Broken Infinities: Slices

Broken Infinities is a bi-weekly experimentation of form in all its versatility. With future posts ranging from stories told entirely through Hallmark cards, bucket lists, and/or the various contents of garbage cans, this blog segment is dedicated to twisting matrices, sticking salt and sugar together in empty space, and anything and everything in between. Here is Katherine Du's second post in this segment, also seen at The Stardust Gazette:

--------------------------------------

Slices

She was the kind of girl who made him wonder who the soldiers really were, the sort of

She had grown too tired. The beeps and the shaking fingers and the murmurs that so often

unsung hero who could make lights flicker from lifetimes of darkness. His memory of her

separated life from death had suffocated her a step too far, a line too deep. She had been

was coarse to the touch, a stubborn thing that remained unmoved as he slid up and

by his side comforting him; there was another operation on the horizon, and he had

around the purpled veins of what had become his being. It was as certain as it was

already begun to revise his will. But when his fingers crumpled like limp, overcooked

inevitable; he needed her the way life needed death. He still remembered that time he

mushroom stems, she knew that the time had come. “You’re okay,” she whispered,

tried so hard to break away. He had taken to mass-reading poetry, flash fiction, horror

reaching her fingers to fill the shadowed spaces between his. “I’m already there,” he

novels, and just about anything else that could take his mind off her for longer than a

replied, and he looked up at her, his violet eyes soaring to a castle she could never

second, but no matter what he did, no matter how many times or how hard he tried to

reach. In that moment he seemed gone, and though she could hear his heartbeat from the

distract himself, she consumed him. She was a violently beautiful disease to him, and her

monitor, though she was living and alive and so much more than anything he could ever

silhouette rose like an awakening starlit mountain in his dreams. Her voice haunted those

be again, she was so afraid she was choking on her own blood, and though she knew it

regions of his subconscious just as much as her face did; her words had always been

was wrong, it was so, so wrong, she marveled for the briefest of moments at the life

especially striking, her pure and unashamed will to live. Most of all, he was drugged

coursing beneath her fingertips. She would not know when she slid onto a sun-dappled

helplessly on the memory of her eyes, those dauntless, ruby-skirted globes of vulnerability

bench in Wayward Park, the five community-grown acres that served as a welcome mat

and unbelievable strength, of the innocence and unspoken hunger she had so carefully

to the hospital. Behind her, two children played war hero on an open patch of grass.

locked away. When he became selfish for her, he became selfish for the musty scent of old

Daylight dripped over their makeshift battlefield, lending it an eerie, veiled quality that

Penguin classics and mocha powder she carried with her wherever she went. He became

made her shiver along with the children’s cries. They stabbed her from the inside out,

selfish for the feel of her coral lips like apple cores under his, soft and sweet and so very

their vitality dulling. Meanwhile, the pungent stench of waffle cones and sweet, dribbling,

far from the reality his father’s departure had flung over him. Above all, he became

licked-clean ice cream reeked and slithered its way into her nostrils. She drowned herself

selfish for the delicious sound of her churning, smoky, fortified voice in his; he was

in the surrounding hum of the park, a messy slew of snapping birds and cell phone

entangled, body and soul, in the space between her mingling breaths and his, an

chirps and smudged and lonely emptiness, and in those blurred, numbed moments, she

enchanted slice of the faraway universe that was theirs and theirs alone.

became beautiful again.

#brokeninfinities #katherinedu