Shot Down Stars: A Series of Vignettes

Part 1

         The frailty of a whisper; of a cigarette. Funny how both can kill you. So he whispered and he smoked, filling the air with decadent poison and forming the same poisonous words on his lips. They were children of the night; insomnia had seeped through their veins better than any amphetamine. Their vision blurred to grey around the edges and a strange loss over what constitutes day and night had conquered them. She was caught in the twilight of her overactive mind and tired eyes, so together they fought off complacency, capitalism, and commitment. Society had set them adrift and they had gladly spat in her eye. What nine to fivers accepted as reality they were content to fight tooth and nail. They bent it with chemicals, lost it with music, and now they could battle it better than ever in each other. They thoroughly enjoyed their lack of functionality and happily estranged themselves from all things functional. He fancied himself a victim of the modern world; she began to hate his nervous laugh and the way he was too polite to take off her clothes. She sat in the dimming grey light and drained the storm in her teacup; the tea could liken itself to her in its bitterness. He had achieved nothing, if not for that. It was borne of the extremities of passion, of their love glutting itself. Now they were simply refugees of it. She adored and admired him with all her broken art; she wanted to consume him, breathe him in, feel his thoughts, share his breath. She wanted his soul in a jar, but it was jarred already - owned by his self-absorption and ideologies. He kept it like a wine collector, with the same purist’s streak; his great unforgettable witticisms like the splash of cheap red wine on her favorite blouse.

         “Don’t waste a gulp of air on saying my name,” or, “The world is best seen through eyes rolling back in your head.” Each touch of nihilism stung like the smoke of his Gauloises in her eyes. Each word she punched in angrily at her typewriter, trying desperately, almost vacantly, to make art out of decay, out of hopelessness. But her romanticism would not allow it. Her romanticism would not allow him. No longer could she abide his blackened sleepless eyes, his hollow cheeks, how his hot breath was forever sweet with excess of wine and his lips reddened with it. His mind was as stained as his nicotine-yellow fingers, ones that crept up her thigh. He grew untouchable but ever polite, always asking before he tried, always fearing her reproach. Always self-contained, delicately asking her why she lacked a revolutionary spirit. The coherency possessed in her mind fell flat and stuck to the roof of her mouth; thoughts laced themselves around her molars. She tried to force the intellectual (the Marxist theories) and the accusatory (“I don’t see you fighting in the streets.”) past her lips. They couldn’t survive in the haze of smoke and the flinty poignancy of his eyes. So she stammers and stutters and draws haphazard circles around her speech, flapping a hand emphatically as if swatting away the terror of being mocked. He laughs and gives her a kiss. She watches him step over the scattered debris of their secluded lives, the dirty clothes, the wrappers, the empty boxes of cereal, the filth they are entrenched in.

         “I’m going out,” she tells him, teeth still gritted, prison bars for her real thoughts.

         “But it’s raining,” he replies, eyes narrowed. She crosses to the slim window, so like a prison window, and looks down; sideways rain pelts the muted grey world, forming quasi-lakes in the crooked street below.

         She releases a breath, glances over at him, and says, “I’ll brave it.” He blanches.

         “Are you sure you don’t want me to come?” he asks.

         “No need,” she answers shortly; she finds her purple raincoat, made of the same cheap vinyl that they sell in sex shops, and owns no practical shoes; this is a part of her creed. She steals his and pulls up her hood; systematically rifles in her pockets for some spare bills. He collapses into the couch and watches her.

         He sighs, flicking ash around rudely. She has always hated that. She stands in the doorway in her ridiculous purple raincoat and boots that dwarf her feet, falling so knowingly for the bait.

         “What will you do?” she asks, and feigns indifference.

         “Wait for you,” he tells her. She fights and loses against a smile, then feels suddenly awkward and clumsy in her coat and his boots, so that the door cracks shut behind her. The pavement - the city block encased in monochrome - the rain blurring everything around the edges - all provide some sort of stark relief. Relief from his presence; the great relief of anonymity in a place full of strangers. He was strange to her but no stranger; he had memorized her movements, her mannerisms, her lovemaking, and it killed a small part of her that was yearning to retain some mystery. But her heart was too generous, her soul too romantic, her body too ready made to wilt if not given affection. It wilted yet, wilted under the slithering drops of rain that escaped past her raincoat and slid down the top of her head. It wilted under the weight of all these heady words, all his heavy expectations.

         She was clumsy as she sullenly tromped through puddles in his boots - clumsiness reflected in her clamor to leave, her clamor for words. She scarcely dared breathe it love, refer to that label, as she crossed the street buried in an abyss of contemplation. Love was what other people did, what they put on Hallmark cards. What they shared she daren’t call any one name; and his sense of cynicism was pleased that she did not demand he use these trite declarations. Citygoers hurried towards their destinations with newspapers and umbrellas held tremblingly overhead. Rain and ink gushed off in furious rivulets as the downpour raged on. She paid it no mind, little girl in a sex-shop coat and mens boots. The thought provoked a bitter snort of amusement from her.

         She turned and entered the High Street. The perversity of this foreign world; a screaming riot of color and advertisement tempting her with things she could not afford. Even half-abandoned in the midst of a storm, the expensively dressed mannequins seemed to stare her down, glaring through the storefront windows. She felt ever-cheaper, ever more grubby and unworthy; her body wilted ever more under her clothes. She had increasingly taken on resemblance to a floral arrangement; she felt pallid and closed in on herself, frail and fraying on the edges. A knockabout in a whirlwind. She felt certain she must be taking on some floral properties; they took in carbon dioxide, after all, and she breathed in quantities of deadly chemicals from his stupid fucking French cigarettes. The similarities ended there. She sighed and took and good look around, forced now to spend the money in her pockets. She had little desire to, but now he’d be expecting it and would want her to come home with curry or fresh fruit or a book, or anything else he would devour entirely and exclude her from. At least she might get half of an apple. The very thought pushed her mind dizzyingly into the late green summer countryside, far from the cruel, stark greys of the surrounding city. But her boots - his boots - anchored her to the sidewalk. He anchored and docked her in this glimmering, writhing metropolis.

         The city was little more than a cancerous growth, a grievous weight on her shoulders - the same, he said, was true of the bourgeois. “Springing off our shoulders,” he exclaimed, “like the greedy parasitic fuckers they are.” She only wondered about the identity of the parasite; was it truly as he preached? Was it the walled up suffocation of the city? Or was it, perhaps, something else entirely?

         But she thought of his comment before, thought of their only remaining exchange. She thought of his light infused gaze, overbright with passion, his elbows, knees, fingers, interlocking joints, mechanical body parts, please press ENTER, and was desperately enamored. She craved the pervading moisture that made their bodies slick with perspiration; it was quite unlike the chilly, fresh raindrops that she flicked off of her hood at present. Rain seemed clean n these thoughts filthy; but she yearned for filth. Something in her demeanor craved it, the disgusting stickiness of two human bodies in the most animalistic of states. She despised his words but suddenly, crushingly, desired such perverse physicality. Coins jingled in her vinyl raincoat as an altogether different warmth overtook the frigid external one. At this, she turned on her heel and traipsed back up the block.

Part 2

         It is a dangerous thing, to love somebody. The intricacies do boggle the mind and quicken the pulse, complexities which make minds and eyes and hearts ache. She had forever played the romantic; even romantic tragedy had given her volumes of Shakespearean flair to entertain. Her rose-tinted blinders had provided her with the wide-eyed optimism of an innocent; the ability to find the darling in the grotesque. Foreign, rainy cities were the most darling of all. They were poetry to her, or at least they sounded and felt and tasted like poetry when they left her lips. They conjured images of cobblestones and canals and bridges and cafes where bohemians played. Waffle stands on streetcorners, or gelati and wine, or fish and chips, depending on her fancy. This fanciful nature could not be quelled or quieted; she imagined staving artists and poets and leftist revolutionaries who’d fight in the streets for what they believed in. And so romance to her was opium, was wine, was crack, speed, cocaine, and ecstacy, was absinthe and blackjack and sticking a toothbrush down her throat. Romance was the most morbid addiction one might ever suffer; its peril far more insiduous than childhood fairytales would have one assume.

         Their love had grown parasitic, essential; lost sight of who played the host and who played the parasite. So she did what she did best; carried on, rosy spectacles intact. Carried on despite the absurdity that marred their very existence. And the city, too, did what it did best – it rained. It was not merely the weather, but the city itself, brick and concrete, conspiring against them. Everything conspired against them, he said – ambition was an insult spat in the faces of the working class, a knife to the throat which tried only to excuse the capitalist crusade. Thus, he too excused himself from this phantom called ambition. He was pleased to keep them impovershed, pleased to shout he would never become one of them. “They who use the propaganda of ambition to justify their greed!”

         Those rosy spectacles were fissuring and cracking under such weight. It was the weight of his heavy intellectualism, his insistence upon the responsibilities of the left and his belief he was excused from the rest. His hypocrisy had as good as shackled her; he fought the good fight for the working class when he hadn’t worked a day in his life. Rain bled out the gutters and he bled her dry; turned the pavement into looking glass as her eyes turned glassy. The romanticism was soon knocked flat from her; she had been emptied of her earlier notions, and the more he read to her from his poetry books, the more the poetry was savaged from her soul. She was weary, scraped clean, and bone dry – the same heavy emptiness as the unwed mother feels in the clinic. As she stared blankly into space, the thought settled firmly and took root. The very notion spoke volumes on all she had lost, surrendered to him with her white flag aloft.

         The dregs of her cold coffee floated limply under her dulled eyes; she watched its murky ugliness for several quiet moments. She vaguely contemplated drinking it, but she couldn’t be certain she wouldn’t choke and gag and spit, drenching herself in it; it was this very same reason which kept her from forming any words. Yet again, he had stonewalled her, locked her articulation steadfast in her head and tossed the keys. She would only choke and gag on her words as she would on the repugnant coffee, only stumble in her inferiority. He would undoubtedly laugh it off and give her a verbal parallel to a pat on the head. Her only feeble response would be a hospital bed weak smile, turned up on the corners. He would find it charming and docile; she would recognize the wicked, serrated edges in it. It was a wicked sharpness she yearned for so desperately that she clenched a white knuckled fist in her pocket. He received her smile, and would soon ask politely if he could have her. Always politely, no matter what. He had a strange tendency to be polite when it was least called for, when the only romance or magic left in the world lay in their utter filth. It was not sex– just pure squalor in its physical incarnation; utter savagery. The beads of sweat forming in the shallows of his collarbone, the light straining in his feral eyes; it was human in a way she scarcely ever saw in him. The language of their twisted, yellowing bedcovers was the only honesty she felt they had truly exchanged. And perhaps within this odd kind of honesty, if only she kept trying, she’d discern something worth knowing.

         He was forever clouded in his obscurity; the obscurity of his likings, of his odd detachment, of their very existence in their heaping wreck of a flat. The fact was, the only way she had learned to fight the obscure was with the obscene. So obscenity left her lips; it was the only articulation she could muster. Fanciful notions once again overtook her – slitheringly dark, frighteningly beautiful notions. She entertained notions of diving headfirst, like a perfect Olympic swimmer, into the concrete that waited stories below. It would be an almost graceful arch through the still night air. She would be a victim of the modern world and its cruel machinery, with all her lace and poetry smashed to pieces on the pavement like her bones. The notion of tragic suicide seemed to lighten to leaden weight in her stomach; it contained her only salvation, her only hope for the vestiges of the romantic. He could no longer offer it to her. He had made her nauseatingly aware of this, hammering it into her with his Marxist dialogue and his brutal lovemaking. The passion welled up inside her veins like drugs – hardened it into hatred. Her blood had seemed to froth into cyanide, filling her to the marrow with poison. The poison he spewed daily and the poison he blew into her face with his nicotine. But no longer.


Part 3

         Unfortunate and inconvenient as sudden attacks of nostalgia may be, she was prone to them from time to time. Accompanying them even came pangs of affection; of sentimentality; phantom notions belonging to a previous self. She'd been emptied out and filled in, incomplete and half-drawn. She ghosted around the bedroom, his smoke rattling in her lungs, his heart beating circles around hers; she knew she must wave the white flag of surrender. She was made to surrender to needing him, to designing her life like a paper cut-out castle where he was the paper prince on his paper throne. She could only pencil in the rest, make an erasable attempt at more. Fearlessly, she delved backwards into the depths of nostalgia and blurred memory, only to her dismay.

         Surely, changes were natural. The world was seasonal, after all. With weary hearts and falling eyelids and fumbling hands, they carried on, filling the air with pointless words and painful silences. Then the calm after the storm. Loving expressions, dirty talk, talk, talk, talk. The waters would settle after their proportionate disgrace, after their hapless disturbance. She was afloat in the midst of this eerie calm, clutching at her banged-up heart and her records with the same desperation. Pretty melodies could only bring her halfway this time; the very truth of it was she had to allow herself the folly of romanticism then and again. But they only kept drawing daggers and rolling the dice.

         They were frightened of the future, of themselves - but they had dived into their love so ardently, so gluttonously; made vicious charges on art and counterattacks with literature, ambushed with utmost affection and made claims on each others' bodies and souls like conquerers of old. They had buried themselves in beliefs, theories, and debates; based themselves in the intellectual and debased themselves in the physical. She was his and he was hers; and words had always sufficed for the glue that held them together. Words had outlined their fears and exemplified their joys, words in perfumed letters and dog-eared poetry books; words tossed in casual play and words hurled like cannonballs, seething with anger. Words in Bowie songs and whispered niceties. Their intensity, their degeneracy, their abstraction, and their entire affair seemed to have melted to one singular point; where had all the words gone?

         The quiet in the flat had grown intolerable; he flicked through his books, newspapers; lit countless cigarettes; seemed unfazed. To her mind, every moment without speech was ground lost, almost militarily taken by a looming enemy of sorts. The notion seemed to come with a sensation of staggering loss. Each second that ticked by seemed to expel the remembrance of laughter from their lungs, driving away the memory of each stone aged, spirited conversation. Any longer without speaking and she was certain they would lose from their memories any reason they'd ever spoke; any idea they'd had something in common, and certainly any idea they'd once been enamored with each other. She wasn't even entirely certain why they weren't on speaking terms; something infantile, more than likely, but lost amidst the haze of many such arguments. They seemed, somehow, to have become entrenched this time; as if this particular petty disagreement held some significance.

         She, for all her posturing, ended up dragging clean tracks in the filth across the kitchen floor, pacing back and forth. It was the only cleaning she had done for months. But how could she point an accusatory finger at the crooked world? It was not achieved by cleaning, certainly not. Meanwhile, he held court in the living room, lingering near the windows or sunken into the sofa, unapproachable. It was not long before she felt the siphoned well of sudden, inescapable loneliness. It took all too many forms; an all-enveloping black cloud of late night television; an all-distancing ocean - or, bitterest perhaps of all - in the gulf between two people.

         Silence presses against her ears; vibrating, heavy, almost painful. Soon, she is drowning in that selfsame silence, crossing the kitchen floor, scuffling in his direction, staring ahead with a hopeful, lacquered gaze. He lifts his eyes to meet hers, startled.

         "What?" he queries.

         She swallows hard, saying nothing; something within her is aware that words have lost their effect. She knows nothing to do but to fumble across the void. He entertains her touch for a brief moment, but soon brushes her off, offering up a grimacing, tight-lipped attempt at a smile.

         There it was before her, starkly; human touch could no longer repair. It had always been the wordless last resort; the last heroic cavalry to order in. But the silence remains, whipping the breath out of her lungs; the cohesion out of her skull. It is frothing inside of her, driving her mad.

         She slowly turns on her heel and crosses into the dust-coated kitchen, searching calmly through the drawers.'I should clean up', she finds herself pondering; perhaps the safe route of damnable housewifery would have led to less trauma. She cannot seem to find what she is looking for, so she snatches up a corkscrew instead; gazes down at it in her palms, twisted and glimmering in the low light. A wine cork is still in it, evidence of his latest ventures, undoubtedly. Grimacing, she pulls it out with a satisfying pop, her fingertips gliding over the edges of the tool, watching it with the fascination of a small child. It's not long before he enters the threshold, leaning sullenly on the door frame, his light hair sticking up around his head like a misbegotten halo.

         "What are you doing?" he asks her, but it seems as if his voice comes from faraway. She peers up into his flinty dark eyes and back down at the serrated edges of the wine opener. The moment passes, and she turns, placing the tool delicately on the tabletop.

         "Nothing at all," she replies, and for the first time in what might be years, a smile breaks on her lips like the coming dawn.

Part 4


           Tonight, she found herself a weary, tired-eyed radical; felt a smudged-eyeliner numbness which permeated each room of the flat, drenching her in painful monochromes. Her pallid complexion looked papery thin, her reflected gaze dull as she watched herself in the bathroom mirror. Oh, vanity, the demonic and unnatural destroyer of all naievete and good faith. Long gone were scruffy-haired, ramshackle days, the full and utter surrender of herself and to her own wishes; no pressures, no politics, no preening. Long gone were the bright-cheeked afternoons she'd spent in adolescent whimsy; spinning vinyl and smoking faulty cigarettes, trying to be James Dean. The optimism of youth had spread its tendrils so far it had overstretched itself, and at a mere twenty, it had escaped her; it had been so misspent and ill-used that she couldn't be surprised it had left her forlorn. Once, everything had been felt in immensity; it was F-E-L-T, no hesitance offered, no apologies made. Now, contrition was her only companion; contrition for cruel words, for petty this and silly that, but overarchingly, for allowing this to happen. The lack of melodrama poorly suited her; sullen quietude and bouts of melancholy were not so much natural to her as was screaming and sobbing; magnified action that was brought to a pitch crescendo before exhausting itself entirely. But she had been long distanced from these boil-lancing, venom-draining fits; now she only ghosted around the flat, stale cereal crunching underfoot, stained dressing gown trailing the floor; a sorry victim of any kind of vanity.

         He no longer knew how to deal with her – her complete retreat from self-interest, forgetting to be obsessed with the curls in her hair or a run in her tights. It was almost a violent recoiling from her once-panicky attempts at pleasing him- no longer would she wake up in the morning to stub her toe on Das Kapital, tossed to the floor in frustration the night before; sit bored wishing he'd buy The Sun occasionally like any other normal person. Ultimately, her desperate desire to please had warped itself, had been tossed back into her face so many times that it became convoluted. It posessed her of a dissatisfaction that manifested itself constantly. The only saving grace was merely that he was unbearably attractive to her; his mercurial presence, his vague half-nods, his day old stubble. But his manner filled her with listlessness; his constant self-possesion, his strict invisible standards that disallowed him from the things which she so desired.

         She found herself feeling exhausted; a melancholy torpor overcoming her existence. It seemed almost humourous, those silly ideals of sustainable creativity; creativity which somehow didn't result in rampant poverty. Oh, the things we believe when we are of a certain age, sheltered just so. Nothing gets better than those ideas. Little do we realize that they are in their fullest bloom in our heads. Nothing shines so bright as our young eyes in the face of a beautiful future. It was this seed of possibility which was so hazardous to her; the possibility that somewhere this kind of life was possible, and that he had become everything that stood in her way. She could neither please him nor could he save her in all the ways she had painted him as heroic.

        Sullenly, she turned on her record player; clicked the needle into place and watched the dizzying, glimmering blackness of the vinyl. The repetition of its movement soothed her. She felt entranced by it, turned it up as loud as it would go. Rested her head on its sturdy wooden side, irrespective of the discomfort. Her eyes fluttered and rolled, disappearing into her head; clasping them shut, she let the music nourish her. It rushed through her and raised her, brought her wobbling to her feet. The wobbling continued in the semblance of dancing; she padded around, trying it on for size, until her arms were flailing, and she was spinning in wild concentric circles. Her hair flew in a tangled arch around her head as she was jarred and thrown like a woman posessed, but it was uncontrollable; maniacal. A stark contrast to the void of silence which had filled the flat.

         A void that he could no longer fill.

         She circled and circled, frantically, until she fell heavily into a chair nearby, the nausea overwhelming. Her whole world jolted and spun in her gaze. It was at this moment that he chose to enter the room, his eyebrow raising quizzically at the sight of her. He watched her with confused dark eyes; unapproachable, full of silent judgement. The chasm between them deepened. The weight of so much reflection had all at once become too heavy to bear; its last remedy could only be some kind of base physicality. The only way to save herself, her ideals, was to escape the strange power he had over her. The only fragment of their love that remained was the madness that bubbled in her breast. That was when she flew as if carried by angels across the chasm; maddened by the holy atrocity of it all, she buried her teeth deep in his warm throat. He released a guttural cry of shock as blood seeped from the small wound, giving her an almighty shove as he staggered backwards. His cries and curses seemed far away as she stumbled and fell, jolting back up as if the floor was hot. He advanced toward her now, blind with rage.

           Cold terror left her gasping shallowly as she backed into the kitchen, the metallic taste of blood fresh on her lips. Their surroundings blurred. Her last abiding image was of the blazing black eyes and clenched fists that had so many times been clenched around her in pleasure; the sight of each knuckle and fingertip she had memorized; the familiarity of the way he moved, the tension in his shoulders,the mold of his features in her sparkling vision.

         It was a terrible kind of familiarity. She dashed forward and brandished something at him threateningly, but he was already diving at her, intent on knocking her to the ground. The result was a painful collision; his forehead violently met with her nose; there was a brutal crack that made her head fly back. The shock of the pain made her eyes swim with tears; he slumped against her heavily. Her nose streamed as realization dawned; he made a horrendous choking noise and she moved back to survey him. The corkscrew that she had been holding was handle-deep in his chest. His eyes were wide with shock; he grasped at her blindly, mouth gaping; struggled for words as he slumped further across her lap.

           Her fingertips traced his lips; the hollow of his cheek covered in stubble. She gazed at him lovingly, the music in the background still bursting through the flat, and then she leaned over and placed a kiss on his forehead. After all his articulation, all his loftiness, all his detachment, he had no last words for her. He said nothing. He gasped and clutched and the colour drained from him, and she merely stroked his hair with a smile.  His eyes like pools of Narcissus, his dying pallor, his hair the colour of sand after the rain; his handsomeness had undone her, and how poetic – how romantic – he looked, handsome and expiring, blood spreading in an arch around his body, on the linoleum of her kitchen floor. She was free.