your life being
a finite instance within
an infinite circle
How long can the ouroboros devour itself?
before it chokes and dies
being a divine snake
the choke is never-ending
within immortality it learns repetition
inescapable
it watches in horror
for it can know no end
beyond twisting tighter
and letting the jaw unhinge
to eat more
and more
of its own immortal flesh
for why would we want for nirvana
when the suffering that is life
is so delicious
(I am pretty good on word count this week, so how about a stupid haiku?)
oh! oh no! my drink
i have over-cherried it
cloying, sickly sweet
I turned 40 last year. I never really felt old at 30, although it was the age that most young people resented approaching, viewing it as “old.” It helped to some degree that my mom had me in her late 30s. I was still a kid when she hit 50, and that was the decade she spent my teen years in. So it was 50 that I viewed as old when I was a kid, and 30 didn’t really bother me at all. In fact, I quite enjoyed my 30s. I didn’t feel rushed or left behind. 30 still seemed quite comfortably capable of brewing and turning into something.
I’m starting to feel a little old at 40 – or at least, too old for things to begin. It feels like I should be in a stage of life where what I have has already been built firm under my feet and certain. In truth, I’ve made very few big strides in my life up until now. It seems I’ve spent the past two decades coasting, and I’m not certain how much will actually change in the next decade, because time seems to slip by, faster now, uncontrollable grains of sand running their course. It seems just as likely that the following decades can be full of the same empty hope as the previous decades.
When you’re young, you think about being the youngest to accomplish a thing. And then you hear about someone young (or your age) who did the thing, and you think you’ll be just on their heals (Eragon released when I was a teenager). And then you think you’re accomplishing things at a normal rate, other people have done the thing by your age. And then you reach an age where you reassure yourself with the tales of people that didn’t accomplish the thing until later in life (Tolkien didn’t write LoTR until he was in his 40s!). I seem to be hitting that age now. Reminding myself that things can still be done.
So I sometimes morosely feel like 40 is old. But there is also a part of me that feels like it’s not quite yet. Especially when I contemplate it from another angle. How much more life would I have to live to reach 100? 60 more years. That’s an entire life! It’s more than I’ve lived to date. My mom had me at 38, and my brother at 40, and she has been around to watch us grow into adults. There is yet a full life to live, even if I only build it starting today.
And if I build it today… 60 years down the line, when I’m 100, what has it become?
There could still be an entire life in that time. A full life.
I wonder what you do with it?
(although writing a letter to your 100 year old self seems silly, most of us won’t live that long, could get hit by a car tomorrow, which is usually my go to example but maybe a bit dark considering my boyfriend got hit by a car last year. he’s fine though.)
(I didn’t really know how to end this so it’s a total cop out.)
Jennifer decided to record the next night’s message as well to see if it remained the same or gave more details. Instead, only one new word flashed over and over again: HELP.
Did her neighbor need help in some way? Or was something wrong with Jason? She still felt that it had to be him, but couldn’t make sense of why he would be asking for help. Confused, she decided to grab a Ouija board that afternoon. It was nothing fancy, just the colorful board game version sold for kids. She felt nervous as she unpacked it. The rules usually said to not play alone, but she didn’t want to try to explain her insane reasoning to anyone else yet. Still, she decided to go all out in setting the mood. She lit a few candles and sat them nearby and dimmed the lights. She sat with her fingers resting softly on the placard and after clearing her throat, nervously said, “Is it you, Jason? What do you need help with?”
She sat perfectly still. The seconds dragged into minutes, making her feel sillier as they multiplied. The house was very quiet, the only sound the ticking of the wall clock and the drip of her bathroom faucet. “I need more information. I need to know what you need help with,” she tried again.
After several more moments she sighed and stood up. This was pointless and childish. She felt tears burn at the edge of her eyes, and she felt surprised at how emotional this was making her. A part of her had truly hoped she could hear from Jason again. She decided to go to the bathroom to splash some cold water on her face. As she turned, perhaps a little too quickly in her strangely emotional disappointment, the board flipped onto the floor and the candle toppled onto it, the wax crackling in the flame as the board threatened to catch on fire.
Cursing, Jennifer quickly patted out the flames, ignoring the searing pain of the hot wax on her fingers. Now more angry than sad, she tossed the lot into the trash.
That night she had trouble sleeping again. As she tossed and turned, half between dreamfulness and waking, she was convinced she could hear a soft knocking from somewhere in the house. She couldn’t tell if it was real or a dream. If it was morse code, it was too quiet and muffled to translate for her. She could hear Jason’s voice as well, calling out for her, and screaming. This, she knew, had to be a dream. Jason had died years ago, right after they had started college. They had been young and stupid and drunk and hanging with friends. They had decided to drive out (to what? Jennifer couldn’t remember. Some stupid local legend spot, like crybaby bridge or a haunted forest). And they had crashed. Jennifer could remember the blood rushing to her head as she was still strapped into her seat, her ears ringing. She could hear someone crying, and someone else screaming. And she could feel Jason tapping on her shoulder in morse code: please be okay please I love you I love you I love you.
She had wondered why he wasn’t speaking but when she turned she could see the way his neck was crushed, the blood spread across his face and soaked into his shirt, the glazed look in his eyes as the life faded from them, the slowing tap of his fingers as he stilled.
The next morning she reviewed the tapes again, wondering if perhaps she was reading a pattern into something that wasn’t real. The nightmares and memories had left her feeling unsettled and exhausted. But now there was a whole sentence repeating again and again: PLEASE COME HELP ME!
Jennifer marched across the street and knocked on her neighbor’s door. She wasn’t sure what she thought – she was halfway between wanting to explain that she thought the older woman was in danger, and accusing the woman of having set up this awful prank in the first place. As she went to pound on the door, she realized it wasn’t fully latched closed.
Pausing, she knocked, not as hard as she had originally intended. Despite the softer knock, the door creaked open. “Hello?” Jennifer called. She started to wonder if the woman was in danger, perhaps collapsed in one of her rooms. She didn’t seem old enough to hurt herself from the fall, but maybe she had a heart attack or something else? Jennifer pushed the door open and walked in. She decided to take a quick perusal of each room and then show herself out, just to make sure things were all right.
The house was quiet, and no one answered. As she opened one of the bedroom doors, she found a room – what must have once been a home office or a small bedroom. Strange symbols were carved and scrawled all over the walls, the floor, even the ceiling. As she opened the door, the symbols flashed bright enough to blind her, then dimmed with a strange inner light. Jennifer could hear a knocking, morse code, beckoning her inside. She gasped as she tried to step back, but it felt as though something pulled at the same time, and she stumbled forward into the room.
Wendy watched from the corner of the room, unseen by Jennifer as the younger woman stumbled in and disappeared as she entered the circle. She breathed a sigh of relief, glad that the trap had worked. When she had learned that the girl across the street had once been a twin, she had felt particularly blessed. It wasn’t often that you could offer two interlinked souls as a sacrifice, and she was certain the boon from this would be great.
She asked the being beyond what it would grant her.
And smiled as she listened to its whispered promise.
(I know I’m going a little all over with what I’m choosing to post lately, but this struck my brain owing to the fact that the neighbor across the street has a berserk sensor floodlight. Once I get it out, I’ll finish out the other short about soulmates, and then work on the longer story again)
The neighbor’s sensor light was going haywire. At first Jennifer thought that it only flashed on the occasional nights. She assumed it was windy nights when perhaps something was setting off a much-too-sensitive sensor. But then she realized it was flashing regardless of the weather. And during the day, when the sensor should have realized it was too light out to be necessary. Not only that, but it was bright – brighter than the others in the neighborhood. And it faced Jennifer’s bathroom and bedroom. She would lay awake at night, staring at her wall as it was lit up intermittently. It wasn’t the source of her insomnia – if she had fallen asleep, she might never have noticed. But she couldn’t sleep, so all she could do was stare at the flash. On. Off. On. Off. Through the night.
When she had finally had enough, she angled one of her outdoor cameras toward it. She wanted video evidence of how annoyingly frequent it was. Her plan was to take it to her neighbor across the street and complain. The neighbor in question was an older woman. She lived alone but occasionally had the company of a man about her age who would come by to mow her lawn and take her out for the evening.
It was only while reviewing the video, speeding it up to count how many times it flicked on and off through the night, that Jennifer began to notice the pattern.
Jennifer had learned morse code as a child. It had been her twin’s idea. Jason and her had become adept at it when they were in elementary school, tapping out messages on their bedroom walls at night. When he slept over at his best friend’s house, angled across the ditch and down the next street, he would bring a flash light and they would signal each other to say goodnight. Jason had managed to talk their parents into buying them little devices that would sound off a tone at the bush of the button. They would use it to communicate while playing with their neighborhood friends, making plans and laying traps. Their friends decried this as unfair, because none of them ever learned enough to be as proficient or quick as the twins.
It expanded through middle and high school – sometimes if they were in the same class, she would tap out test answers discreetly on the floor, bouncing her foot as though she were a bundle of anxious nerves. When the history teacher finally caught them, he had been impressed with their scheme. Still, the school had decided on separated them in their classes. Sometimes around their parents they would tap on each other’s shoulders or backs or discreetly communicate to each other.
It had been like their own secret language. Morse code was emblazoned on her brain, as natural as speaking. It always made her think immediately of Jason, so strongly that she could feel her throat constrict, just as it did as she watched the video. She wondered if somehow he was trying to contact her from beyond the grave as she watched the one word repeat over and over:
DANGER
Jennifer didn’t know what to make of it. Sitting and watching the video filled her with more curiosity, strong enough to override her previous annoyance. She wanted desperately to communicate back, because she felt instantly that it had to be Jason. It was too strange of a coincidence otherwise – a sensor floodlight that shone directly into her window communicating in the same way she had always talked to her dead twin?
What else could it be?
mehryment 