Every Heart Challenge: Waiting at Home

“Will you marry me?” In the rearview mirror the whites of his eyes only just slipped out from the night's veil. The street lamp dripped its light like a broken waterspout around his parked coupe, all else was darkness. He stared back at the porch continuing his hour-long cycle; door, mirror, door.

After a few minutes he asked the mirror again, “Will you marry… Will you mar… Will you marry me?” That was the one, he realized. His eyes broke course finally, falling into the pit of black at the floorboard.

The world traveled past him like a subway tunnel as he rode his body helplessly into the bedroom. The light from the fixture, clanging below the wild ceiling fan, seemed to have gained wattage tenfold when he dropped it
onto the hushed disaster of a room; a cacophony of clothes, garbage, dishes, and what can delicately be referred to as “other.”

It wouldn’t have kept her, he thought, even if he had been able to say it when he still had the chance, so very, very long ago.

Song and Dance

The soulful licks of the electric guitar’s howl peeled layer after layer from him with each sonorous spank. The refrain had become cliché rhetoric—If lovin’ you is wrong, I don’t wanna be right—but tonight it had been rewritten and plucked from the airwaves by the hand of the Divine.

His insides sizzled as he poured whiskey over the coals of guilt that had grilled hand-squoze patties of self-loath into scorched stones even the dog would turn away.

He rolled down the driver-side window and the slope of angry rain avalanched into his face. The window to her bedroom was the only one with even a whisper of light sneaking around in the great big house. He chanted in his head that her husband would be on another trip in a few days and it would be his own shadow brushing across the curtains, and that was enough; he didn’t
want to be right.

Places

The set doesn't brag; it's not proud enough to lie. The wash of faint light crawls over it with my fingers, X1 through 9 sliding up as if riding a wave to safety.

Lights One is "Black to House," but I always bring up the cue for Places when I first reach the booth. That's why I get to the theatre early, just so I can do it, without one of the actors sullying my moment of Zen.

In an hour it will be ruined by life, born into a world of iniquity, but now--in my moment--the stage and I share a secret, swearing to each other that we will protect this sanctuary no matter what egos threaten to impurify.

A door creaks open below me--a door I haven't exactly "forgotten" to oil--and the stage goes dark; a secretive wink hush-hushing our pact.

Heal, Boy

Rusty was nothing to mess with, to say the very least. He'd been locked up a time or two as he drifted from town to town in his younger years, leaving in his wake a forgotten troupe of little Rustys.

Fierce as he could be--and usually was--the dry, rigid sponge in his heart immediately and permanently softened in the pool of an unfamiliar potion as he settled in to observe the tiny angel whom Patricia had brought into the newly-painted room and placed gently into the low-set, high-barred crib Rusty watched with transfixed wonder. The newborn girl would twitch slightly every few minutes, and Rusty's heart would reflexively spring into an alert pounding, wringing itself with gushing do-or-die palpations for the next few eternal-seeming moments until he realized she was alright.

Patricia was across the house and all he could think was "How could she be away for even a minute?" At the thought, he felt an even stronger connection to the girl, since he had accepted some time ago that he was the odd-man out in Patricia's heart, with not so much as a back scratch in weeks. But now he felt a new purpose and for the first time since God-only-knows-when, he felt his tail dancing behind him and his floppy tongue tingling for a kiss.

Originally posted at http://sixsentences.ning.com/profiles/blogs/heal-boy