it comes in so many guises. I love the idea of a life being the time spent " between the dashes" of birthyear and year of death -- which moments do we polish of the pauses?
I need to read more stories...
"Waiting to Waltz" by Cynthia Ryland
"Stories I ain't told yet"
The Underbeast
... hides in shadows, in parts of things, or missing parts. It screams silently and can only be heard by the person in whose body it hides. The only way you can surprise it, is to refuse any plan. It is curious, and when you say, "I'm too busy to be interested in you", it wants to know what you are so interested in that it is ignored.
Can you imagine spending your life trying to get attention like this? Can you imagine, existing as such a smoke machine, playing with illusions so that a goat-skull ressembles a human head, the spaces between ribs look like seashore? Perhaps the underbeast is artist-informer. Do not discount its magic -- have you seen it working marble?
Stone is stone, and yet, the underbeast has worked fingers pressed into a back, and two faces, so close you can sense the breath they exchange through their lips, and how the touch of his index finger paints her cheekbone, until it turns a soft, living pink.
and at night, when you think you are asleep, the underbeast takes you through the webbing of shadows,
through the dreamstreets you half-know but can't remember, partly in the past, but telling of the future too.
Like the firmen, sleeping under their shaggy snow blankets on the side of the road. Perhaps they heard the tires drawing the arcs and eyebrowed lines-- perhaps they witnessed the slow erasure of the white on black pavement-parchment. The absence of all color is erasing the embrace of all color. It takes the underbeast's whitening to see such passages.
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