OCEAN
ben spivey
The friction of my tongue slipping was damp. There was a beckoning noise behind the only door into the room. My wife sat in a swing that hung from two tight bolts in the ceiling, swinging her feet in motion, laughing. The noise was a small static like a radio, or television left on a dead channel. From the thinnest covering of my skin I read the directions of how to colour the walls with shapes and stones. Stacking the stones, encasing bones in walls. Applying the correct colours from my wife's hands, her jaw, her thinning muscles. Bugs carpeted the single flickering light on the ceiling, curling the silence between thinking a word and speaking it. We looked at the door we've never opened. When the stones were stacked, and the colours were correct she pushed my left hand through the spectrum of colours, and the standing stones. My fingers, palm, and wrist made it between the friction of the stones. I felt the stinging salt air filling the new cuts. I felt the sun's warmth. The static noise behind the door grew louder. My wife thrust my shoulder, and shoved my waist into the stone's cracks as water slithered under the door, and rose quickly. My blood tickled her toes, mixing with the colours running down the walls. You're almost there, she said. My bones cracked and crushed in the flux. Lastly she pulled my tongue from my mouth, she kept it balled in a fist. With all of my body reaching, reaching, reaching, becoming compressed in our creation. She swam to the ceiling of that room holding what was left of me as I was filtered through the wall. Under the water she breathed small fast breathes with wide eyes. My body, like pieces of ribbon, twisted in the new breeze; falling onto the piles of people resting on the beach. Bodies trenched in the infinite sand. My wife expanded, and flattened against the room's only light. The water shorted the static sound. She too filtered through the stones, falling over, and into the ocean followed by the colour, the bugs, and my tongue.
Children playing in the sand built castles, and buried mothers.
As a fragment I watched the colours spread until they diluted into the rest of the ocean's blue.
Ben Spivey
www.yourbrainsblackbox.blogspot.com
Log of the S.S the Mrs. Unguentine
Stanley Crawford