Month: April 2016

Some nonsense for the road

Listening to songs about

Moving to a romantic city out there and spreading love across sunrises and sunsets 

Is like grasping at skydivers because 

Life’s a station where stationary is complacent and that boy’s halfway across the nation. Everyone’s chained to their places and wishing never erases 1,000 miles. Or 1,000 smiles at the thought that spring break lasts all year long. A song full of promises, see through rose rainbows straight into lava pits, all of this with no regrets except a tightening of the chest. It’s hard to express how love often forgets. If absence makes the heart grow fonder, maybe then it’s good to wander, into crimson skies where tired eyes turned to say their last goodbyes. A goodbye is hardly over, usually a bad hangover, it’s a heart that’s always sober. Maybe it takes a cold October? Because months pass, pain fades on roller coaster escapades. Everglades? Anywhere where heartaches waves, the ocean sighing starfish blades. If there’s a way to be born and raised, it’s with a shotgun to survive and a map for the ways. Then set it ablaze, where something is is where something stays. 

On By LilyAnne Rice9 Comments

Small Things

So I found this from two years ago and decided to type it up, even though it’s admittedly a sad attempt at teen fiction, I’m literally keeping it for a single line – “Small things for one person aren’t the same as someone else.”

–

The moon’s really bright tonight, hopefully he’s not a vampire.

Rose rolled her eyes at her best friend Kristine’s text. She was sitting on the couch when she replied, her leg bouncing up and down from nerves.

Uh, yeah, I think you’re getting vampire and werewolf confused.

Whatever. Hopefully he’s not either one. Or a frog, either. This was followed by a string of frog emojis and crowns, which was then followed by a series of lips emotes and a winky face.

Rose was about to reply when she heard his pick-up pull into the guest spot outside, so instead she grabbed her jacket and headed out the front door.

There he was in the pick-up, anything but a werewolf, vampire, or frog. Rose didn’t really know what he was, not to her anyway. He was just Sean.

Some might say that fate would have it that in a chemistry class of 400 people they’d sat next to each other. Well, lately she’d been thinking that if really was fate she’d like to blow up fate with a bunsen burner.

Because in that class they’d learned about mixed properties and Sean had been helpful in explaining that to her but he was really a master of sending mixed signals.

“It’s nice to have a friend in a class like this,” his words from lunch earlier that week jackhammered around in her head as they got out of the car and started out on the path. She wished the words would shut up so she could hear more important things, like the possible approach of rabid wolves or bears. Or what he was saying.

“But you said you didn’t like Blink 182, right?”

She was partially paying attention to his question, partially second guessing why they’d thought it would be cool to come out on a nighttime walk in the creek bed behind her house. She was glad the moon was so bright. Because the path was not. No, with the overhanging tree branches and the shadowy twist in the roads, it was anything but bright.

“Well, no, I said I just didn’t really know any of their songs. Just that one they always play on the radio,”

He chuckled. “Which one?” How was it even fair to the rest of humanity for his green eyes to be that bright even at night? She was pretty sure her poopy brown eyes were not having the same effect. It’s nice to have a friend… Friends? Was it because her hair was flat and straight and her eyes didn’t shine in the dark?

Oops. That nighttime daydream again. She snapped out of it. “Oh, it’s that popular one. They played it at my high school graduation. It can be sad, depending on where it’s played, I guess.”

“At your graduation? At mine they played Pomp and Circumstance.”

“Yeah, yeah, well they played that too. I mean after that. The Little Things?”

“Oh! You mean All The Small Things.”

“There we go! The small things.”

She sang the start of the opening verse then he joined in and they didn’t stop until they reached the end. “Say it ain’t so, I will not go…”

She was a little less worried about rabid wolves now because chances were they would be scared away by their terrible rendition.

After they stopped, just back to talking, she couldn’t help but notice both their hands were shoved into the pockets of their own jackets.

Continue reading “Small Things” →

On By LilyAnne Rice7 Comments

The Last; again

My first attempt at found poetry on a rainy sickly afternoon. 

They kissed and 

His breath smelled of wine 

God said nothing to her 

A secret war

My body. 

He showed me his life. 

Unfortunate, alone. 

No one 

A vineyard to die 

Then only after 

At once 

Cry 

She repeated. 

Left alone. 

He said, I have no right to you. This will be the last, again.   

On By LilyAnne Rice12 Comments

Upside Down Rain

This is the “after” of a story I’m slowly slowly writing right now, composed in the notes on my iPhone. Maybe tomorrow morning I’ll wake up and realize this was junk, but for now it felt good.

–

A few weeks later she was going home late at night. Her hometown, familiar. She took the long way to the parking lot. It was silent and the clouds covered the stars. She imagined where other people were. One boy was probably a few streets down, playing basketball or whistling in the night air. Another was holding someone else’s hand under the stars, falling in love with all the ways that girl was special. And he, he was asleep. A different time zone might as well have been a different world. But she looked up, and remembered they were all under the same night sky. It brought her a little bit of peace, knowing that. He wasn’t there beside her though. She was all alone in this crazy thing called life, just because of circumstance and the miles on a map. She wanted to bend the rules, jump through time and space and whatever was in her way. But she couldn’t. So she just sent up a prayer through the clouds that one day she would be happy. She had been standing still without knowing and the sprinklers turned on on the grass. She didn’t care. She stood there in the upside down rain and closed her eyes and breathed the air and clasped her hands tight because she wasn’t ready to let go. Maybe she’d be holding them together for a long, long time. And for a long, long time she stood there in the sprinklers. But eventually she adjusted the straps on her backpack, brushed her hair back, and walked back to her car in the glowing parking lot. She put the keys in the ignition and drove back home. Although now, she didn’t know where that was.

On By LilyAnne Rice4 Comments

Broken Moon

The young rabbit grazed on the ocean grass, silhouette lit by the full moon, making the black hair look gray in the silver light. Its little nose and little whiskers twitched as its mouth hovered speedily over its meal. Its brothers and sisters were somewhere munching in the field, too, but way beyond, still hidden in the more dense thickets of grass. The sea water lapping near their furry paws frightened them. This young rabbit was brave, though, and like the feeling of the breeze on his fur.

Suddenly the rabbit’s head flicked up, whiskers tense. He stood stone still, anticipating. He could sense something, in his tail, through his tiny body. Seconds passed and nothing happened, so he let his guard down, nose bouncing up and down once more as he ate the grass.

Then once again, every muscle in his body tightened. His eyes rose toward the sky.

The moon, ripe and yellow, shrunk. Like a telescope retracting, it wound down, down, waning until it was a pinprick of light in the sky. The ocean trembled and the breeze whipped angrily across its surface.

The pinprick of light in the sky exploded. Confetti ribbons of bright white streamed through the night sky – but only just for a second. Just a second of starlight tendrils, bursting from the dot of light into a terrifying symphony of lights kaleidoscoping through the sky. Then the moon quickly regained its composure and grew back to normal size.

The rabbits hid in their holes and didn’t come out until morning. The few people who had been awake late enough to see the sky on fire were dismissed as crazy or imagining things in their sleep.

But they knew what they had seen. For just a few moments, the moon was broken.

On By LilyAnne Rice10 Comments

Down to the Wire

She knew that she was going to fall from the start but sometimes she liked to imagine tightropes were endless.

But they call it a high-wire for a reason so she kept tiptoeing along.

Eye level with the crowns of sky-scrapers, she was on top of the world, saying hello to the eagles and the airplanes.

Until she forgot the advice of the old adage –

Don’t look down.

Busy city, criss-cross streets and rail-road tracks of realities – her life down below.

There was a fine line between what could and couldn’t be and she had toed it long enough.

So she went crashing down, waving  into office windows and tugging at leaves on far reaching branches, because even as she dove down to her demise she refused to let it go all the way.

For a long time she would need to remind herself from so high up, you’re the last to see the sun rise and the first to see it set.

She’d climb another rainbow ladder there someday, on point to get her head lost in clouds and moonbeams.

But it would take a long time.

From that tightrope in the sky she realized

only when you’re so close to the sun do you see how far away you are from the ground.

On By LilyAnne Rice10 Comments

Skip a Beat

She was always dancing with her could have beens to the steps of a beautiful disaster. The lyrics to those songs kept her up at night, playing over and over. Could have been our first slow dance, could have been walking down the aisle, could have been dancing all night till the sun came up.
She liked his moves because he danced to the rhythm of what could be, a two-step –
a new step –
she’d danced once before but hadn’t in a while.
He looked at her like she was doing the fox trot perfectly still.
She didn’t want to miss a beat or step on any toes so she never asked him where he learned to dance. Nothing scared her more than the thought of radio silence, that she’d get his song stuck in her head but she would change the station, and she’d remember the words but not the tune.
So she stayed silent and moved her hips to the sound. The sound of his laughter in a far away note, taunting her to shake her way into the future like she had a clue.
She wanted eight counts into his heart but the beat was too fast and if she tried she might fall, so she watched from the sidelines as strangers asked to guide her on the floor but she refused. She was too busy in the echo of the could be’s that side-stepped around in her head, the hopes of the one-day memories. He was catchy and she had caught him, but in the back of her mind she knew that the day was coming where she would have to let him go.

On By LilyAnne Rice10 Comments