Tuesday, March 16, 2010

The drowning flash



No guns or knives? What kind of story is that!

A kiss as sweet as a blowtorch. A touch as gentle as an acid trip. Burning sensations and hyperbolic hues are lovely, if rare, blooms we deign to pluck out of a wasteland of dull aches and infinite shades of matte grey. Those interior states always remain after such transient perfumes scatter at postmodern speed.

Finding one at all, now there's the rub of steel wool, the same color as the pavement saturated with witching hour rain, perforated by neon shards and blood quickly sheathed by a fresh splash.

Watch your step, you tell yourself, or you'll drown.

Turn your head and imbibe the first act of a thousand simultaneous plays staged in a gilded glass cabinet, another thousand each and every block. These actors and actresses, having rehearsed their lines to the point of nausea, restart their wandering through that greasepainted matte grey, warding off those dull aches with loose cravats and spirited abandon until the inevitable awareness that they failed to garner applause once more and so venture forth into the witching hour rain.

Watch your step, they tell themselves, or you'll drown.

Slipping around a streetlight's oval glow, you stalk past carnival minuets and shadow puppet theatres left in the dark, a solitary blossom caught in a flurry of breakdown. Though how long the former will last, you know all too well. They'll find out in a whirlwind, a rushing, redolent scent soon stale. You laugh, for a moment.

Then, as the others, venture forth nonetheless, infused with unspoken promises borne on that hallucinatory soupçon, the tableaux of her abstract, arcane hydrocarbons demanding that we heed her one and only command, that we search for a touch as gentle, a kiss as sweet.

We didn't watch our step, and we drowned.

21 comments:

Ubermilf said...

You were supposed to try something different this week, not just spew forth the same gibberish.

Ubermilf said...

I would just like to add that I spewed forth the same gibberish I always do on my blog. Full disclosure.

Randal Graves said...

You're simply jealous that I found a way to flash sans vulgarity and zombies.

Tengrain said...

Graves, you swine! Not to worry, I found it vulgar and oddly zombielike.

Regards,

Tengrain

Tengrain said...

Oh, I forgot:

Eat at Roy's!

Regards,

Tengrain

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Doc said...

You really are a dyed in the wool romantic, you know that don't you?

Pardon me, I think I see my life jacket floating by.

Doc

Laura said...

Simply, beautiful. :)

((Hugs))
Laura

Life As I Know It Now said...

You know I love The Cure so I gotta like this post just for that reason alone.

Crybbe666 said...

Randal,

Even sans zombies, this was a great piece of flash. Enjoyed the opening paragraph especially!

Randal Graves said...

tengrain, at least someone did.

doc, you tell anyone and I'll blow up your state.

Wait.

sunshine, thanks, but isn't this comment breaking your hiatus and thus grounds for a jail sentence? ;-)

liberality, I love the original, and I'm probably biased because Unto Ashes is one of my favorite bands, but I think the cover version is better.

crybbe, thanks!

Commander Zaius said...

Great story very well written but I miss the zombies.

susan said...

I don't miss the zombies or the the gore. A little more vulgarity wouldn't be out of place though. How about in the gilded glass cabinet?

Very nice.

David Barber said...

Drowning seems the in-thing at the mo. ;-)

Great piece, Randal. No doubt you'll revert to writing something that I don't understand in your next post.

Regards mate, The Big Sap. :-)

S.W. Anderson said...

"A kiss as sweet as a blowtorch."

This is what happens when your partner has developed a taste for Naga Jolokia peppers, and indulges before the two of you start swapping spit.

Explaining blistered lips at the emergency room is so difficult — and painful.

Tom Harper said...

"A touch as gentle as an acid trip" -- where'd you get such good acid?

Holte Ender said...

Sounds like my sort of of blowtorch.

Randal Graves said...

BB, oh don't worry, you can't keep a good undead down.

susan, are you saying drunken bar hoppers partake in vulgarity?

david, today, at any rate, although looking out the window behind me, I haven't seen anyone stumbling to the turf yet. ;-)

SWA, why would anyone, under no coercion whatsoever, willingly ingest even the tiniest piece of that? Might as well scarf down a flaming tin of Sterno.

tom, not here, the feds might be reading.

holte, more satisfying than one of SWA's crazy ass peppers.

Dr. Zaius said...

I am not quite sure how hydrocarbons become arcane...

Randal Graves said...

dr. zaius, ancient Chinese secret.

Anonymous said...

So I don't know what the hell happened here other than my comment went missing that I posted after I deleted the first one... so I'm going to try again (maybe Randal's blog really doesn't like me?).

Randal- I think I'm in love! Now why couldn't I have written something like this, instead I had to try to be all sappy.

A toast to drowning flash!