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colour blind.She saw him at the park once. He was the colour of dirt; with bird eyes and white, mapped palms. Her little forehead lined as she felt the bile force its way up until her saliva was acid. She counted her toes and bit the inside of her cheek, should she run? Are they fast runners? She figured this one must be if he kept himself out of jail. The dark man flashed a mouthful of pebbles and held out his hand- which would have swallowed hers.

'Don't touch me.'

Her hands were all knuckles and her baby eyes tore into his. He faltered and stepped away, a half mouthed sorry. He looked upset, a grin spread like fire between her dimples.

Suddenly she

flesh puzzlesIn the beginning it was enough. I’d be wide-eyed, quietly watching her through the windows. Limbs and torso like a slender tree; bowing in wind and always shooting up toward the sun. She’d wear summer skin in the middle of winter with freckles spoiling her shoulders and cheekbones. Her birthmark was a dull red stain at her collarbone and she had a mole beneath her left breast. She was thirteen and I thirty, but my, oh my, did I ache to see her insides.

The house next door they called the sea house because it was two stories of cerulean blue. Through my bedroom window I could see naught but an empty bedroom. But late September the P

the fluttered- a collectioni

Hear my joints dislocate, coming apart at the notion of sunlight. It falls and it settles in pictures of loveliness, golden tree branches and hints of leaves; of autumn, of spring.

I am so tall in the water. My legs are never-ending, crooked lines of peachskin- watching my fingers draw out ripples until they strain and buckle and fall into the cool. I’ll touch my toes and loop my figure and I’ll make giant ripples, abhorring fallen leaves and sending shivers of blue through his legs.

It’s a faded crimson red holding my breasts, tugging my hips and leaving my ribcage bare to the current. It’s smudged lipstick and smear

leavemedon'tleaveme.you make me sick. you make my stomach fold in on itself and press out against the lining of my flesh. you put lumps in my throat and you tie strings to my tear glands and tug until the world is just a panoply of blurred lines, hazy colour and bokeh.

you made me do this. you put the knife in my fingers and you told me to tear, you said you would care if i hurt myself like this. you said you’d care if i opened my flesh up for you like a gift of blood and flesh and tissue. but you never really did.

i like being small, i like being the blue eyed girl sitting amidst background noise, rubber band arms holding the necks of her legs together.

vacant.Look at her; she’s a porcelain doll with never-ending milk legs all stapled to the bed, thirteen years young with forty-eight years suffocating her figure. He’s right up to her baby lips, offering cigarette breath and grinding his stubble on her cheeks, it reminds her of gravel and she closes her eyelids as it falls across her neck, inhaling the cloud of dust.

The curtains are draped across the sky, dried blood red casting shadows she can’t tell the ends of. A dim flicker of a light and maybe a filter of moonshine illuminate the crevasses of his eyelids, forehead and awry mouth. His skin tastes of sweat and earth.

She was wit

you can't feel through fabrictonight the rain becomes the earth
falling from hidden spaces in the sky and swollen clouds
i hear it make mud of dirt, and lovers of friends
and ask, quiet, where are you going but down?

i’m not all there in the head
you’re not all there in the head, my mother says
i’m not all there in the head i repeat
sometimes i’m there in my toes and fingers and heart as well

and now - in this downpour moment- i lie on the street
so warm that i think well that’s where love’s gotten to
but where is your shirt n? oh someplace else
and is that a light flickering in the house across the road? hide!

i rush in soaken w

oh the little thingsIt’d be nice if he'd let me breathe. Just inhale a little air to keep my teeth company- maybe even exhale again when they grow tired of one another. You really don’t notice how wonderful it is to breathe until you’re lying stomach down with empty lungs and the creepy man from the corner store sitting on your back.

But what can I say? Not- ‘please get off of my back, I can feel my spine against my stomach and I don’t like it.’ Because I really can feel my spine against my stomach and am breathless to say such. My cheek makes like feet against the wooden floorboards. This man has a whole forest of trees in here! A

why didn't you say goodbye?Love wasn’t in the air the night you unbuttoned my shirt and kissed my skin. No, love definitely wasn’t in the air the night we spent in heat of moments, sweating and tumbling and fumbling on your father’s bed.

It was anywhere but there. Does love go on vacation? I ponder and make fleshy butterflies from my outstretched fingers. Probably.

I can’t remember much but I can remember the beginning. The burn of acid bleeding and gushing past my tongue and down my throat. The noises and then your silence. The clumsiness and then the awkward kisses.

You had a garden of dark hair growing from your scalp and dirt eyes. You had a

of storms and skysee my hair dance wild as wind-strings jerk it about//hear the ocean-wind heave itself against us all- crashing into our eyes and mouth//feel the winter-wind brush our skins in summer//then inhale the heaviness of air and sink through the dirt- because darling, you don’t deserve god’s beautiful violence.

(it drags the tree by its leaves saying kiss your trunk, kiss it and it does; releasing with a snap. the other trees flitter-flutter violently, crying within the cacophony of rain on concrete. white stars fall where light exists, and only sound where it disappears. the sky -the colour of sunburnt skin- watches it all with hunger. a

sickDeath slouches over the edge of her bed, licking his lips as he caresses her thighs. He sings the noise of wind and rain crashing all around and her head throbs with the sound. Her head is hot. Her forehead is on fire and her cheeks catch alight with it. She burns silently and sees red, red, black.

Tiny insects have crawled beneath her fingernails and they dig with tiny claws and teeth until they are swarming beneath her skin, biting outward at her flesh. Each vertebrae carries bruises and as she tosses her body about the bed they ache loudly and sharply.

All the heat has rushed to her face, her body shakes like a leaf in wind and goosebump

picture death.I couldn’t bring myself to bury her.

I couldn’t bring myself to empty the ground of dirt and of earthworms and of the spindly weed roots, and fill in the ochre gap with her body. Her coffee-cream fur held her tiny skeleton from falling out when they hit her. I try not to think of miniature beat-less hearts and mute lungs. I never saw her dead, but I can imagine.

They found her on the median strip. Breathless and still by the endless whoosh of traffic.

In my mind I see Mum’s face; I see her heart throbbing at her feet and her cradling the dog, like a precious baby to her chest. I see the love flowing down her withered cheeks

the weeds across the street.She’s the little girl with flaxen curls at four pm flouncing down her driveway with her hands buried in her pockets, lips pressed out like she’s whistling. You’ll watch her out your window, with your tea lukewarm on the sill, and splutter a cough; fogging up the glass just enough to miss her smile.

You saw her once, twice eating petals off the roses in your garden. You’ve forgotten how to converse with children, you cussed between the wheezing and she stared right past like you were simply a knurled twig catching the wind in its leaves.

One morning you found her; purple stockings, blush mittens and a head of sunlight cur

intoxicationi see naked bodies in the gutter as i walk queen street at 3 am. they make love, awkward but warm in the concrete curve. i don't place their clothes. i think it is wonderful though. the heat, the heat.

my entire body is rolling from heavy to light, like the shore. my head is humming and my limbs ache dull. there is a sickness in my stomach or in my throat. i think that maybe my stomach is wanting to force itself out my throat- but i won't have that.

i walk further. there are no straight lines to follow but i picture them in my mind and still cannot walk across them. i trip, tumble on the edge of the pavement and no one sees. the alcohol pul

before, beforei am only just thirteen. he is sixteen. i am in love/lust/crush.

my best friends big brother, or friends ex boyfriend, is tall. once or twice i imagined kissing him. but he never would. he is friends with the boy who is sixteen. and besides he is my best friends big brother or my friend's ex boyfriend. and i am not a bad person.

i am tall too, you know. i am stretched skyward but there was no more to stretch, just bone. so i am not really that tall at all. but i pretend i am. how tall are you? oh above average, you know, pretty tall.

the brother says want to come and see j? and my heart leaps and i sing yes but he only hears a nod and ther

strings of pearls and breathunderwater they are mermaids. patterns of poolwater-caught sunshine dancing in soft-edged white upon their long legs (tails). red hair like ocean fire and fingers ever reaching for the bubbles, like pearls but from out their mouths. darting up between their fingers.

there are places here, beneath here, beneath the sound of their mother yelling at their father and the loud rough of the neighbour’s dog’s bark, where they can breathe. breathe the dead leaves in water whirlpools beneath their feet and breathe the chlorine, leaving eyes red and hair green at the tips. breathe the quiet of their bodies and their imagined underwater world

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exhalation.

by ~Pretty-As-A-Picture, Oct 5, 2008, 3:30:57 AM
Literature / Prose / Fiction / General Fiction / Short Stories

Sixteen. Sixteen years since she was the size of a deflated lung beneath her mothers ribcage- now she has her own mass beneath her ribcage. Thumping sometimes to the outside, treating the skin of Laylla's stomach like a door. It will open in 3 months, it will be sliced open because her flesh is meat and they'll bring Sophie to air and she'll swallow until all she tastes is that dull white of the hospital. And then she'll cry and the music will drone in Laylla's ears until she tastes vomit and she is numb in all the aching places.

She doesn't know the father. She thinks Michael but she tells herself it is Louis. She repeats his name over and over in her head until it simply can't be anyone else's. But baby Sophie will have Michael's milk skin and his amber eyes and then she'll feel her heart sink all over again.

They fucked in a Garden. Wire fencing ripped open her calve like it was a gift and left a scar souvenir. He lifted her dress -sun yellow- and brought her underwear to meet her knees. She could taste his sweat or her sweat or both and she could feel that rush, rush, rush of adrenalin or maybe it was alcohol. She forgot loud wasn't something she could be in Queens Street at 3:40am. She felt him heave and shiver and sigh and then she opened her eyes and pressed out against his chest. Pushed him until he was lying beside her and she was smoothing her dress and mouthing oh shit and fuck and dear god.

At school the next Monday she was no longer Laylla she was slut, whore and skank. She skipped lessons and cried pools. Her father bought a new knife set so she bought a new scar across her thigh. This one was deeper.

She sucked in and filled the gaps inside with smoke, smoke is all she ever wanted to fill gaps. Cement gray smoke and not babies. But now she was. And she knew it. Before she knew it she could feel it and she couldn't keep the toast down, she couldn't keep the cereal down and she craved vinegar. She passed out on the bus and then she didn't have to worry about telling her Father anymore because the Doctor did.

He didn't hit her this time. He sat down for a long time staring at the living room wall and thinking. She pretended she felt the waves and wondered if by force of will she could pass out once more. But then the husk of his voice broke the silence and he said it, he contemplated the A word and she felt the tears, the tantrum.

Three broken plates later and she was drowning in the hot fog of the shower cradling her stomach and rocking. Had the doctor told Father to make her kill the baby? She promised she'd never see a doctor again. She loathed the thing inside her, but she loved it. It was her; it was her all over and one day it would breathe. It would breathe and it would love her and depend on her, fall asleep on her chest and play with her hair.

Her hands resided on her stomach and some nights she drank until she passed out. She knew she shouldn't, she didn't want to but she had to. It was all too much. She was constantly holding her breath, tucking in away somewhere and just waiting.

Her stomach began to swell. One morning she was so massive she could hardly pull herself out of bed. She was weak and fragile- no, she was soft and warm but she felt like glass. And she felt if Sophie moved anymore she'd crack and splinter and shards of her would fall at her feet and then Sophie would, blood soaken and screaming for life. She couldn't do it, she lost her breath and she fell once more and awoke to bright lights, white walls and clean sheets.

She's a soul in a carcass, her skeleton is simply a collection of branches- bending, aching but never breaking. She's using and losing her breath, finding strength and losing it again. Push, push, breathe, push. But she forgets; she fucking forgets how to breathe and doesn't want to push because her body is recoiling and she's falling and she can feel it all one moment and is utterly numb the second. God where are her fingers? She wants to claw through her stomach to her womb and rip through her skin with long fingernails. She wouldn't feel it. Someone speaks far away and she doesn't care, she doesn't fucking care because she wants Sophie out and they can slice her from head to toe and play with her organs, finger her heart and bounce her kidneys from the walls if they like. They have to cut into her and time is racing but it still takes so long an- blackout.

Lights on. And there she is bawling. Laylla can see right through to her tonsils and her eyes are closed creases, carved into pink-purple stained skin. God she's ugly, she thinks, but god she is beautiful. And now she truly knows she didn't understand. There's a hand engulfing hers and one, faint, on her chest. Now she knows she didn't understand love when she murmured, moaned it to Louis too many Thursdays ago. But back then those butterflies and that racing heartbeat was love. No, love was the suffering, it was the dark hand at her throat that threatened and motioned but she pushed away. Not because she didn't want it to steal the life from her breath but because she wanted that breath for Sophie, because she loved her and because she was her life now.

And as her daughter exhaled for the first time, so did she.

exhalation.by ~Pretty-As-A-Picture

Literature / Prose / Fiction / General Fiction / Short Stories

it's all over the place, i know.
but it's something and i owe you something.
[camera and computer broken at the moment, so sorry]

inspired by her.

(On the outside: Bubble gum mouth, barbie doll hair , fairyfloss nails, Laylla with two L's beneath a yellow M on a blue striped uniform and an extra layer of skin on her face.
Beneath: Playboy B cup, bonds boylegs at the bottom of a balloon stomach, outie belly button and salmon-pink scars on her thigh.
On the inside: A heartbeat, a heartbeat, half formed fingers, placenta, blood, blood, fetus, Sophie.)

~~mad 0 0~~

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~MoonShinersDaughter Sep 7, 2011

I can't imagine a more terrifying and wonderful feeling than love, and I have yet to experience something so deep and painful. This is a beautiful insight to that

~RagdollRiot Mar 5, 2011

Its beautiful. no words express your talent

~Sweetbanannie Jan 31, 2011

This is incredibly well written. You are very inspiring, all of your work is very inspiring

~picasso06 Sep 2, 2010

_{Breathtakingly gorgeous. I love your writing!}

!Princess-Mangoo Jul 24, 2010 Hobbyist Writer

Ghaa *Tears*
that was amazing

~Peaniko Jan 30, 2010 Student Traditional Artist

Reminds me of my friend. She's trying to get pregnant and her boyfriend knows. (At least I thnk she is, other people had to tell me, she won't tell me things any more.) I just don't understand why... I want a way to stop her, but i can't babysit her, and no matter who i tell, if she's deadset on it, its going to happen. just... ugh. Anyways fantastic piece, you need to get yourself published.

~fetuscockslap May 11, 2009

Honestly, this is the first piece of literature I've read on this side, and I am simply speechless.

Absolutely amazing.

~jessihead May 10, 2009

This is beautiful, your a really talented writer and I love your photography

~PrincessBlackRose May 2, 2009 Student Writer

this is so amazing.

~XavierXF Mar 28, 2009

Laylla had better consider herself lucky that Sophie doesn't have FAS. Of course, this story is too beautiful to not have a happy ending. It'd just be a little more realistic.

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