aspiring independent filmmaker from spokane, washington who was kicked out of her home when she turned eighteen. her father left her when she was relatively young but her mother soon remarried a rancher. the rancher was a good man, strict and fair, but let her mother have the most say in her upbringing.
the little one chokes
the little starts to cough that turns into a choke. playing poker i am frozen looking for the color of her face. someone says, do the heimlich and i get cross the room looking for color and see a face full of panic. i wrap behind her and tilt her forward, two fingers just below her sternum and wonder if the placement is right but i push anyway. once, twice, i don’t see anything come out but she starts to cry. can’t cry without air, she starts to cry and i am relieved. i pick her up and hold her tight and she bawls that she can’t breathe. i laugh a nervous tension and whisper in her ear, if you couldn’t breathe, you wouldn’t be able to tell me.
merry x-mas
merry christmas to my extended family, scattered across the city, without collared button down shirts, without slacks, without fine stockings, without a home to call their own. merry christmas to the fools and the war mongers, the drunks and the diseased, the addicts and the lost. merry christmas to the childless couples and the children without love, to the stray dogs sniffing through dumpsters, to the whores huddled together over a bottle of wine. merry christmas to the abused whose bones never seem to mend right and the thieves who can never seem to have enough. merry christmas to all the wretched, all those without hope, to those that are mired in despair, to those that remain sleepless, to all of us that have the faintest memory of dreaming and what any of it means.
merry christmas
presents torn open and mouth agape, the little one says, over and over, i wanted this, i wanted this. and she goes through the pile, a wasteland of wrapping paper. my sister-in-law announces her pregnancy, eyes welling up, the family grows. outside my brother-in-law says, it’s nice today but i wish there was snow. and i wouldn’t have minded a snow storm either, something to cover up the lawn, the sidewalk, the limbs of trees, one big push before the new year and have winter move on its way.
randomness
somewhere there’s a hotel of santa’s imported from around the country belligerent & snapping towels at each other.
there’s a woman utterly convinced that the priest & tv crew of a paranormal-based reality show are exorcising her grandmother.
my cousin, who is thirty five and divorced takes it upon himself to give his two younger cousins, both sixteen, “the talk” about boys and girls.
and why is it every year feels less and less like christmas?
beneath my station
a house full of children yelling like banshees while adults mill about in their clicks. the hosts meander from site to site, checking up, filling glasses, offering cigars. santa gently handles each child on his lap while people of a better class than mine snap photos of them little realizing that jolly old nick has a full sleeve of tattoos down each arm. but he shows incredible kindness with my son who sleeps in his arm as if he was the real thing. we sit on the patio and talk of the politics of the world and the economics of our children’s future. i say little but am filled with anxiety. i ask him, your father owned a business, you are a partner in a law firm, what do you hope for your daughters? he says, i want them to find out what they like and get good at it and we’ll be well off enough that hopefully the money will come one way or the other. i think of my daughter’s fine hand and her penchant for photography and how she rambles prose that sounds almost right and i think of all the wrong turns i’ve made that the other is not an option for her.
snowflake project: 3.storylines: harry
amanda met harry at an atm machine he was fixing while she waited to withdraw some cash, a little over year after she had married tom. he is, on the surface, a brute but with a self deprecating sense of humor. well read and seemingly knowledgeable, they both felt easy and also uneasy with each other. harry ultimately is an odd mixture of anger and kindness, coldly analytical but also impulsive. for the most part he cannot be reasoned with, resolute in his opinions and even more so if argued with or contested.
out of the three, amanda had the most chemistry with him although neither of them could specifically point out as to why. his job confused her, it seemed out of place for him, particularly when he often wrote pieces that had, as amanda would say, “an attention to mundane details that leave you haunted.” she would often trawl through them for material, never finding anything suitable for her films. he had no interest in publishing, claiming it was just something he did to pass the time, just something he felt compelled to do.
he often chided amanda for “not thinking things through” which she thought ridiculous considering the plethora of details involved in filmmaking (cinematography, sound, editing,) that harry, as technically minded as he was, barely had a grasp on. for harry i’m debating whether or not to shoot his story through with straight minimalist prose (i.e. carver, a little beckett-but not too much), poetic/elliptical prose (i.e. “without the inherent sickness of blanchot” -don byrd) or something along the lines of a technical manual (since he is an atm technician); it depends how far out there i want to be.