Crackers and Cream (A Collection of Short Stories and Poetry)

[Creamery]

I've decided to make a thread for some of my writing/poetry I'd actually be inclined to share; comments and feedback are always welcome (and encouraged)! Prose is usually private; poems are often online elsewhere. Thanks! ~BV, aka Creamery :-)


EMPATHY: VtM-inspired character writing; a closing gift for a campaign.

   The night was still young.

   Smoke hung, low and spiralling, in the suffocating restriction of the Westefalia’s den. It had been a long time since the petite blonde woman perched on the edge of the plasticky vinyl couch had spent time by herself in the camper-van. She seemed in a sort of meditative trance as she went about her routine – nobody rushing her, her friends attending to their needs while she attended hers, a moment of complete calm – but the encroaching anxiety stirred something within her body even in this peace. Her thumb snapped off her stick-on nails one by one – a noise like the breaking of a wishbone. A hiss stirred from the depths of her chest. You’re alone, it whispered, and you are foolish.
The woman’s body twisted violently; her fist slammed down into the table by her side. The pistol on its surface jumped from the impact, along with the ashtray, bezels powdering with a crunch. A chip of glass skittered under one of the many furs on the floor. The sharp noise and tingling pain provided her a moment of clarity. A deep breath. A frown pulled at the woman’s lips, but her hand danced across the table, requisitioning a pair of latex gloves. The pomade – mixed with black box dye – had already been prepared. She began to work the wax through her wavy hair. It would be straighter when she was done.
The repetitive scraping of the comb against her skin diffused into the grainy saxophone playing through the plug-in radio. It had taken most of the past week to come to terms with their situation. She was sure there would be sympathy somewhere; with a sad enough story there always seemed to be. Snakes weren’t fit to punish that kind of sin- but being right, well, it never made it easier.
The squeaking of the van’s sliding door brought her back to awareness. Both the smoldering cigarette and the incense burning in her ashtray were nearly out, and the smoke poured out the opening door, across the empty parking lot. It rolled across the ground, rising against the cool spring air, but the air was too wet for it to survive for long. A familiar face peeked around the door.

   “I didn’t know you were going to hotbox the van,” he quipped, sitting with his legs over the doortrack – his hand tapping down the doorlock to keep it open to air. The woman’s nose wrinkled. She beckoned him forward with a gloved, tarry hand. “It’s my car. C’mere and I’ll fix you up.”

   “I’m 99% sure it’s actually Josh’s car.” The teenager crept forward, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of her, gaze directed determinedly out the sliding door in diligence. Her hands tousled through his forever bleach-damaged hair. She felt a pang of misplaced sadness as she worked.

   “Josh smokes – god, twice as much as I do,” the woman finally sighed as she dipped her fingers back in the pot. “Turn around, please, Jude. It’s rad. Hip, even.” Jude shifted to face her, tilting his chin up, eyes scanning across the various editorials and articles tacked to the back wall of the van. He didn’t smile. He eyed the latest newspaper headline tacked to the sideboard: FAMILY OF THREE KILLED IN CARBON MONOXIDE LEAK. He passed over the finer text. Hard to read, upside-down. The whiteboard in its center had been decorated with window stickers – bats, blood, and little ghosts dancing around its edge. Many of the names on the board were crossed out, with notes specifying locations and connections, and thin string connecting lines of seemingly unrelated people and tacked snippets of paper with strings of information. They bled into each other – CONSTRUCTION, BENEFACTOR, POWER PLANT, TARGET, DEVELOPER, ENEMY, OPPOSITION, FRIEND, PROTEST, MURDER, DISOBEDIANCE, BREACH – not quite enough to be worth looking over without someone’s notes. Over a dozen dreamcatchers littered the wall. The journalist swept her finger across the boy’s lips. The fat was sour and acidic in his mouth. Crimson salt threatened at his waterline. “Keep that on for a sec. I’m going to do your face.”

   Her voice was clipped and somehow foreign to him. The accent was flat – too American, really – and there was a weight about her shoulders as she painted the thick makeup across the young man’s face. The black eyeshadow was metallic and sparkled in the light. It was from her own bag, but generally, she would only wear it herself in situations that required drawing a lot of attention. It surprised her for a moment how quickly they’d used it; Jude had of course put it on occasionally but now she’d caked it onto them both for days. The brush worked across his eyelids. His eyes were closed, and he looked at peace; his chest neither rose nor fell. The woman moved to wipe the fat off his lips with a dark handkerchief. They were tinged purpling-black now, too, like he’d been punched a few days ago but the swelling had dissipated. It was an honest aesthetic. She pressed the eyeshadow brush into his hand and shifted back in the chair, turning sideways to be able to face him with her own legs crossed. The boy’s eyes opened. He took his place, painting lines across her face, a portrait of black and grey smoke around her eyes. She produced a tube of orange eyeliner from her pocket and handed it over to him. There was to be fire alongside the smoke.
Her eyes were turned to the ceiling when the heavy footsteps approaching the van finally stopped. The large man filled the side of the vehicle and shadowed the pair from the parking-lot-lights; a cigarette dangled from his thick fingers and his other hand raised to scratch awkwardly at the stubble on the side of his face. His tongue flicked over his lips. “Tayan,” he questioned thickly, “a light?”

   When Jude’s hands left her face, Tayan turned, hand pushing down to check her pockets. She pulled out her own pack – flicking it open, pulling out two cigarettes, and lighting them both in her mouth. As she extended that hand to Jude, she tossed the lighter with her other; it smacked against Joshua’s palm. He inclined his head appreciatively. “Thanks,” Jude muttered as he took the cigarette from her, nearly drowned out by the flicking of Josh’s lighter. They appraised each other.
   These names of theirs had meant more, once. Tayan bit back the rage that so freely gnawed in the back of her skull; all that work put into building an identity could be destroyed in such a small instant that recognition was hardly worth pursuing anymore. Her hand rose to the to the lanyard around her neck. PRESS ACCESS, it read in blocky print, at inch-long intervals along its ragged fabric. Once, the plastic cardholder had held her press identification, but her name and face were conspicuously missing from its torn plastic sheath.
   The palm-sized card she’d worked so hard for – the easiest way to excuse her nosy behaviour – was more of a hinderance than help. She held her breath. Gavin wasn’t sorry, and that was the worst of it, because he felt he was right - and maybe he was, at least in her opinion, but the road to hell was paved with good intentions, wasn’t it? Her fingers spun the card.
   The picture displayed inside had been replaced by a pair of stadium tickets, placed back-to-back, a grainy black-and-white picture of a wrestling legend peering from the repurposed lanyard. She offered it to Josh. “For you.”

   The large man’s broad, hard mouth cracked into a rare smile, hand raising to cradle the reminder in his palm. Their eyes met. Josh nodded in acknowledgement and slipped the lanyard deep into the pocket of his jeans. His gaze slipped from hers as he brushed past into the van; her hands grasped desperately for the grab-bar as the vehicle lurched under his weight and her feet left the Westefalia’s grungy floor. She hung, grasping for the floor with her tiptoes, as Josh settled. Finally, the engine turned and sputtered to life. When she glanced back at Jude from the doorway, he was already deep in his book, ignoring the pair. Unbelievable.

   Tayan’s snakeskin boots hit the pavement. She moved around the van, checking the side of its solid wall before rounding the front of the vehicle. Josh was elbow-deep in the front console. Her eyes wandered to the lights of the small city up the road from the gas-station parking lot. They’d stopped because the bar was still open. A young man in a leather bomber jacket crested the far edge of the parking lot through the grass and sagebrush alongside the highway; she walked out to meet him. Someone else might have thought he had a pretty face underneath the parking-lot lights. “All good?”
“All good,” he replied brusquely.
“Just one more run.” Optimistic. “Yeah.” It was always professional with Gavin. This adherence to justice There were no words for what she knew of him now. His face was tired; the tightness of his mouth betrayed a glimmering of worry or grief. There was no point in questioning it. The pair returned to the van in a mutually amicable silence. His jaw was wound tight with things better left unsaid.
There was still work to be done.

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

Some projects need to be finished even at the risk of your own life.
Going off-script was always a risk. It was worth it, sometimes, to make the ones closest just a bit more content in this endless cycle of violence. Misjudgement could be terminal. The journalist knew all of these things. Usually, they got by easily enough, directed by the somewhat independent and somewhat aligned interests of the people that they were bound to represent. The kinds of places they came from did not send out futile forces.

It took too long to head into the city. Turning up the radio could only mask so much silence;  every minute on the road made the air feel heavier between them. Just one more push, and they could get the fuck away from all it, at least for a little while. She’d miss them. It was a special thing to have this much trust in people. That hollowed feeling of loss followed her as they reviewed their entry plan. The boys had a target downstairs, because their faces could still be seen out and about, while Tayan and Gavin would make sure the second target didn’t escape from upstairs. Once they were out of the van, it was all automatic movement, feet finding the path they put in place. Deep breaths.

   The tin roof echoed underfoot as Tayan crept toward the breaker box. Gavin was ahead of her – but his feet were against the second-floor fire escape. Jude and Josh were somewhere downstairs. They would mill about for a while– not too long, hopefully – before picking the direction they needed to go to find their own target. She had faith in them. It was up to her to provide the cue.
   “Gavin,” she whispered in the darkness, “is it open?”
   The door handle jiggled a few feet to her right. It was hard to see anything but an outline of him in this half-light; the ambient light of the city was wholly inadequate. She imagined a sparkle of excitement to his eyes that had been recently fading. “It’s open.”
   “Rad. I’ave a light.”
   She heard him shuffle away from the balcony door’s window. Swallowing hard, the woman flicked on the heavy flashlight in her hands. It flickered to life and illuminated the wires in front of her. Her hand swiped forward to cut the phone line with a thin x-acto knife. The artist moved quickly, then, to the breaker box. She bashed the flashlight against its hinges – a few hits all it took – and although the light weakened, it was enough. She pulled the fuses, throwing them to the ground below. Gavin tsked impatiently. The fire escape bounced gently beneath his feet as he waited.
   A scream from inside. “We’re late,” he noted dryly, and she scowled. Her teeth glittered in the light in the way that his eyes had not. It was rare that things went perfectly according to plan these days. “The boys are early,” she growled back. “Found ‘em fast.”

   Gavin threw the balcony door open. The glass of its window smashed against the side of the building. Chunks of glass rained onto the pavement below. The pair advanced side-by-side down the hallway. As they made their way up its length – her flashlight the only illumination – two figures, one huge and one short, emerged from a doorway arguing with each other. Their conversation petered out as they heard movement. Tayan raised the light from the floor. Joshua’s face was painted with gore, and he shone in the light, as reflective and shimmering and pigmented as any powder she could apply to her skin. The hammer in his hands was similarly slick. She took in a long, deep breath as she passed the others, letting the smell of copper and collapse consume her senses. The group followed behind. They all knew the next room number.
   It all happened so quickly, in the end.

   Gavin was faster than any other person she’d seen with occasion to run. As soon as her hand left the creaking door, he leapt across the room, feet slamming into the floor as he stopped himself against the target’s chair. The knife glittered in the beam of Tayan’s flashlight as it pressed against the man’s neck.
   Holding the flashlight steady, she handed it off to Jude, crossing to the filing cabinets at the side of the room and beginning to rifle through them with a much smaller penlight. Joshua approached the table. “Hold him,” Gavin murmured, and the larger man was happy to oblige. Gavin stooped to bind the businessman’s legs and feet to the chair. He was pleading, Tayan thought distantly, but there wasn’t much point in thinking about it. The glittering of tears caught her attention. Her lip curled.

   Gavin usually went about the business of defining the crimes that required this sort of judgement. It was not something that interested her. She tucked away some of the papers more interesting at a glance; if nothing else their replacement would be an inconvenience to the office. The sobs were growing tiresome. Disgust should be rejected – it’s dangerous – but the excuse of hierarchy didn’t seem like a shield. It was hard to justify this sort of action on an individual level; apathy was developed through practise, and it was too easy to revisit the same sobs among masses of dying men in these moments, but that muscle required to slam down the rising dread was, in her, stronger – was always stronger – than the horror. The camera snapped with agonizing light, but there was nothing to document there. This was not for the public to see.
The tension in the room was palpable as the group evaluated their victim.

   He was not particularly impressive. She crossed the room and clipped her bag closed. Stepping behind the desk – now behind the stranger, across from Gavin, who was stood beside the light – she leaned down to whisper into his ear. “There are some very good reasons to be afraid of the dark. But you ignored all those warnings in the back of your mind, so…”
   Her mouth moved down to his neck. Baring down, she tasted the crimson in her mouth, sweet and warm. “Too bad for you,” Gavin concluded, but Jude hissed her name, upset by this turn in events as if the result wouldn’t be the same. She stood her ground, swallowing, but-
Fists slammed down into the man’s face like a hammer. Tayan whipped back as the man’s skull collapsed with a crunching like a nutcracker. She heard a thump of impact as a knife struck the back of the chair – where a head was just seconds before Josh’s intervention – and clawed at her eyes, cloudy with blood and brain, acidic, as she hit the ground. Everyone was talking over each other, but the ringing was louder; the flashlight burned her eyes. Joshua’s hands pulled her by her armpits to her feet roughly. Her nails dug into the backs of his bloodied hands.

   The ease of this kind of work did not make it less difficult.

MIND YOURS
A road has been described to me,
a place to move ahead,
a crossroads somewhere on the road,
promised to ease my dread.

This road is mythed to hold a truth,
tied to its branching tongues.
They say to hold onto my wares,
despite my burning lungs.

When I balk, they assure me,
it’s just over the horizon,
but many miles I have trudged,
and I begin to wizen.

Whenever I profess a doubt,
when’ere I start to gaff,
I search for despair’s company-
they lead me to the path.

I suggest they take my bags,
and haul them in my stead,
but they just laugh and ride away
to leave me there for dead.

So if you see me laying,
in the ditch beside the road,
then I suggest you leave me there,
unless you’ll share my load.

BLOODY DECEMBER
Manic academic
Repressive progressive
Foreseen force majeure
   THERE IS NO CONSEQUENCE.

Partisan season
Chauvinist vocalist
Bad faith raconteur
   KEEP THEM SCROUNGING AND LISTLESS.

Holiday cliché
Unimpressive concessive
and Love of the poor
   CLEAR YOUR CONSCIENCE FOR CHRISTMAS.


PERFORMANCE ANXIETY
I’m overperforming, fully discordant
Drowning in see-saw night sesh sketch struggling
I’ve never known what I was writing
Make it easy, god, please

Bought a language learning pack
Can’t put the sounds to words
So I needed that transcription
To give myself a hope in here

We’re investing in the future
Listening while we work
repeating that I’m well
while my typing hands lurk

I know greetings and goings
How to say where I’m from
I read about street festivals
Other daily humdrum

I try to keep focus,
In a fight against my muse
But my attention slips again
I turn on the local news.

The program’s in English
The prognosis is grim
I’ve defeated my purpose
Again and again

I’m a learner, not a linguist
Thanks for the last time we met
you laughed when I languished
I think it was worth it

I’m underperforming, fully discordant
I never focus fully on my work
Don’t test me without purpose
You know, god, I shirk.

MONOLITH
I step into the arena
To take a walk on the wild side
“Queerness is normalcy
And violence is novel
Or, at least, a morbid fascination of mine.”

But their eyes drift to bare bone
Handprints blistered up high
That surely denies that former assertion
That confident-impulsive deception
I didn’t mean to lie to you.

“So proclaiming it new is a lie
But we’ll call it a walk on the wild side
Acknowledging a taboo
As a part of my life
A glimpse into something inside.”

I was cooked in oil
Caressing down my body
Like your hand on my thigh
Suddenly, higher-
You burned me, I thought.

“There is no point in reflection
I’m here for a fight, after all.”
The sand is hot on the wind
I raise my hand
to shield my blinded eyes.

It’s all sensation, no set duration
I wrestle the grit from my gaze
I find my bearings
Without momentum
and fight the wind toward the stage.

In the end the battle is usurped
By an act of God or the weather
I charged forward still,
Suspecting loss
I could not contain my rage.

A sparkling array of colour
Electricity running over wet sand
A familiar experience, blurred vision
All-white
I crumple to my knees.

They inform me that I’ve lost
When I leave the arena
And I asked if he was dead or not
But I guess it didn’t count.

INCHING TIME
The timer is ticking inside of my mind
I do many things and they’re rarely on time-
Especially considering
All the commotion about it
That’s all me
I can own my self-derision
Though it’s an unhealthy vision-
You know, when I get like this
I only need a moment.

   It only takes a moment.
For all the time I run away
From all the things I need to do-
For all I suffer silently
Caught by death and destruction
Stuck in a loop
Cereal in the bowl in front of me
Trying to eat but we both know I won’t
Because someone put milk on it
I guess I wasn’t watching, really-
It only takes a moment.

   It only takes a moment
To muster the will to write
Bursting through my heart-
Headaches emerge
I reel back from my work
Painful rejection
The picture of productivity in my mind
Interrupted by my restlessness-
I need to clean the apartment,
It’ll only take a moment.

   It only takes a moment.
Five minutes to organize the dishes-
Another twenty to wash them
Methodologically
Weaving in and out of the water
Waiting for you
Like the cat weaving between my legs
Waits for my task to be completed-
But I have other things to do, first
They’ll only take a moment.

   It only takes a moment.
I fear there are too few to go around
For me to achieve my myriad goals-
But when my body goes cold
and the muscles in my skin freeze up
It’s black ice
You never see it despite my warnings
When you fall flat on your back
You’re angry at me, somehow-
But caution would only take a moment.