fiction 

nocturne

 

The sad thing about flowers is that they only bloom for a short amount of time. Intense fragility. The author notes that the irises are in bloom along the Hudson. 

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They spout frills, and desperate, curling flounce toward the heavens, pressing ever upward, above the wrought-iron rails at periphery of the garden. Are they pious? They defy gravity, slaking their thirst for sky. Their violet hues are celestial and feminine. Their form articulates the call of not the sorcerer, but the mystic- the midnight cantor. She sways, with the aria of the moon, wistful and mercurial. In the folds of her dress, a mystery that smells like shortbread cookies. A tissue paper world sighs, illumined in her soft gaze, then reassumes its illusion of concreteness.

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A feeling hovers, hazily- what is it called? It feels a Kanye West duet with Maria Callas.

 

Smoke in glass, a dancing girl. Faceless, her hips twist and curl, she moves and moves. The music pulls her like magnets, but she doesn’t care. She flicks her hair and keeps time, shimmying her shoulders without making eye contact.

 

The tissue paper world flutters, less real than ever.

The machine continues.

The clouds and the steel are all that remains.

 

The grass dissipates, like so many sheets of astroturf being rolled away.

Wind whips.

Nothing but the beating heart and the wild spirit.

Clouds, steel, gathering,

the pulse.

The music.

 

The flowers howl while the accelerationists offer a golf clap.

 

Lit from within and without, the tissue paper world careens on, a pretty, papery carousel ambling through the mechanized void, as the clouds whirlpool, to the beat of Power. An older couple reclines in the velvet couch of a horse carriage. Slow, so slowly, the horse clops below the street lamps, quietly hammering the cobblestones further into the earth, as the couple remarks on the new seasonal shuttle bus from [neighborhood], and their lunch sandwiches (cilantro, on a toasted swiss!). A Park Avenue heir on a longboard skids to a halt, and his boys catch up, kicking their boards up. Nah man - - invite- - Sarah’s not - - dare you- - 

 

The irises flutter and still, fade in, resume their former ontolgy as ornament.

 

Roots that had been clutching the soil, with unbearable thirst, screeching, grappling for mortal survival, reassume their ontology as gentle straws, through which the irises suck quietly on the nourishing milk of the earth. Clouds, no longer wraiths of the cosmos, reassume their ontology as prim puffs. 

 

The grass reappears, and the beat fades into the distant, like the M.D. who has drawn his stethoscope away from the chest of the patient to look them in the eyes again. The tissue paper world reassumes its concreteness once again.

 

The author gazes upon the irises again as the carriage clops diligently away, through pools of orange sodium vapor mist. She does one long, slow developpe a seconde in the intersection, melting into it, then turns away again down 5th Avenue. Maybe it’s more like a James Whistler painting, she thinks, as the light changes, and suddenly the scene dissolves into so many flung specks of material gold, patterning the surface of the deep cerulean Nocturne.