One pattern slips inside another. Skittish and slippery. A beauty and illusion in this dance which confuses and beckons the eye with perfect geometry and imperfect chaos. Between the cracks, the lines, the spirals, the divine nonsense. That is where we are. Where we walk hand in hand while leaves scatter on the ground and wires cross the sky and flowers swallow bees inside seductive pollen dreams. We lie within the lyrics of Something Changed, the sultry tones of Jarvis confining us to a metafiction future that can never quite be. We are the lies I tell myself when I’m ready to give up. We are the hope that sits quietly on a darkened stool, waiting for its moment in the spotlight. It will crack jokes one after the other until the audience is rolling in the aisles, delirious with love and life and all those things which you and I will have once we step beyond this pattern, once we slip through time, once we spiral into chaos… Once the pattern finally makes sense.
Tag Archives: stream of consciousness
Eyes Open to the Elements
Snatches of conversation as we fade in and out of conciousness, echoes of San Soleil. The cinematic touches the everyday. Fiction and fact are just library tags, they don’t separate the fake from the real. The sleepy heat draws slumber compared to the wide awake cold outside. Eyes open to the elements – the sleet, the fog, the sheet rain quivering like flying arrows in the light of a solitary street lamp. We are and we aren’t there now. A whisper in the shadows, slipping effortlessly away from outstretched fingers tips. The footfall of a fox at dawn. The intangible belongs to the dreamer snoozing against a black window pane. The pages of a book are audibly turned and we know from the pause a new chapter has begun. A new era is about to write itself. If we pause too long to dwell on what we leave behind, we’ll lose confidence to make the leap into the unknown. Every story starts with transition, an equilibrium unbalanced, scrambling off the cliff into chaos. The train pauses at the station. Someone steps off and checks the sky. We wait. The engine rumbles back into action and we set off again. Onward.
© Kirsty Fox 2015
All we never wanted
In the spiral of chaos there is nothing but tears and love and absolutes. Tenderness and doom enraptured in a dance. You know when you’re really crying because your throat hurts. It aches with cries you’ve never sobbed and screams you’ve never howled. It aches with every word you were never brave enough to say. There is nothing beyond the great spiral and nothing before it. It tunnels in on itself while growing ever greater. An all-consuming force that is at turns reassuring and terrifying. The spiral of chaos has no fate, no ultimate destination. It doesn’t promise that the right thing will happen at the right time. It promises that something will happen. You will happen to someone and they will happen to you. That bones will crack and splinter and spray. That lessons will be learned and unlearned at the bottom of a wet mountainside. We will be cowed by the spiral for she is all. All we ever wanted and all we never wanted. A phonecall. A conversation. A thoroughly well-time hug.
© Kirsty Fox 2015
Ghost Ship
The ship creaks beneath my feet, a loud aching creak like the bones of an old whale turning in his watery sleep. We drift on the dark ocean, yet it is the sea which seems to move only while we stay still. A solid steady weight afloat on fluid dreams and an imagination drawn to whirlpools. Spiralling down to an ocean bed of starfish and sea horses and beautiful ugly incredible things that man has never seen.
The ship drifts towards the whirlpool or rather the whirlpool drifts towards a still ship. A lonely creaking entity weighed down with history. War, fishing, rum, piracy – all in a day’s work. Claustrophobia and agoraphobia all at once. How do you survive in this tiny place amid so much space? How do you tell the stars from the sea? The clouds from the white wash? Are we moving or is the world moving us? Will it suck us down spinning with bubbles and deceptive light. Down into a purgatory not unlike the one we’ve left…
© Kirsty Fox 2015
Posted in Flash Fiction/Snap Shot Prose
Tagged dreams, fiction, flash fiction, ghost ship, stream of consciousness