brimmed hats

So, there were these kids, right? Four of them. They wore straight brim snapbacks, two black, two white with four color coded brims. From left to right, blue, green, white and black. The white and black brim with their opposite. They're moving at the same pace and lazy strut like they've been doing it forever. They each have a certain way of being, which seems to define the color they sport. They could easily be spotted as "those guys". Though, it could be debated. One's fidgety. One is loose. One Is cross eyed. The other is balding at age 22.

Street lights fill in their dilating pupils. Giving some sense to the darkness, they find feelings in extremities. They have a plan and irrefutable evidence of strange happening, in these rolling hills that hold bodies that occupy this cemetery, engulfed by the lake. Evergreens flaunt their oxygen processes in coordinated sways and bends entrancing the one with green eyes. His skin hardens to bark and he begins to sway and bend into a ballet of instinct. He does not understand or refute the processes. He is breathing. He is learning. He is transforming.

The group merges together for the time until blue brim creates a shell of smoke burning both ends of his rolled tobacco and danced around their bodies, encapsulating time and color. The pale eyed one climbs upon a statue of a woman of concrete. His skin builds a film of muggy sweat and the dust becomes transparent mud. He is forgetting his name and can only see the jist of something, much like nothing. It is like looking at the empty spaces between crisscrossed branches towards a dimming sky. It was a silhouette of a seed, the idea of germination and the shadow of root. Its indeterminable shape mocking him in its stillness. It's now swallowing him as his pupils move onto his whites, burst, then leak, like ink, onto his skin. He reaches for sight with rapid eye movements that are lost in irrelevance and daydreams. His efforts produce faint whimpers to nothing, that are always swallowed by time. It all becomes more and more useless, as the film has taken his eyes.

The group becomes complacent in memories, all four in their early 20s quietly determine they have already experienced too much. Movie theaters. Literature. Wet cement. Ghost stories. A wax dripping candle. An actual belief in eternity. The encapsulating capsules they swallowed whole. Now, being capsules themselves, they are also swallowed by each other. They are eating their own legs. They are cannibals.

The curious one calms the rest with curiosity in his eyes, as if to imply the uselessness of worry and the necessity of wonder. He gauges the distance from two geese and by the judge of their size casts the first and second stone in their direction. "No need to get fancy" One falls short, the other, too long. "Overkill; undercooked" The fowls flee to the lake that encapsulates the dead. Now, more than ever, does he see the nature of life and death and the tangents of life and living. The loss of the geese produces the stilly sight of a swan engulfed in swaying cattails. It bore the form of a question, a mystery, a ghost, a transformation. The image, is a clear sunlit detailed swan and so much more, yet somehow less than before the stones were thrown. He wonders if this was the only an afterthought of circumstance. He then furtherss the thought as serendipity, then as miracle and once more as a plan. He circled through all four, trying to find a beginning or end, until he became tangled and didn't. The four forcefully speak unrepeatable words, etching all the tangents they can, trying to explain the chronology of things. drawing circles around the contradiction the see, but sink in the lake instead. Now, the well that encapsulates them grows higher as if being built from the outside by unseen angels and demons, lids wide open,
"Now, another day to steal my eyes."

"Now cat food is dog s**t."
"Now the birds won't sing."
"Now wet cement is dry."
"Now our ghosts will be our names."
 
And one day, much like this day, the quiet one felt this feeling. He was slipping away, soundlessly into his mind. Gray became him and he grew a television set in his brain and focused on his own personal static. The electricity keeping him able to actually be anything didn't keep him entertained, but he learned to live with himself. Then the lightning started. He remembered it was supposed to rain at a certain time as he checks his wrist watch for conformation, though when he looks, he noticed his reflection in the glass of the watch instead. As he attempts to adjust his eyes to put the focus on the hands, he can't. Fear strikes him as he sees himself panic. Raindrops tack on to the glass of the watches face, further distorting and furthering his image of himself. He must close his eyes, its all too much. He loses his sight and hears the ticks of his watch. Booming through his bones. But wait...is it thunder? No wait, its the watch. He cannot tell the difference. Eyes still closed the pulses of seconds take form as black and white strobes. The strobes take shape as a wall clock ticking away minutes, hours, days and lives. Then he knows. Its his heart. His pulse, he knows, is guiding his watch. the watch is shaking hands with the pulse in his wrist. He feels them happening together. He lifts his hat from his head, now drenched in sweat. He loosely brushes his scalp. He felt he was the lake and is thinking of jellyfish.
He remembers a dream of having a terribly strong feeling to burp, but just couldn't no matter how hard he tried. Until finally, he began to push it out, but it was the strangest thing. The amount of force it took was similar to blowing up a balloon, and took the exact amount of the air he had in his lungs. He pushed until a transparent thing of an impossible color comes expanding out of his mouth until it became apparent as a jellyfish, tentacles and all. When they slipped out at the end he felt them in their absence as they passed through his body like a hologram. He watched it float away as if it were underwater. As if he were.

He wished down the well of himself, in reversed speech, setting his string theories to the depths of his personal void, waiting for vibrations with a hook. He wonders if there is a catch. His ribcage takes shape as hammock, his skin as sandy shores. He is now lying in white rope swaying, breathing with the wind. His skeleton is external now. He is becoming more aware of the insects around him, the shellfish inside his body.

He thought about spiders and how they don't get caught in their own webs.

He opens his eyes and sees himself lying on the ground, as a hologram on the grass, as if it were water. He sets his eyes on the sky and watches his body take shape in the clouds as they move like he does, in all shades of blues, whites and grays, The fluffy limbs are folding themselves into a shape closer to himself and closer each time. They are engraving details of his veins and scars. And as soon as the moment of perfect replication, he is gone He looks at his hands and only sees the silhouettes of them. He is void of actions. He embodies all the things he has never done. He doesn't even flinch.
He knows he is his shadow.
And he is thinning; they all are, becoming transparent to the scenes already painted behind them.

Reviews

[roarke]

As I read this, it sounded to me revelations from and LSD trip. Where the minute is hyper-sensitized and time expands to near stopping. This is more a prose piece than a strict short story. If more a short story, I'd leave out the beginning and references to the four hat wearers, it gets lost in the body of the main narrative.

As for the imagery, the concept, the flow of consciousness, this speaks volumes. Where does it go? Where everything else goes, right here. I see this write as illustrating the right here, right now and feeling it, experiencing it as an immortal perception. Is there a beginning/middle/end? I don't know, I don't know if it needs that kind of structure, that's why I don't read this as a "short story".

I like how you've written with less ambiguity and started defining your impressions by something other than using the word "it".

This is a huge write. Make sure you're completely strapped in before reading.

[Shmoke-Sifted Heftlander]

somehow i knew to read this first