Tag Archives: Angels

Confessions, Experimental, Other Places, Space, Streaming

Zippers on Donuts, Cathedrals on Mars

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Cathedrals on Mars.

Sure, I read Bukowski. He’s good. To me he’s good. I got to be in the right mood, though. Some people hate him. He’s a little rough. But he tells it as he sees it. Told it as he saw it.

I was really into Henry Miller in my 30s, maybe 40s. He’s tougher to read. A lot of French in those Tropic books. He had an extensive vocabulary and I had notebooks filled with words that I didn’t know the meaning of. But I learned. I wrote them down and looked them up. Now I forget. I have no idea where the notebooks are.

I was reading Tropic of Capricorn long ago in a motel in northern New Mexico, I think. It may have been Northern Ireland. It was a gray and blue evening, the dusky sky being the color of a human bruise. I don’t know why, or maybe I just don’t remember, but there was a lot of sadness in that night. I think I was supposed to be somewhere, but I wasn’t there. I probably had let someone down again. Despite myself always being let down by the same others.

I had wandered off again all lopsided and loony because I never could find a place I fit into. I was never comfortable in any space but my own, that I made my own, away from the mad world and its defining rules and painful pinchers and suffering structures and caustic cubes and devices and policies and directives and common senses and lanes and boxes and pews. The gods especially, had too many rules.

I was never good at following along with all that. The only thing I was ever good at was being alone and thinking about things, writing thoughts down and looking up at the stars and falling in deep love with a girl from that green Tennessee. But even in that I am rough around the edges. I was born tarnished, perhaps. I always have a tint of unwanted patina upon my living being. I’m like a wormed apple or a brown banana or a stuck turnstile in the subway tubes of the gaseous underworld.

The people of the world. I often cannot stand them. I don’t want to join them and cheer for the idiots. I don’t want to put frauds on pedestals. I don’t want to wave flags in favor of death. I don’t want to buy into the latest and greatest because it really isn’t all that great. Most of the time.

My rocket always comes around from a sweet, lonely trip to the dark side of the moon to see the light in her ocean eyes back down there on blue marble Earth. There’s always that desire to return to love.

I also like going to the cathedrals on Mars. It’s a fantastic getaway. The best is San Sarro on the Boulevard Elliptical Wave. It’s the one right across the sandy, windy, partially upturned square from that famous Martian donut place — The Red Vibrato Hole — they have donuts with zippers on them, edible zippers, candied zippers that melt in your mouth, and you can open the donut up and look inside at all that delicious jam or cream, like having your wife for sex dessert. The Red Vibrato Hole is more of a sweet café than just a regular donut shop there on the Boulevard Elliptical Wave. The coffee is very good, maddening good, and I like to just sit there by a thick window and look out at sandstorms and ancient ruins and the people who wander there are just better. Their priorities on Mars are more aligned with my own thinking. Most of the time.

It’s hard to breathe sometimes, though. The wind, the dust, the cold in the summer, the heat in the winter. The last sip of my coffee is always bittersweet. I must get back to Earth to cook spaghetti and meatballs for the prophets and all their wives. It’s usually something like that that calls me away. I always tip my waiter well. He’s always so nice but has weird eyes that make him look evil. But he’s not evil. His name is Bruce. Sometimes the ones who don’t look evil are the ones you should watch out for. Why are they trying to be so perfect? Is it all just a pleasant disguise? The sheep are so easily won over by the fake pleasantries and promises and chilled buckets of hate.

I saw some angels swimming in space on my return trip. The captain alerted us to their presence and said we should look out the window for a “real treat.” The angels were glowing like Los Angeles and soaring like glittery whales in the ocean on Christmas. They sang a similar song. I turned off my overhead light and rested my head against the ship’s inner hull on a small pillow the color of cranberries. I had a dream of someone shaving and cleaning cobs of corn at the same time. I hope the people who eat that corn don’t confuse shaving cream for butter. I think it would taste like soap. There must have been something weird in that donut to make me think of such odd things. Fucking Bruce. Whatever or not. I have always been weird and misaligned with the real world down there. I hold my breath as we descend.   

By

Aaron Echoes August

Independent content creator, author, former print and digital journalist, and trying really hard to be a diligent husband. I am the publisher and editor of Cereal After Sex, an eccentric online journal/magazine focused on social commentary and fiction with an unpredictable edge. I reside in Tennessee, US.

Fiction, Haunted Light, Short Stories

Refrigerated Dreams (Act 4)

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The boy from the refrigerator was perched upon a steel beam like a vulture high above them in the old shoe factory. His slick black hair was more slick than usual. The dead eyes of alien blue that punctuated his pale face swirled like a spiral arm galaxy as he looked down at them. He cocked his head in an odd manner as he listened to them talk beneath him. Adam Longo recognized the boy as one of them that was there when they locked him in the old refrigerator that day. He was one of them that held him roughly by the arms as they led him down into the pit of the dump. The girl was someone he recognized from that school he knew as his living hell. She was the one he stared at when she wasn’t looking. She was the one he thought about at the closing of the day when he would lie atop his bed in his quiet room at home. She was his only good memory.

Then Adam Longo recalled how the other one, the red-haired one, their leader, had laughed without remorse, how he had gotten right in his face and said something like, “Are your balls all shriveled up… Is that why you don’t ever talk?” His breath was overpowering. Rudy was his name. He hated Rudy. And now here was one of his rooks and that girl thinking they were all alone in this immense place lost in time. He thought about leaping out into the air and floating down and he would come upon them in a fury of revenge. He could do that now. Something drastically changed after he went into that refrigerator unwillingly. Sheer human cruelty had given him a power he never expected.

Veronica took a step back from him. “You were part of that?” she wanted to know.

Andy paused for a moment. “I was against it.”

“But you still allowed it to happen.”

Andy looked up and sighed with frustration.

“What!?” the girl snapped. “You’re angry because I’m upset you let a boy get locked in a refrigerator? He could have died.”

Andy bent down and picked up a metal rod and tossed it into the void. It tumbled and clanked loudly. “Why are you getting bent out of shape? Let’s just get high.”

“I think I want to go home,” Veronica said.

Andy’s demeanor suddenly changed, and he grabbed her by the shoulders. “What’s your problem?”

“Let go of me!”

He pushed her away and turned. “Fine. Do what you want,” he said, and he started to walk away.

She called after him. “Where are you going?”

“Just go home,” he called back, and then, like the sudden snap of a bone, something fell from above and was on top of him. It attacked him with the ferocity and conviction of an angel bred by animals, and the boy struggled and shrieked as he was mercilessly beaten and clawed.

In the epilogue of the boy’s torn moans, a panting Adam Longo turned to look at her through the dim light. He was mystically aglow, and his gaze froze her in place, and like in a dream she struggled to run but her legs refused to receive and follow the command. Veronica had no control over her own self now and could only watch in wonder as the figure stood. He was just a boy, but nothing like a real boy. He looked down at Andy twitching on the dirt-strewn floor of the factory. Then he looked up, toward the place from where he came, and he suddenly ascended in a completely inhuman way.

Her legs became free from their dream burden and Veronica ran toward the lighted frame of the doorway they had entered. She burst into the outside world and leapt down the iron stairway, past the loading bays and toward the hole in the chain-link fence. She scrambled through, a piece of metal bit into the top of her shoulder and she winced as she dove into the sea of weeds and tall grasses on the other side. She went for her bike, lifted it up and got on. She pedaled toward town with an urgency and fear she never knew she could possess.

Once she was long gone, her scent and heartbeat now carried away to the place where the terrible people were, Adam Longo curled into himself for comfort and warmth as he perched on the wide beam. He watched the day turn to night through the broken factory windows. Living had been lonely enough he thought as his eyes set on the few stars he could see, but now, now this, whatever it was, whatever he now had become. It was lonelier than death itself — lonelier than the dirt piled upon the lost ones.

MORE TO FOLLOW

By

Aaron Echoes August

Read the previous part of this story HERE.

Creative Writing, Free-Range Verse, Haunted Light, Poetry and Prose, Reflective Light

Wallflowers of Chemistry

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You invented love
like dragons spit fire
the longing when you are gone,
is an immediate reaction
I’m drawn to your eyes
I’m drawn to the night
the full vibrato of darkness
the stars splashed so randomly across the universe
we can touch them if we try

Candles melt away so quickly here
this otherworld, this neverwhere
We are a collision of chemistry
wrapped in coils of electricity
The ache of our day
becomes the joy of our night
empty wine glasses and ghosts
the bluest tears,
the reddest blood

The valve has been wrestled loose
the drips drop incessantly throughout the house
Impenetrable venom
impenetrable malaise
Someone broke the switch on the furnace
and it’s coughing up hot laughing gas
and I choke on my own experiences
Am I sad?
Am I happy?
Am I a supernova,
Or just merely a simple star,
blinking randomly
from within this skull of space?

Am I a colored moon
peacefully napping
with a nightcap perched upon my point
Or am I a black hole,
sucking on everything that exists?
Or am I merely a chemical byproduct
that sits in an empty room,
waiting for night to pass
and day to begin,
when I can talk to you
and feel my heart thunder against the world

But sometimes,
I just want to be a rocking chair,
swaying gently
amidst the dust of a long-gone grandparent’s den,
listening to the easy tick of the clock on the mantle,
watching the footsteps fade deeper into the carpet,
waiting for the sounds and smells
of a childhood lost forever
lost in the woods of autumn,
across the icy bridge of winter,
into the wet grass of spring
and along the thick dreams of summer
on some Midwestern small-town porch

And so,
when do dreams end
and reality begin?
When is night’s finale
and day’s birth?
One fluid sweep of time
and the Earth still tilts
and I still stare at the ceiling,
catching glimpses of you
in my mind’s eye
the baby’s breath in my fist falls,
landing in a blanket of fresh snow,
you pull up into the white gravel
and I can see your smile through the windshield
my heart still rattles
as the sun breaks through the clouds, and your hand clutches me in dreams.

Confessions, Creative Writing, Personal Essay, Poetry, Relations

Gwenhwyfar

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A rainbow is seen coming out of gray clouds over farmland in Wisconsin, north of Milwaukee. (Photo by A.A. Cinder)
A rainbow in Wisconsin from inside a moving car / A.A. Cinder

Some say they only fall, but I say they walk among us. She walks among me even now. She would never admit to being an angel – I don’t think she believes in them. I would call her a guardian of the heart, if nothing else. She’s taught me to cast out the enemy love once was and replace it with the real spirit of it. And like angels usually do, she came out of nowhere one night when I was alone. She fell from the sky like a derailed comet and exploded everything that was already blown to bits – and what I mean by everything is everything in a good way. I’ve often wondered if I died and she was just helping me along down Heaven or Hell Boulevard – she has carved a soulscape of wonder, my wonder, her wonder, our wonder, two wondering wanderers standing still and cracking until they run into each other, from out of the air just like that – there was Gwenhwyfar.

She came down from the sky on a glowing escalator and I waited for her in the parking lot. But sometimes I think she was maybe there all along, maybe my entire life and I just didn’t see her because they can be invisible. She looks human. She has all the right parts in the right places. A great ass. There is a glow about her though, like sun coming up out of her guts at times. I would call her a beautiful angel. What else could I call her? She helps me when I have problems with life. She’s a pretty decent angel.

I asked her about Jesus, and she said he was a pretty nice guy – just a bit upset about what we do in his name. Gwenhwyfar told me she was an angel of words – the one who corrected the language of the universe. She’s beautiful like that. I’m surprised she eats actual food because I didn’t think angels needed it. She makes me a lot of frozen pizzas because she doesn’t like to cook much. She’s afraid she’ll burn the tips of her wings on the stovetop and that’s not something easily fixed. She watches over me like they say they do – a love never wavering. She can make it not so bad of a day when I am in mental Hades, roasting and getting stabbed, mentally and emotionally. She lifts me up and out of the ashes and shows me the true meaning of love. She is love. She is real faith.

And when the duties of our earthly days are done, she sits with me in the lamplit room of red, and I hold her in the stillness, an episode of House Hunters humming in the distance. I hold her face and tilt her head to kiss her lips… And in that last taste of her before she sleeps, I am fed love, and bow to the mending of a broken heart.