Ninety Seconds To Midnight

Ninety Seconds to Midnight

They displayed her to us, a sweet, battered doll. Coy and precarious, they called her uncertainty a victory. She was small and quiet. As I looked at the savaged girl, I watched her wringing her hands. A tired young woman, shifting and slightly broken, she was like a pink petal tugged and battered by the swift dark undertow of privilege. They promised us that she would return to the world what was stolen from her, and the absurdity of it curled my lips into a snarl. The stupidity of the insult drove a stake into my chest. but the subtle cruelty of the display was lost like the years trailing raggedly behind her. If they saw my tears, I do not know, but they bled like acid and burned as I swallowed each one.

I marked the time: it was ninety seconds to midnight.

© JM Tiffany, 3.16.2024

Vocabulary Definitions - Lesson 1

Radiant – An all-consuming flame. Sadistic – The song of hope. Insecure – A knot undone. Atrocious – A gilded lie. Forlorn – The tattered truth. Rejected – The emperor’s new heart. Loathing – A familiar face. Vulnerable – An exit wound. Horrified – The look in your eyes. Ruins – What’s left of us. Unresponsive – A shovel full of dirt. Blessed - The dead. © JM Tiffany

Red Bones

In my vision I flew as I fell and rode a great gray wolf through a vortex of smoldering antlers. My beast steered my thoughts until, like water in milk, we merged and became a singular ghost rushing like wind through the dreaming wilds. I was drawn to a sullen sound and at once saw a young boy’s skull hanging from ghastly strings. There was a mournful chanting nearby, a soft feminine voice that sang wordlessly in the night. I found its source: a young girl who was rinsing her ruddy hands in a starlit pool. She was bare, save for a wooden mask, its brow carved with a pale moon. Nearby, amid the vines and briarwood, a black bear lurked, but the girl showed no signs of concern. I saw then eight arrows of yew, each with a glinting green obsidian point, arranged like the spokes of a wheel on the ground. I looked again at the boy’s skull and saw that it hung amidst his red, excarnated bones. A gentle breeze rocked his remains in the gnarled tree, each bloody bit bound there by his own sinews to its misshapen branches. It seemed to me that he sprouted like macabre fruits from the sleeping, twisted limbs. His luminous flesh caught the light of the full moon and glowed dully in the darkness as the masked girl began toiling to stretch it tightly over a simple wooden rack. With her hands, she caressed his lovely ruin, and smeared the taught flesh with the boy’s own brains. This she did to tan and preserve his hide, but also to work his memories into the skin. “I will wear you in the Spring,” she lamented, “and you will rise again as the Sun.” I think that she wept beneath her mask, though its rough wooden visage was unchanging and stern. When she resumed her singing, I heard the rough sound of ursine breath behind me. As snow began to fall, I opened my eyes. © JM Tiffany 1.2.2024

Vampires

Light as windborne leaves, you were soft and pale as down, your cornsilk mane a midday fire that framed haunted wells of profound blue. You were prettier than anything I could have hoped for and crueler than anyone I’d ever known We had both been torn from the bellies of our worlds and met at the bottom, on the cutting room floor, with scalpels in our hands. Pain filled our cups and told us stories of happier days as we drank each other like vampires in the dark rooms of our hearts. It was no secret that I was a mad dog, a stoned stray, feral and desperate, and you howled with me in the canyons of my wounds. I clawed at your back as you drove a stake through my plans and I paid you, happily, for the pleasure of losing my mind. I carved your name in my chest. Parts of you were stitched into the closing gaps, like buckshot buried in the scabbed-over graves of a few brilliant moments. Hot breath and cold kisses. Love-drunk and wine-stupid. Children making children in the shadows of oblivion. © JM Tiffany

Box of Charms

A pale shadow in gossamer draped, old wings tattered and fluttering. A fay ghost trembling, she whispers that I am not I, just a box of charms: old brass and polished stones, all witch bones and memories tethered to feathers.

Her fluttering dreams batter my heart, this ardent jewel of glowing art.

Resplendent she sits, a caged bird singing songs about love, her aching breaths all sweet odes to pain.

I write her name in notes that dance along resonant strings, and spell my own in blood.

She carves strange runes into living bones, her wispy fingers tracing the pink of my lips.

We lock velvet arms in delicate arcs as we frame our presence with spidery limbs and weave these dreams that we become.

© JM Tiffany

Nexus

Wet ribbons of highway pass asphyxiated exits as noise pulsates from the dashboard.

The undulating interstate winds into damp darkness toward a vagant interworld nexus.

Hypnotic neon lights pulse, like vampiric dream-serpents of mind-killing urgency.

We pass under aqueducts where new gods form like obscene angels.

© JM Tiffany