pity party magazine issue one / no place like home
made by: Lillian Scales
VIOLENCE REFRACTS AGAINST YOUR BACK By stigmatasis -You’re a grey silence. When you voyage through your head, you lay down in the bottom of the boat with neither compass nor captain to steer you along. In that wooden belly, you peel blue devils from your skin like leeches and drop them overboard, hoping they don’t float. You never catch them all; for each you destroy, the sting of its memory births a blue man anew, fumbling in the pink scars of its predecessor. There’s a knock at your bedroom door, dropping the anchor and coaxing you to dry land. Seasick, your legs wobble and your head spins when you stand to answer; you sit back down and try again. A reedy voice chants your name on the other side. Honey, Honey; it’s me. Honey, open up. Behind the door is nothing blue or devilish or anything like that—it’s a talking head, suspended in the air. It tilts nervously and you realize through the dimness the body that’s attached, a human shape distinctly darker than its surroundings like a black hole. For a moment it’s a girl, clad in armor with eyes burning something fierce. She purges the red skin of her hands, and she is light as air. You blink her into an ashen memory and replace her with a friend whose name you won’t say to yourself. The sound of it makes your palms itch. He looks up and the only light in the room rushes and clings to his face in a wan glow. You notice the color beneath his eyes and the lack thereof in the rest of his face. “Hey,” he breathes, arms crossing over his chest. You echo him with a nod and he leans against the doorframe. “Just came to check in. It’s eleven.” He adds with a sniff, “You missed breakfast.” You nod while he goes on about having wrapped up a plate for you in the fridge. He’s bleached and dull, a worn out motion picture thinning on the reel. Words drop from him like tar, dripping through your fingers; you look within its bleakness for something you don’t already know about him or this place or yourself. Blank walls. He says your brother called. The two of you are standing in a swarm of dark sludge in the hallway, nearly cemented to the tile. Shut up, shut up, shut up, he’s talking a hole into the bottom of your boat, and water and blue devils alike rush in through the cavity, eager to fill and be filled.
“How’s he doing?” you ask, and the blackness recedes back into him, his mouth a dark pit. You wonder if you could disappear into him. “Improving I think.” You’d do anything for a placid sea, to stay asleep the whole boat ride through. Blackness trails down his cheeks as he hangs his head now, crossing beneath his chin and tying itself up like ribbon. Crying tears of tar he runs his mouth about underwater sunrises, how the dead find their place beneath the palette at the taking of bread and walk the world through us. With hands folded you two could revive each and every graveyard this world has to offer; try harder, Honey, try harder. “That’s great,” you offer. His face is blank when he looks back at you with a dry smile. All the dead between the two of you rise up in your throats. They fall from your eyes before you can condemn them to your stomachs where they’ll ache the linings until you don’t have a mind to hold them in. “Yeah,” he agrees. “It is.”
ART IS THE ESCAPE
JCKSUN_ EXE
harmxny
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