The sun rises and casts its bright gaze across the molten landscape. The fires of the battle before still burn, fallen bodies drying out in the heat and drawing scavengers to the smoking field. Barren from the war, nothing grows here and no one moves. Everything is dead except memory.
The music is near forgotten, the song a whisper on lips that never dared to speak the secret, save only in dreams behind teenage walls and pinup lovers with eternal voices long dead. I silently lament these lost days. what was the point of growing up, if I’m still alone?
Jane stepped into the circle. The early morning light filtered through the trees. The stones she had arranged on the forest floor marked the points on her brother’s compass, allowing her to face in the four directions and call upon her goddesses with a wave of her willow shorn wand.
The man sits in front of the tombstone crying. A young girl holding a bouquet of flowers joins him. She reaches out to place a consoling a hand on his shoulder, but her hand passes through him. There’s nothing there, just two ghosts mourning the accident that took both lives.
The beast looked back at her with cold, dead eyes. She had thought maybe there was still a human in there somewhere, but now she wasn’t so sure. Even when he reached out to her, his fingers grazing the swell of her breast in curiosity, all she saw was zombie.
It’s gone now, the big empty warehouse where the raves were held at. They say it was the vampires that spoiled all the fun, but personally I thought it was the drugs, altering our minds so much we thought we were meant to sparkle and drink the blood of others.
I was the biggest disappointment back in ’77. Instead of following my father into construction as expected, I enrolled in Lady Zevon’s School Of Dance. And there I fell in love with another student. A boy. Oh, heaven forbid and hang me upside down. But my God, he could kiss.
I saw her on the forest edge, a fawn girl shimmering from the morning dew on her skin. At first I thought her an animal, but with bow drawn I realized she must be a daughter of Gods, a lithe naked creature with antlers peeking through her long white hair.
I’m still in a state of denial. I refuse to believe the truth placed in front of me. Is this the way it always happens perhaps? First darkness, then light, then the throne before our eyes, so bright, yet unblinding in its reveal of all our shortcomings. Heaven, I’m afraid.
The dragon sleeps now, his hunger held by the sacrifice left for him. He did not feed on the offering. There was something about her tears, a defiance in her eyes saying this would not be her fate. She would not be food for the gods. She would ride them.
Author Paul D. Aronson shares some works in progress and the writing process.