Ecstatic Inferno

by Autumn Christian

you never escape the forces inside of you, you just subvert them, make them change shape.

“It’s fun,” she said, “to be a monster sometime.”

In my dreams she released butterflies in the operating room. Wove a spider’s net into my hair.

She was the glass skinned Ophelia sprung from my head.

I wanted to go to sleep for once knowing that my dreams belonged only to me.

“We’re more of a monster than he’ll ever be.”

It’s been forty nights since Jehovah washed up on the Gulf of Mexico in three black trash-bags.

“All relationships are about control,” she said.

Momma said only rich people get to be God. I think she might be right.”

Everybody would believe in a prophet who had straight teeth and a pediatric degree and made love to his wife on a regular schedule. It took real faith to believe in these sick and crooked-fingered misanthropes.

Tuesday was right. Loneliness is our origin and epitaph.

There’s been an insidious force in this universe from the beginning, trying to keep us apart from each other.”

“Stop calling me. You don’t care about any of these things and I certainly don’t either. You will not find answers in clinging to dust-covered, useless relics you collected searching for the thing that is you.”

Life was not an anomaly. Only a bad joke.

“I thought you would never get home,” she said like always. “A butterfly landed on my hand, and I thought it was you. But it wasn’t. It was just a butterfly.”

I looked back behind me and my father was trying to look inconspicuous as he stood behind a mailbox sipping a cup of coffee. When he saw me looking at him he winked and gave me a thumbs up.

And when you touch me it’s not like the other boys touch me. You touch me like, I don’t know, like good philosophy.”

Her white dress glowed with the ferocity of an atomic bomb.

That is the curse many of us carry, I think: we wander the earth looking for ourselves and instead we find the quiet girls, the looking-for-love girls, and we fill the blank spaces with who we think they should be.

but I couldn’t help but get to thinking she didn’t love me as I was me but the me that I had the potential to become.

In the dark hollow throat of the CAT machine I saw the face of God. I was not very happy about this.

“I’d be happy if people stopped telling me how unhappy I must be.”

I told him that in the singing grass I saw a deer tear out the heart of a cougar, but instead of staying away he went out there to paint.

Because I said to him once, when we first met, “all writers are liars,” like a badge of honor, and I’ve never managed to escape it since.

He slouched in a chair in the corner of the room underneath a portrait of his last ex-girlfriend, flowers spurting out of her decapitated head. He looked up at me with bug eyes that bit like teeth and he smiled.

When you’re a writer, you can only use words like serpentine and aberrant once in a lifetime. “So” and “very” are pointless modifiers. The road to hell is paved with adverbs. If you ask your friends to read your work, they’ll never tell the truth.

And if you’re artistic and attractive and enigmatic, people will fall in love with you at the most inconvenient of times.

I ate the heart. I think that’s when I realized this was never my story.