Tag: writing

excerpt from “The Balance”

She flicked the corner of the bright yellow metro card against her thigh.

Click.

Click.

The sound assured her that the card was still there in her palm, as real and tangible as the battered Retro 1’s on her feet and the overstuffed backpack slung across her uneven shoulders.

As long as the card was in her hand then she knew it was real. And if the card was real, then her plans were as well. It was her favorite type of proof — a syllogism; simple but impenetrable. She’d always found comfort in logic. It was her business, after all.

An LED screen spanned the entirety of one of the bus stop walls, cycling through an endless loop of advertisements that framed her face like a digital stage light. The red hues of a bourbon promo synthesized the illusion of blush in her pale complexion. Seize life by the glass with Buckshot Bourbon.

The boozy ad faded into a black screen that hung there for a brief, quiet moment; an electronic exhale that she wished she could stretch until her bus arrived to spirit her away.

The public safety warning that followed the whiskey ad cast a pale white halo over her silhouette. Be mindful of your surroundings, the sign warned her in bold white text against a black slab backdrop. If you see something, say something.

Like a tick, she subconsciously complied, glancing up from her MetroCard and lazily scanning her surroundings. She let her eyes come to rest on nothing in particular until the sensory barrage of Delancey street slipped out of focus, regressing into its most elemental forms: shapes, colors — blurs of movement smearing across her plane of vision. She felt safe and detached as the world recessed away from her and she submerged deeper into her own subconscious, playing the different scenarios of what she had to next in her head.

The pulse of a subwoofer thumped her chest as a black SUV passed by and her mind was dragged reluctantly back into the present.

— Jesus, I’m fucking tired, she said outloud to no one in particular but still wondered if anyone’d heard.

Excerpts from “Forty Days”

A year, a whole fucking year. Felt like a decade, but at the same time it felt like the months had all spontaneously combusted, like it was just yesterday that I’d watched Sam’s eyes close. Grey eyes. Brown hair, just like mine. Body diminished into something less than a body. Hollow, weightless, like a bird’s. I could imagine the wind from an open window, he’d asked us to open the window, and I could see the breeze carrying him in its hands, lifting him up, suspending him in motion. I’d wished it would. The wind had my permission to lift my brother from his bed at Mount Sinai, hospital gown and all, and fly him through the window and into the thick orange sky.

***

All the Bedloe’s have some kind of tick. Mine were more sensory – rubbing my face, running my hands through my hair, biting my inner cheek. Adderall makes the ticks come to the surface more, but it also gets me out of bed and helps me sort through the incongruent thoughts, loading them all like small lead pellets into a single shotgun shell. Regulates the headiness of my head. Makes me forget the tiredness in my bones, keeps my boots on my feet, my shirt on my chest, everything in its order, place, fitting the mold I have to fit in order to be a cell in this sea-dwelling organism, Manhattan, to live in my shoe box with its water stains, to take Shay out to dinner now and then, to keep the freezer stocked with middle-tier gin and limes in the fridge and splurge on the $4 organic, mocha, cold-brew, fair-trade, cruelty-free, half-caff, sugar-free, caramel swirl, micro-brewed, iced coffee.