Hey I'm Stephanie Carmella. I go by my middle name.
I'm pretty sweet.
That is all.

Georgia shifted the thing into the crook of her arm and felt her sweat soak into the white linen cloth that was separating her from her burden. She shuffled her feet in the sand like an invalid, staring straight at the sun in hopes that it may blind her, if only for a second. Georgia licked her lips and felt her thick, hot, sticky tongue push past them. They parted, but her teeth involuntarily clamped down and make her taste her own blood. She drank it hungrily.

Georgia shifts her burden to the other arm, watching the sweat trail spread across her shirt, making tiny droplets of insect tears. She considers putting down her burden in the sand. She considers lying down herself, and wonders whether it will be like sleeping in the snow.

She sees a cactus and wishes herself like to one. She feels so weak in this skin, water dripping, giving her life to the sun God of the desert.

Her burden remains still.

She squeezes a hand to provoke a reaction and the fingers curl around her thumb in a weak and futile motion.

She sees something obscured by the quivering heat waves, dancing and blending into the flat line of the desert. She heads that way. She heads there because even if this melted mass of candy canes is in her mind, it is the only thing that can offer her redemption.

She counts in her head, keeping track of the number of steps she walks with the burden so that she can cash them in with God when she ascends into the grasping sky. One, two, three

four thousand

eight million.

She hears a scraping sounds and sees a little boy lying on a rock. He's jet black, the color of all the little boys in the pamphlets she had gotten in the mail over Christmas. The little boy didn't have fat tears and an oatmeal stained chin. She meant to pick the boy up.

About 400 feet after she had passed him she yelled back. Goddamn her burden was heavy. Seemed heavier. The center of mass of her burden sunk into her elbow, causing it to fold and slip.

The little boy made no effort to follow her. Soon, she thought, he reminded her of abstract art. A black dot curling and dissolving into the sky.

Within a few feet she saw a woman walking. Her pure white eyes darted in panic. Georgia pointed in the direction of the boy but the mother's eyes never focused. Georgia wondered if she blended in with the desert. The burden felt heavier. Georgia felt her bones beginning to creak like old mattress springs.

Georgia reached the people in the desert. They were sitting around a fire, vapidly letting their children run too close. One touched a log in the middle and her entire hand went up in flame, then her arm. She was engulfed like a match in a saltine box. The other children laughed, not viciously but just because it was what they had always done. The midnight women did not move, but lifted their eyes in unison.

The began to cry. The girl lied down on the ground and the desert wind roared around her until her entire body turned into ash blacker than her skin and stumbled into the dark gray sky. The fire dried the womens' tears and their heads sank.

Georgia passed another group the same, and then another, until she felt as if she were running over the same strip of film in her mind. She heard shouting, and looked violently to her left. The burden groaned and she let it slip down to her hip.

In the middle of the desert was a stage. Ivory white men shifted around in gaudy costumes with diamonds on the cuffs. Below them there was an audience of figures swaying together like a first snow.

Georgia moves closer until she is almost at the edge of the stage. Her burden makes a gasping noise and one of the players turns too look at her. His watery black eyes consume her.

The burden slips and adrenaline surges into Georgia. The man freezes and continues to stare at Georgia. She grasps the cloth with her fingernails as the burden hangs from her hands, dangling by her knees. The man crouches down and moves toward Georgia until his eyes are inches from her face and her hands are trembling. His breath smells of peaches.

He offers her a handful of long, white fingers and she is pulled onto the stage by a soft, cool hand of cotton and silk. The burden swings like a lead pendulum at Georgia's shins. She is on the stage and thousands of black orbs are focused on the burden. A woman in the crown starts to hiss and they all join in. In unison, they hiss. A few throw pennies.

Georgia is frightened and climbs down. The crowd is pacified and their wide, painted discs soften.

The adrenaline seems so flow through Georgia again, constant and more pressing. She sits with the burden on her lap. It cuts off circulation in her feet. The burden's skin brushes hers and it sears upon contact.

Georgia squeezes the burden to her chest and it feebly searches her. She has noticed that this is a town alone. For all her searches it is alone. She has noticed its black and whites and purples. She has been here before. She remembers. The adrenaline pushes more, further, in her chest.

She remembers the player and the crowd.

The burden sinks into her lungs so that she cannot breathe.

She tries to shove it away but remembers that she cannot.

THIS IS A TOWN ALONE.

ALONE.
ALONE.
She runs. She counts the steps frantically in her head.
FIVE MILLION.
SIX MILLION.

She falls and scrapes at the caked earth with her fingernails. She places the burden on the ground and it starts to cry.

Cries like the memories of the screams in her head.

Blood begins to fall on the sand and disappears.

The hole is shallow. Parts of her fingernails rip away and fall into the dirt. She can no longer see the bottom.

The burden screams louder.
louder.
LOUDER.
LOUDER.
LOUDER.
She shoves the pink, fleshy burden into the hole and it screams.

Blue eyes stare back. She lays on the sand and gives her bleeding hands to the desert. How many more times this world will exist, she cannot know.

But she still feels the burden, screaming in her ears. Clawing for her breast. Her hands bleed until she is dry and the sun and the wind claim her.

The burden sleeps.

She often wrote stories that did not involve him. She wrote of knights and dragons, the cliffs of Maine and lost Atlantis. She never showed them to anyone. She put each story in a box to hide it from the people who came to see - and to hide them from herself. And so she lived, hiding her dreams under the bed to forget them.

He often wrote stories that he did not know had to do with her. He wrote stories of women with red dresses and black hair, blue eyes ans skin like silk. He wrote stories about women who loved men like him, but he knew they were stories because men like him did not deserve love. His stories became very famous but he hid them in a box under his bed so that he could forget them, and though there was never a shortage of women he slept alone every night. He could smell her through the springs of his mattress and cried to wash her eyes away.

Then one day he stopped her in the street. And they went home and burned their boxes.

And so they warmed their hands by the fire of the dreams they were burning, and put together new dreams like pieces of a puzzle and hung them up on their morning mirrors so that they could see them in their reflections when they awoke.

As they watched the days pass together they felt that they ate diamonds and breathed champagne, and every day was like a winter night filled with snow, on bridges, traced with silver and cold fingers that were warmed by hands intertwined and walks into warm hotel lobbies in Rome.

They watched headlights of cars dissolve into tiny fires on the highway from their room on the 16th floor, through frosted glass and visions of lonely roads. In the days they would sleep until the noon bells of the churches rose to awake them, and they made love between clean white sheets and hazy eyes. When she was bare and cold he would wrap her in his body and when he shivered she would warp him in a blanket and fill him with warm drinks brought from porters downstairs with inquiring ears and skin searching to see between the cracks of the door and the empty places in their hearts.

When the spring came they bells of the church would wake them up early in the morning and they'd drive far away to the wild green of the countryside where they'd laugh and strip themselves of their inhibitions and swim together in streams so clear that they showed every inch of each other's bodies, every inch that they knew so well from years before.

"The House"


Mr. George Williams, Sr. did not just build the house with his hands. He built the house with his eyes and elbows, his knees, his instinct for rain, and his preference for mahogany wood. When he looked at the house he could feel himself staring back, as if his genes, his DNA, was implanted in the wooden beams, as if the panes of the windows were melted together from every grain of sand from every family vacation he had ever seen in his life. The structure of the house was all he had to offer. The house was all he had ever known.

The main intention of Mr. Williams in building the house was one of distraction. He had retired, been depressed, felt old, and eventually volunteered at a nursing home. His doctor did not tell him this, but he knew that the work was to lift his spirits. To teach him to be grateful. Maybe, even, to de-sensitize him to the nursing home. He wanted to tell the doctor that his son wouldn't put him in one - that he had two granddaughters who would love to have him after he could no longer have himself. But he didn't. He understood standard procedure. Retirement cases were all the same.

Mr. Williams was standing in the kitchen one day after he had come home (volunteering, hair cut, grocery store) eating form a bag of plain, unsalted chips in the unforgiving summer heat. How it happened, he had no idea, but he suspected it had to do with how Mrs. Williams always kept the AC setting on energy save. Anyway, his palms sweated and the chips were on the floor along with Mrs. Williams (breakfast, knitting, daily soaps.)

Mr. Wiliams watched his wife bend over to sweep up the chips, watched her sagging ass and the way the skin on her knees allowed her to slide around with her bones still pressed into the floor. And all she would do is whine.

"I'm 84, George! I'm too old for this and I have too much to do! It's a bag of damn chips for God's sake! Hold on to it!"

She went back to reading her Bible. Mr. Williams imagined dust flying from those pages as high in the sky as dreary messengers to the Big Man himself. "Damn it George!" She mumbled to herself, flipping its thin pages and dropping chip crumbs all over Psalms.

So Mr. Williams left that day, just walked out of the front door and started the engine of the dull blue car that was about as close to croaking as he. He talked to the car. "You and I," he'd say. "You and I."

He came back for dinner, of course, and to sleep and to watch Mrs. Williams' programs at night with her. But Mrs. Williams didn't really notice his daily absence from her. Maybe if she was younger she'd have become the jealous type, but Mrs. Williams figured George was old and out of style and most of the girls in the town weren't his type, anyway.

When Mr. Williams left he didn't go to the house of a mistress or a whore, but he drove down the street to an empty lot that had been barren for years. He called the realtor whose name was shamefully plastered on the cracking sign, paid in cash, and sat on the empty lot reveling in the feeling of ownership, of control. The feeling of creation.

A neighbor walked onto the lot and stood a few feet away from Mr. Williams with his hands folded over his middle age pouch. They both stood there for a moment, the way two men will when working out social complexities in their head. The other man opened his mouth, skin stretching over his lips, wet with warm beer.
"You buy it?"
"Sure did."
"It's a scam."
"How so?"
"Built on a swamp. Floods. That's why no one bought it here for years. Overpriced, too."

Mr. Williams sighed. He wondered if an agent would've done this twenty years ago. Biting world out there.

"G'luck." the neighbor said, and turned to waddle back to a football game, to soak in his Godly knowledge of misfortune.

Mr. Williams invested the rest of three years into his sunken swamp. He overpaid men with habitual five o' clock shadows to dump dirt on the lot. He hired surveyors. He called every person from every ad in the yellow pages and finally something worked. So, thousands of dollars later, Mr. Williams was left standing in the middle of the lot with a load of lumber on his right, sixteen boxes of nails on the left, and tools in every color, colors he hadn't even known existed in front of him.

He was finally going to build this goddamn house.

He build the house on intentions. The kitchen was built for his daughter in law. She liked white kitchens, so he bought her white tiles. He bought her a white sink. He bought her white granite and he paid for a white kitchen set to be flown in from Italy.

The upstairs rooms were for his granddaughters. He build them both on the same side of the house, windows facing in the direction of his house. He wanted them to know he was there. He wanted them to be able to flash their grandfather a signal when their parents were making them go to bed early. He wanted to be able to put a ladder underneath their windows and climb up there at night to hold them when they were asleep. He wanted them to have everything. For them, he learned to paint. He painted murals on their walls, murals of all the exquisite things in the world, all the things he knew they dreamed about at night. He bought shades of pink, shades of purple, shades of blue that matched, and gallons and gallons of paint so that they might know how many hours of his life he had put into making theirs beautiful.

And for his son he built everything that he had learned about him in forty nine years. He built everything in the house with his intentions. And with the intention of watching his son on the day he moved in, smiling and thankful. He wanted to see the reactions of his son as the boy ran his fingers over every surface, knowing that there was a reason that it was there. He wanted his son to know what he could never tell him in the years before. He wanted to show his son who he was. He wanted his son to believe in him.

George Jr. showed up at the house without his wife or daughters. When he stepped onto the lot, he looked down at the dirt wishing his father had thought for once to plant some fucking grass. He tilted to head to the side and murmured "Looks like it tilts a little."

When he walked into the foyer he wished his father had put down hardwood instead of carpet, and the kitchen, to him, looked like it would be too much to keep up. He hated to be woken in the morning by the sun, and his father had built him a room with a window toward the east. Even the study was off.

George Jr. turned to his father, who was smiling at him, eyes watery with anticipation.

"Thanks, Dad, but we got one on the south side of town. You should be able to sell this one though. I'm sure you won't get as much out of it as you put in it, from talking to the neighbor, but it was a lot of fun, hey?"

George Sr. set fire to the house that night. He didn't really care about the arson charges, or where he'd end up. It's my house now, he thought. Let it burn.

Something I wrote for the creative writing List/Litany assignment about 2 months ago:

Farming

When you feel like deep orange
When you feel like the earth is moving
When you feel like a hollowed out headlight
When you feel like Des Moines
When you feel like swing, swing, jump
When you feel like the bottom of every soul
When you feel like evolving your mind
When you feel like a poison in every nightshade
When you feel vindication, anxious.
When you sum it all up in a sideways glance
When you realize your usual morning self.
When I show up in my year old dress
(The one with your fingerprints)
And high heels
And red lipstick.


And two poems that I wrote in 8th grade (don't be too harsh) just for nostalgia:

born of a mother so admired that nobody expected
such a small pitiful helpless little baby who cried
squalling and ugly and red
bittersweet; such a disappointment
to the mother and the world so
she reared the boy in walls of fury and the
worthlessness of himself and the boy spent countless hours
watching the mother and how she squinted her eyes and made
her face very small when she looked at him so as not to see
what she had created and he tried not to fear the disenchantment
in her eyes fiery like nobody but him could feel so he
tried to change but couldn’t and started
thinking of transparent perfection
sitting at the window watching
the ugly scars of rain falling
onto the snow and thinking and
false hope beckoning and slowly reeling him in
hooking him and locking him up
wrapping him tightly in his mind
a betrayal of the gods holding a spell over
him for not being
what he was supposed to be and
how he thought he was safe in his asylum
clutching tightly dependently oh how he was never aware
of the disaster and of how the fear waited just outside for his to
wander maybe venture outside but no he never did for
the deception of his hidden safety was too great a tantalizing
unknown love but really just a thin string of trust and betrayal and
spinning and
yesterday's forgotten and tomorrow's just too far away
until one rain when the wind just blew too strong roaring and down
came his world and
shattering
into crystals so scavengers could come and snatch
the pieces off the cold cement and
remember the ugly little boy on his doorstop such
a pain but the pieces beckoning in the light of the moon for they came in the darkness
because unacceptable intolerant shame they felt for almost
weeping crying only for the lost innocence swept into the night
disbelief and so naïve and how he wished but couldn't and
if only someone tried to save him but
all was gone and it just fell and fell and grew old and into dust but
not he for never could he forget and wept for the wound
that lay flat sparkling on the ground as beautiful as
he always wished that he might be


He saw the world through glassy eyes, never daring to look in
For he thought, he knew, he tried; never could he win
He saw the world through darkened rays
He saw the world in shades of grays
He saw the world through broken glass
He saw the world, he watched it pass

He saw the world through glassy eyes, sitting all alone
He saw the world through misty fog, he heard its distant groan
He sat and looked and watched life’s dance
He never sought to take the chance
His life was like a haunted dream
But not a person heard his scream
He sighed his death without a sound
His lost salvation never found

He saw the world with glassy eyes, living breath by breath
He saw the world through nothing eyes, he saw life and he saw the death

Like dim dreams in the wind, hollow whispered in his head,
Sang a sad and mournful song, sang tunes of moments shed

He never felt the world’s embrace
He never ran the human race
He never caught a falling star
He only watched it from afar
No one could have heard his cries
He saw the world through glassy eyes
Saw the world through nothing eyes
never daring to look in.

Coming Attractions!: A short story I am writing in the present. Hard to describe because it's more of a philosophical one (as usual) rather than plot based, but I'll post it as soon as the rough draft is done. In addition, Mary Ann and I may post our novel in segments. Don't know about that yet. Haven't spoken to her about it. Mary Ann? [We should do it on your account anyway, probably.]

Le Short Story. Again.
Note: This one is about a man in prison. It's one of my favorites, but if you can't identify with the "bad guy" (read: Ariel's Mom. heh) you probably won't like it. It's one of my favorites though.
( Everything They Forgot. )

Poem #2
( Love;Digested )

Piece of Poetry #1
( Turn )