X Crus Bangye

Follow your heart.

"Hey Jo," giggled the messy-haired boy behind me. I didn't stir, just kept walking. He was talking to his mate, not me. "Look." Whispers. Oh, great. Then theyhadto devolve into a fit of whispers. I almost had to turn, but I tapped my fingers against the strap of my backpack and waved it off, sole of my shoe fluttering along the dampened pavement. What was I thinking? Getting worked up over myself again; as if I wasn't just a part of this city, but the whole damned table-top board game. Cringing, I fell my head down, wincing my eyes closed.She's right, you know,a soft murmur echoed within me as my left hand reached for my left strap to clasp it, tightly, the cold morning breeze delicately brushing the hairs upon each petite knuckle, as if it were a finger coursing itself across the gaps of a chain-link fence that comprised my nervous system.It was your fault. But it's not your responsibility -- your responsibility is what you can control. Your responsibility is inside you, darling.

Not out.

IN.

And suddenly, the chimes of the bell rang in the distance, followed by the string of beeps from the street pole. I snapped out of my thoughts and within a smatter of moments, so too did the world around me, it seemed, and everybody, be it man, woman, child, citizen, foreigner, outcast, or loved one, and all beyond and in between, broke out of their chambers of ice and began to move.

The world was moving.

"Momma momma are we there yet!?"

chirp

"...alleged not to be giving him another term in the senate, however..."
A click, then a sigh. "Fuck radio."

chirp-chirp

"HAH! Catch me if ya can, sucker!""
"You idiot, stop -- hey! Herman B. Titus I'm not playing around, give back my study sheet."

...chirp! Chirp!

"Oh, I never knew. Tell him I said to take it easy then..."

Chirp!

"Yes I can skate..."

"What's the deal? It's only a fifty-percent cut. Fair? Define fair."

"...or tomorrow, or the next! He's a shit-eating bitch that burns everything he touches, I don't give two flying asscracks what he thinks..."

"...no, no problem at all, Mrs. Dalury. I'll keep her in my prayers too."

-- chirp!

Screeching like a claw against chalkboard, it came so suddenly, so out of the blue, that she didn't even realize what it was she was flabbergasted about most; the feeling of talons in her hair, or the body flung across from her just a second earlier. "Donnie!" a young girl cried with a mortified gleam trapped in her praire-green eye -- one that would probably not leave for a long, long time. Onlookers looked on in half-stricken, half-uncertain silence as the schoolgirl ran up to the immobile, sweater-adorned corpse and grabbed his wrist, feeling for a pulse in spite of the impact she knew she saw, then heard, and then couldn't believe, and then laughed at, somehwere deep below their right state of mind, where it was right to make it all wrong. "Donnie?" Some dialed for an ambulance. She just kept saying his name.

Meanwhile, the other, visibly stocky girl -- the one with what felt like talons in her hair -- her steps rattled and with a stumble she fell to her knees and scraped polyester against the rock, slightly dizzied, clouds above beginning to gather and the city ambience turning incoherent as she felt drops of blood collect along her splayed knuckles and suddenly, a ring in her ear.

And a snicker as the clock turned the hour and sounded the bell. "Look at that loser," one whisper emerged more loudly than it needed to be. Everyone got up to leave and stifled a fit as they slid out the door in mocking noises that clearly were directed at her and not drowned out well enough in the sea of usual grumbles, to her consternation. A hand rested on her shoulder, but she didn't bother to look up. with a B+ circled in red ink on the top fit snugly into her hand and she grabbed her things and tucked it away and then went about the rest of her mid-autumn weekday staring at clocks and chatting with her sparse clique. She did appreciate what she had. Life was too short for cold feet.

The crosswalk, just moments before brimmed with backpack-clad students and chatty morning people and dog-walkers walking the dog, was quickly liquidated as people scattered for cover.

Someone had died. The day had just begun.

But already, for him, the dead, lying there across from the young woman known as Elizabeth, who stared on listlessly as a tall man clutching a thick item in his hands lumbered up towards them from the distance, it was already over. Ever since the day he was born, the trajectory assigned to him was only ever designed to reach a certain point -- no after, no extensions. He lived for many things. Swimming, walking straight, Comedy Channel exclusives.

But he would be remembered for, most of all, that overcast morning crossing Turing Street and Nightingale.

DRAFT--
END--

INPUT
COMPLETE

With a rip and tear the paper was detached from the typewriter, cradled in tough but tender fingers. As they lifted the paper up to a pair of black eyes, they revealed who they belonged to: a man whose stare was barely obscured behind dark brown bangs and a cheek that nestled across his chin in fashionably roguish charm as he looked upon his paper disapprovingly. He was the writer, the creator, the world-builder, the dejected and the fathered. Everything which belonged to him and rejected him, and all above him and below. All wrapped neatly within the grammatical precincts and sentence structure below his eyes. Like lasers against melting plate his gaze mulled over it, craftily, lamely.

A voice creeped up from behind, within the dimly lit room strewn with un-hung clothes and leftover Chinese takeout boxes, smelling of compromised living. "How is it, honey? You were typing the whole day this time." A briefwhooshfollowed, smoke blowing into the ceiling fan. Honey waved the air under his nose, but didn't wrinkle it at the cigarette's stench. He actually quite liked it, though not as much the cancer. When his uncle fell into it he disavowed the rolls ever since. But there was something which never left, no doubt. Something like nostalgia. And everyone was fine with that thing.

Joining a drawn sigh, the wheels on his chair squeaked, his mouth puckered in un-ironic seriousness as he replied glumly, "I'm going blind, Ay." His face then turned back to the paper, the force applied from his fingers slightly ripping the top edge of it, but him not noticing. "I can't even see the words without shoving it, like, the whole thing, in my face."

"Aw, well," another billow of smoke circled Honey and soaked him in blissful ignorance as he thought about all the woes of America, from Pangea to Y2K, from slavery to the natives, from Lincoln to the Saudi's, "you can't have everything, I suppose. That mean you haven't finished it yet?"

"Not yet," Honey said to Ay, as his heartbeat fluttered like the tweets of a newborn chick out of the nest -- as his sight grew blurry, and all of a sudden he saw the blood of the man before him, the man lost to machine, and his eyes tried to blink it out, like water, "not yet."

No smoke tailed it, that flaccid utterance, not this time. But the silence was followed up anyway. Ay locked an empty stare upon some poster on the wall before her, long since eroded and shriveled up a bit from an over-excited drinker many a year ago, and fizzled her cig against the ashtray, shrugging. "Ah, well."

"Hey Jo," stifled a giggle under the beeps as the morning smog filled the busy, swarming air,

"listen."

[End of Glimpse 1.]