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Daily Deviation
Daily Deviation
October 20, 2011
Retrograde by *Packeranatic. Suggester writes: "This Science Fiction piece does a marvellous job of maintaining some beautiful abstraction to go along with an appealing voice."
Featured by BeccaJS
Suggested by DailyLitDeviations
Literature Text
Scents from inside the suit intertwined their intentions with the sights of tangled and tessellated hair illumed by firefly LED's, spiking my circulation with memories and murmurs of dopamine.
I took her by the gaze; she steered her sight away from mine. I led her through a glance that involved no scuffling of hands.
She was one of two wayward strangers passing in the cosmos; two separate glances met as objects in motion tending to motion. People aren't the same however.
Drifter was the term we were known as, people cast off of vessels and ships, mostly by accident, condemned to trudge about the universe until starvation kicked in or their oxygen-starved filters were finally incapable of operating. My unplanned departure from the mysteriously flaming vessel, Surveyor, had left me careening towards the scorching of the sun.
The communications spoon-fed me the same spitting static and ever constant resonant hum of electromagnetism. Hers must be damaged. Which wasn't all that uncommon. The micrometeoroids fed on us like gnats, their holes sealed up with a layer of gel immediately on impact. Just how the suit design was intended to operate.
We didn't need communications; her expression was that of one knowing and who admitted and was committed to their fate. I was still terrified of the thought. I hate the sun.
The days on most civilizations were spent brewing a rivalry with the native sun, to see if the star had survived another night without my swelling and underwhelming opposition. It is like a race, the sun laps me while I lapse, as tiredly and resignedly I rest. Parting glares and glances at dusk are commonly shared and misinterpreted between us in streaks of blighted crimson, cyan, and maroon.
Ahead of her I know she only sees the citronella-stained pale mauve and navy of the hemming of unraveling nebulae, and she is acquiescent of this fact and resigned to be reigned by stars.
We are a momentary retrograde of celestial bodies, then she has passed by. I can no longer block out the sun with my thumb at arm's length. I know that it would cover her figure from the nebulae.
The adrenaline rush begins to lessen and the cortisol continues to burgeon like embalming lighter fluid in my veins and vagus nerve. The ever-present resonant hum chanted cicada-like rites over the buzz of static. I stared down the sun as I marched toward self-evident immolation.
I took her by the gaze; she steered her sight away from mine. I led her through a glance that involved no scuffling of hands.
She was one of two wayward strangers passing in the cosmos; two separate glances met as objects in motion tending to motion. People aren't the same however.
Drifter was the term we were known as, people cast off of vessels and ships, mostly by accident, condemned to trudge about the universe until starvation kicked in or their oxygen-starved filters were finally incapable of operating. My unplanned departure from the mysteriously flaming vessel, Surveyor, had left me careening towards the scorching of the sun.
The communications spoon-fed me the same spitting static and ever constant resonant hum of electromagnetism. Hers must be damaged. Which wasn't all that uncommon. The micrometeoroids fed on us like gnats, their holes sealed up with a layer of gel immediately on impact. Just how the suit design was intended to operate.
We didn't need communications; her expression was that of one knowing and who admitted and was committed to their fate. I was still terrified of the thought. I hate the sun.
The days on most civilizations were spent brewing a rivalry with the native sun, to see if the star had survived another night without my swelling and underwhelming opposition. It is like a race, the sun laps me while I lapse, as tiredly and resignedly I rest. Parting glares and glances at dusk are commonly shared and misinterpreted between us in streaks of blighted crimson, cyan, and maroon.
Ahead of her I know she only sees the citronella-stained pale mauve and navy of the hemming of unraveling nebulae, and she is acquiescent of this fact and resigned to be reigned by stars.
We are a momentary retrograde of celestial bodies, then she has passed by. I can no longer block out the sun with my thumb at arm's length. I know that it would cover her figure from the nebulae.
The adrenaline rush begins to lessen and the cortisol continues to burgeon like embalming lighter fluid in my veins and vagus nerve. The ever-present resonant hum chanted cicada-like rites over the buzz of static. I stared down the sun as I marched toward self-evident immolation.
Literature
On the Subject of Finding X
I'll have you know that I've just spent a considerable amount of time searching for x. I've looked in all of the places that x might plausibly reside, and even in some places where I assumed x would never be caught dead, but I've come up empty-handed.
I checked to see if x was under the bed, perhaps hidden among old school notes and forgotten art projects and lonely orphan socks. I scoured the closet, checking in every pocket of every innumerable pair of jeans, which, trust me, is no mean feat. I screened for x in every drawer of every dresser in every room, but it was all to no avail.
I proceeded to flip through all of the books that have
Literature
Subduction
We drip into October
with the silence of spiders
heavy in our chests,
our hearts curling in
on themselves like
leaves in autumn.
Lungs unfurl into the
stillness;
there is a breath, a whisper--
This dying wind whistles
through empty throats,
as if to murmur a warning,
perhaps, that we threaten
to become
earthquakes
along our hipbones.
Literature
Housewarming
She opens windows
in their wintery home, hopes
to let the cold out
when it doesn't work
she scratches matches to life
and burns the house down.
Suggested Collections
Featured in Groups
A flash fiction story I wrote for 365 Tomorrows.
Comments55
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Overall Vision Originality Technique ImpactHoly shit there's some awfully poetic writing here.
On content
This piece is highly abstract and buried in language so it took me almost and entire red through to realize what was going on. A science fiction piece where people who are blown or cast off ships careen through the ether endlessly to die. It's a flash vignette of the nonverbal interaction of two drifters similarly condemned passing by one another. This is a marvelously unique concept, it's heartbreaking and terrifying and interesting and honest. All good writing starts with a good concept, a good message, a good idea. You certainly have that here and I congratulate you.
On diction
You could creatively linebreak this and make this a poem. "tangled and tessllated," "fed on us like gnats," "laps me as I lapse" etc it's all good shit. I feel like this quality detracts from the piece a little bit in making the first three paragraphs of the poem fairly abstract. It's not really until the fourth, or maybe halfway through the third, paragraph until the reader, or this reader anyway, fuly understands what's going on.
"Their holes sealed up" is a little bit misleading, makes it sound like you're talking about holes in the meteorites (especially when you reinforce it with talking about the suits, it reads as though you're comparing similarities), rather than the holes the meteorites leave in the suits.
On English
Any particular reason for your decision to relagate a lot of single sentences to their own paragraph? I see how the flow of the reading is somewhat fragmented, talking about differenct subjects every other sentence or so, but even in places where you have a sentral focus, like the "I took her" and the "she was one of" lines, those could easily be condensed into a unique paragraph and give this piece less of a, if not only visual, outline-ish or note-taken feel.
I really can't critique much on the content or language, I think this piece is perfect to me in a lot of ways. What I can do, however, is point out a few sentence structure things that I've noticed:
"Which isn't that uncommon" needs a subject, you could mate it to the preceding line as a participial phrase with a simple comma (which is how it reads anyway) to remedy that.
"Just how the suit was intended" is the same way, could be joined as a parenthetical phrase to the preceding sentence with a semicolon.
On conclusions
The ending is really good. My inbox has been full today of prose that wraps up in complete and pleasing ways, this is no exception. Solid beginning, solid middle, solid end. Well written and poetic, this is a remarkable deviation. Thanks for sharing!
Also ignore the star rating, rating critiques is stuuuuuuupid.