Window Mirror Doorway

Poems and songs about broken hearts never talk about how you don your veil and walk slowly down the aisle gripping that perfect bouquet of peonies just days after you find out he’s cheated on you time and again with a waiter at a roadside diner. A fucking diner! Not even an upscale restaurant, which is all he normally goes to.

Or if they do, it’s not the poems and songs that you happen to know. 

Fuck!

Why are you doing this? Why are you going through with the wedding? Getting married as if nothing is wrong??

This was supposed to be the happiest day of your life! 

You were supposed to see him standing there at the altar and be so full of love it’s damn near bursting through the seams of this too tight dress you only almost lost enough weight to properly fit to breathe in.

You were NOT supposed to hate him so much you want to kill him ten times over!

But everyone who’s anyone is at this wedding, and you’re the bride. This is your day. And you’ll be damned if you let him…

You’ll be damned if you actually do it. If you actually marry the lying, cheating bastard like you were supposed to. Like everyone expects you to do.

Like your mother said you must, when you called her, crying. “He is rich.”

As if all the money in the world could possibly make up for what he’s done.

How do you get out of this?

How do you not walk the rest of the distance down the aisle, and promise to obey that piece of shit as long as the both of you shall live???

Step.

Slow step.

Inch by inch you creep towards your groom. Your doom.

From the corner of one eye you see something strange: A window of the church becomes a mirror that reflects everyone and everything inside the church.

The all start to look like demons. Everyone you’ve known all your life, your groom included. Your Mom, your Dad. Pastor Midler, who baptised you and all your siblings. Everyone!

Then the scene in the mirror changes. You see a castle someplace very wild and green. It’s beautiful.

You can tell the mirror is no longer a mirror. The window has turned into a door.

You take another step. Hesitate. Stop moving.

You look at the man you’re supposed to marry. He frowns.

He can tell something’s wrong.

You toss the peonies over your shoulder into the pews, and turn to run towards the window, mirror, doorway. A portal from this horror to somewhere else.

Through you go.

The bride is gone. Disappeared into a mirror reflects you all inside the church. Turns into a window.

She is nowhere to be seen.

Never found.

Head Hopping

I cannot believe everyone’s just standing here… We’re not doing anything… Why doesn’t somebody do something??! Who..?

The gun in my hand is heavier somehow now that I’ve emptied it. It weighs a ton. I cannot hold it up much longer, but I don’t have to, do I? I got them all, I think. They won’t be coming after me anymore since they are… Oh my God they’re dead I killed them, I killed them, I’ve killed them all!

Somebody call the cops… The ambulance… Help… Help someone what how???

This is not real. This isn’t happening. I didn’t just see… I did not! 

It’s too much I’m gonna be sick! I’m so gonna throw up my lunch… 

This has to be pretend or something. It’s a movie. Someone’s making a movie. There’s no way that it’s real…

Oh my God I hope I didn’t hit anyone else… Oh, Lord, let me have hurt only those who…

Bitch… This is wild. I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s like a movie but it’s not. It’s real. Those are actual human… 

There’s all these bodies around me. Dead bodies… All these people, they were standing like a minute ago and now they’re… I gotta call my mom.

How am I still alive? I was standing right next to someone when they…

I drop the gun.

Hang on… Whose thought was that?

She’s in way too much shock to register the falling of the weapon from her hand at this point. So who thought ‘I drop the gun’?

We all did.

Everyone’s face turns towards me. They’re all looking at me now. Even the ones whose backs are towards where I am. They didn’t turn their bodies, just their heads.

How can they see me?

They do not know that I am here!

I’m head hopping into a moment that already happened without me in the room. I’m studying it. Trying to learn. Understand what happened.

They cannot possibly sense me, or know that I am here, and yet they stare right at me.

This is impossible!

We all thought the thought I drop the gun, they all think at me in unison. My head hurts.

And we all pick it up now.

We all point a gun at you.

And they do. They all point a gun at me now. All the live ones, and the dead as well.

The corpses rise from the floor with guns aimed at my chest.

This cannot be happening.

We all pull the trigger.

Pain.

The world explodes goes black.

Interesting, thinks the head hopper who hopped into my head hoping to find out how I ended up dead. 

Interesting, yet quite, quite impossible.

Are you sure? We all think at him now.

Legends Do Not Die

He is on the ground. Bleeding.

His legs are useless. He drags himself forward with his hands.

Desperately tries to get away.

He realizes at last that there is no hope. No escape.

And just as he had won…

He turns to look at her. She approaches from behind. A beautiful young woman dressed in gray, and bleeding from a thousand cuts that will leave her forever scarred all over her face and everywhere on her body. 

“You cannot destroy me,” he says. “Legends do not die.”

“True. Legends do not die,” she replies. “But the people behind them do.”

She raises her weapon. Shoots.

The energy of the weapon enters his brain.

He dies. 

“Granma! Granma!” shouts a little girl. “You lived when he was alive! What was it like? What was he like?”

“Like nothing you could ever understand, coming from the safety of this world since then… Come. Celebrate the hero. The man who saved us. Thankfully, that is all you need to know about him or his times.”

“Granma,”  says a young man. “You have never told us how you came by all your scars.”

A shadow passes over Granma’s face as she remembers the nights before the battles that he won. The days always thereafter. 

“And I never will,” she replies. “Come. Let us celebrate a legend.”

They, and the rest of the world with them, rejoice. 

Father Wind

Father Wind was blowing in from the North.

Father Wind was fast and strong.

All the women ran to hide. In caves. In basements of big buildings they had built solely in the hopes of keeping themselves safe from Father Wind.

All but one.

One woman stood proud in the middle of the Market Square. She simply waited for Father Wind to reach her, which did not take long.

This woman, Leija, she knew that it was time for her to have a child. She had seen it in a dream, and the dream had told her that the child that would come would one day kill Father Wind. 

Leija stood her ground. And Father Wind gave her a child. And the child grew.

And the child slew Father Wind.