WIP: Jazz
i guess technically this is a finished piece but... ugh i'm just completely not happy with the writing on this one lol. i wanted to script it as a short film but i got too impatient and now i hate the current format... either way, its something.
**EDIT: so I heavily chopped this thing and its so much better. I hope its not too incomprehensible now?
WARNING: contains themes of death, gun violence, unreality, and implied sex.
Middle school. She’d been huddled in a stall hiding from her third period class. Bells rang, hallways emptied, and the bathroom cleared. There she had been, alone with a body. It had come from nowhere or perhaps from herself. Megafauna Mitosis. Slumped, it wedged itself between the toilet and the wall. They had the same botched haircut (late night mistake, never again). The same hands, knees and shoes, but their faces were undeniably different. Where her face was red and puffy, the body’s was pale and slacken. Rigor mortis.
~
Again. High School. He had been a nice enough guy. She had liked him. They made sense together. They laid there, in her dark bedroom, side by side. Yellow lights cast themself on the ceiling, burning against blue shadows. A blanket of something warm and suffocating settled over them. She was completely stiff. Paralyzed by the fear that if she opened her mouth, that warm and suffocating thing would run down her throat and coat her lungs. He lifted himself from the mattress to lean over her. Carefully, haltingly, he kissed her. His hand found her shoulder and caressed the side of her neck.
“Is this okay?” he’d asked.
“Yes,” She’d responded, that warm thing flooding in like slick.
She’d rolled towards him, steeping herself in burning yellow light. A corpse rolled off the bed into the blue. When they finished, he crawled to the edge of the bed. He tugged his shirt back on with shy motions and stood to leave. Dead fingers found themselves crushed beneath his weight, but he only smiled and waved. She buried herself beneath her sheets. It was okay. They made sense together. It was okay.
~
Later. College. Or would have been, if she ever left the house. The basement was nearly full. Wall to wall, cold flesh carpeted the concrete floor. Bodies lay in gradients of age adorned in the same 13 shirts she had been wearing for the last seven years. They tangled together in a decaying heap. Perhaps at some point a smell had developed, but everything seemed sour to her nowadays. The sun peeking through the little glass window was hot enough to melt old skin. She stood in the doorway of her museum. Sweating with effort, she tossed another wax figurine down the stairs.
It slid, punctuating its descent with seven knocks on wood.
~
Stepping outside was becoming a philosophical paradox. In her room existed the singular point of an entire existence. Every atom in her known universe. All things which were burning and cold. The room was tasked with containing both too much and nothing at all, perpetually collapsing on a point of infinite gravity and dead air. A chaotic and empty room with only the constant of a sour smell. But outside in the stiff summer breeze, nothing was real. It was all images burned on the backs of eyelids. Mirages of synapses collapsing in on themself. Objects on a screen.
A father rocked a stroller and cooed at his baby. A woman in yoga pants stood in a patch of grass and raised her arms up to the sun. A dog walker paused as a hummingbird flew by. All of this was lacking. She saw the burning absence of real people to inhabit those lives. Above was the blue sky and below was the shape of her hand. Playful. Finger Guns. Without tremor or hesitation, she lifted it toward the people of the park. Without feeling, she pulled the trigger.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
And nothing, of course. Just imaginary bodies. Melting in the sun. Only playing pretend, she turned her fingers toward her head. She breathed in nothing and exhaled the same. She pulled the trigger. Deadweight ripped itself from her. Vomit of organized matter. Another corpse gazing up at that clear, blue sky. Her weapon had worked to some fractional or hypothetical degree. At least everyone else was luckier. A man, a woman, a dog walker. Too fictional to be affected. Deaths more fake than their simulated lives. Her hand no more than a simple biological machine. Pinch. Grasp. Still, her corpse laid behind her and blood flowed in rivulets from the hole in its head.
She slung the body across her back then set out into the woods. Blue turned to gray until the sky broke and wept openly. She dug a shallow grave. Fingers became increasingly unable to find purchase. Hours. Then, finally. The body laid below her, facing that crying sky. An empty moment passed between herself. Then another. And another. When she finally reached for a fistful of dirt, her fingers passed through the wet earth like it was air.
A willing out of existence. Not as violent as she’d thought it would be. An end to the stroke of luck which had carried her from 13 to 16 and would not last past 20. The soft earth of her perch above the grave— particles more real than herself— gave way beneath her.