UnderConstruction

Do you ever not feel like yourself?

Do you ever feel—say, fractured into billions of little pieces, just drifting within your own body without purpose?

How about your grief? Is it in check today? Did you put it back in that damned glass jar again? 

I've already warned you of the teeny cracks in that jar. They don't look like much now but if it's weakened that much already I'd hate to see what it will look like in a couple of weeks.

Need a break?

Sit down, please, and listen. Let me tell you what I know.

You put your grief in the jar if you must, poor darling.

I stick mine in one as well.

The Wishing Well

The girl knew of these children, though she had not been one of them.


They were her kin, distant, but all the same she knew who they were.


Deep down, they resembled each other, and her fleeing of July, who was the one to show her the well in the first place.


Back when the well was not as wanting as its children. When the well was good.


July, so lavish with her pain, was what turned the well sour, made the water boil into an unrecognizable mush. Turned the gold to dirt.


In taking what little the well possessed, what gave it the mastery of all its greatness, July took away its good will.


The well could only hope that along with poor, wandering souls, July came back next year with what was rightfully theirs. 


Nameless girl, face so blank, could feel the well's anguish, but felt no pity. It was there, roiling deep in her soul, in the part of her gut that always told her best, but the emotion never bubbled up to the surface.


It sat, just high enough to feel uncomfortable without knowing why.


It was in July's wake that she felt the familiar pull, so strong in her mind's eye that she dreamt once again of the crumbling brick that had once been all she knew.


She held tight to her faithless companion, who also felt such an uprooting of his soul. But he held a strength she no longer did. Years of wear and ruthless persuasion had sculpted her will into a smooth, round pebble. 


She believed soon enough her will would go skipping along the dark waters of her unconscious, and after it had sank, she would follow July's footprints back to the one place she dreaded more than life itself. 


Sometimes she wanted to return, maybe even on her own whims. The well would be pleased, no doubt. 


But along with her, dripping with his own warped loyalty, the boy would return, and he was much too new to this alternate universe to press himself to cool walls once again.


So the girl held fast to his anchoring presence. He did not understand her pain, but he cried along with her.


And though he did not dream as she did, some nights he had terrible dreams of her tears.


p o o r , f o u r