My body is fast and it is strong and it is as much my own as it is at any other time. It moves and shifts with every passing moment, borne by the currents towards the future - always rushing and never quite reaching. To live in the world is untimely, but live we do. I am at home in myself. Home can change and homes can change; so can I. I am never still, never done with what I can become. I become endlessly, alongside everyone I know and have known. It brings joy as well as sorrow. It brings us forward; the only way we can hope to go. My friend twists her long hunting arm, and in a moment, she is the mimic of a bird, who lives in the open space we seldom go, whose beak dips into our upper limits from time to time. I whirl my limbs, and join her in the shape. Another friend curls himself up to imitate a mine, shaking as it prepares to go off. My duck-friend becomes a wheel-friend, and I become a bigger bird: a swan with arching neck and paddling feet, about to sing as the mine
they took my body from the river, thought that I was someone else. water wore away my edges, chipped my nose to sludge. they tried to mold a new one, cast my bones into fine gold. the washers knew it wouldn’t work. told them to cut their losses. they cast it in. smoke rose in plumes. the air stank of kelp. It was my body. It was the end. ⁂ When I breached the wards, I knew that was it. My heart skipped a beat, and then another. I counted the subdivisions. I reached out, and clasped the right hand. She would sink into the black earth with me, fall beneath the waves that she had called. What do a marriage and a plan seventeen years in the making have in common? They only take one traitor to end. ⁂ Nothing gets beneath your skin like the cooperation of cicadas. It starts slow, a single voice. It builds up into something unbearable, every time. “The Mississippi jumps her banks tomorrow,” my lover whispers. “It’s all been settled. I’ll hold the wards down. Ricky will cast.” “I
Bartenders Don't Have Client Confidentiality by Mademise, literature
Literature
Bartenders Don't Have Client Confidentiality
Echo suspects she shouldn’t be talking about her job this much on a first date, but in her defence, Kim did ask her what she does. “We actually had Jesus herself in the bar last night,” she says as she pleats the corner of her napkin with her freshly trimmed nails. “She’s a real firecracker—ordered a Red Herring, and when it didn’t lead anywhere, she turned it into wine. She turned almost all the drinks into wine, actually, but I hear it’s an occupational hazard.” “Wow,” Kim says, looking down at her own neatly buffed talons. “Only almost all?” “Well, some of the drinks were wine to start with,” Echo explains. “Isn’t that a little old-fashioned?” Kim asks, looking up now. One of her eyes is yellow, and the other blue. She reminds Echo of a skittish cat that she would very much like to scoop up into her arms and cuddle. “Dionysus is a regular, obviously, since she hosts the drag nights and all that, so we always have a few barrels on hand. She actually dances on them every now and
“Hi May-Auntie,” says the middle-schooler with an eyepatch as they walk into the laundromat. Their long, shiny black hair is swinging in a thick plait, and their skin, a few shades lighter, is chapped in the dry winter weather. “Kiran-uncle sends his regards. Hey, what is making all that noise in the driers?”
The woman sitting with a stack of magazines looks up and smiles. “Demons, man-eating scorpions, the usual. I’m experimenting with a new sea slug puree, it’s a bit of a risk but I’m hoping it will work,” she explains, her accent even and clipped where her younger relative’s is r
My bangles shake against
bare skin.
The men before me
leer. Retired
saviors of something that
was good once.
No longer.
Pontificating,
taking pride
in their philosophy.
Amorphous as
jellyfish.
Searching for answers
in my eyes and their
endless knowledge.
Finding none.
I am Phryne,
savior
of every man who finds his stability
has capsized.
We meet in an exam hall on the day of a re-take. It is the first time since age six that I have failed a standardized test, and my only excuse was that I fell asleep halfway through the actual exam. She's here because she wrote her essay in the wrong language.
When we file out and I am pondering all the ways I potentially messed up this paper whilst admiring her ankles, she turns to me and tells me, with a certain amount of pride, that she remembered to write from left to right. I blink at her and ask why that is an accomplishment. She frowns and turns away.
We see each other again in a liquor store. She's perched on a high, backless chair