Zenith

...and the world's just too damn grey.

1.

 

The teacup is spattered with broken roses, a thorn poking out of the chip in its shoulder. My mother raises it to her chapped lips and glances down at the murky liquid inside. Her thoughts are concealed behind Germanium irises, and I wonder if I am in them.

 

 

2.

 

Call-Me-Steve from the flat below is walking. I know this because I see him. I know this because I am spying - a hobby I loved when I was younger and more colourful. My personality has been stunted and blunted, dragged through a millennia and dropped into one I am now quite familiar with. I would have liked to be smiling during the process, but the world’s a little grey.

 

 

3.

 

Footsteps creak in the hallway, and the wilting lampshade cradles a flickering light. A glimpse of a slender form catches ignorant eyes and the metallic noise of a zipper being done up slowly is the one thing that stays sowed into my brain. The noise of footsteps slowly decrease as they make their way downstairs. When the world is spinning, it’s hard to get off.

 

 

4.

 

Distantly, I hear laughter. It pierces my ears and is snap-shotted at its most ugly, contorted angle. My eyes cringe, lips unravelling, and I look out the window again. The sky is scarred with neon streaks of orange and dianthus pink, while the sun lowers, mourning for the stars that She never got to meet.

 

 

5.

 

I dreamed of a house once. A mock-Tudor house with a dark, slanted roof and three floors. I dreamed of stepping inside, scraping the dirt off my old trainers and sitting down at a mahogany table where I’d say Grace - losing my religion? - and clasp hands with two people with friendly faces and shallow souls. Chrysanthemums lined the front garden, and the curtains were drawn.

Author's Note

This isn't an actual story, just a one-shot, an experimental piece of writing that will not be continued but that I hope to have some feedback on.

Reviews

[spence]

I think you have come up with a very unique style with this. it reads something like prose poetry that offers snapshots into arbitrary existance and instances. Some of the aliteration and rhyming are simply sublime and the descriptions were skillfully executed in both the literal and abstract sense.
Each section is wonderfully ambiguous and the first person viewpoint adds to the admonished sense of perspective that the entire write gives to the reader. Could this be a series of flashbacks from a single life, or the random combination of many? I was asking myself on first impressions.
However, by the third read my mind had to come to a definitive conclusion as to the underlying 'singularity' of this and so decided that this was a series of causal factors that left a single protagonist's world in perpetual cloudy grey.
I envisaged a child vying for their mothers attention, (wondering if they were in those irises) and then seeking this affection elsewhere as they got older, (Call-Me-Steve), and that this led to an unfortunate traumatic occurence of a sexual nature that has effected every aspect of the protagonists life since, (that is what I took from the whole of the third section). The fourth part describes, to me, the newer perspective through eyes that have had their hopeful, innocent outlook cruelly torn away- the fifth of shattered dreams and those shallow souls that had broken those imaginings.
I think this is a very intriguing and engaging piece of writing that is totally unique, profoundly emotive and wonderfully well told. The only thing that didn't seem clear to me was the flower references- I can't decide between my image of the mother owning a floralists and/or being obsessed with distractions of beauty and ignoring the child, or whether these are symbollic of the way that the petals of innocence fall away.
This is mildly breathtaking and becomes more powerful with each read, excellent work, take care, spence

[LynLee]

i like how you did the writing.......in the different sections it makes writing easier......... i very much like this writing! i didn't understand what it was exactly telling though

[loverly9316]

i've never read writing like this . .. . i like it