celerity

This is a piece that I worked on for my Creative Writing: Fiction course this past semester. The focus of the piece is to make the language opaque... to make the reader stop and listen to the words simply for their sounds and how they mesh together. This piece has succeeded when it pulls the reader out of the facts of the words and pushes them into an emotional response or feeling. I think this one will take more work to get to that point, but at least it's starting along the way.


Celerity vies with concrete right there at the edge of the street, where the thread moss blurs the steps. Picking the fronds strand by strand with roots and all, two women sit and sit. Each word plunked down is dissected in silence and safely at arm's length. The wet-metal taste of pilfered opinions lingers on their mouths after both have finished speaking, while words to say go deep an deep; but neither dares to get wet. One scrubs the rings from her coffee table when no on watches, one sleeps alone, but neither can face the parallels. Green crazed out by an early spring succumbs to dusk as the morning's shoots prepare for night, furling over into tightly wound scrolls. Dark over blue over pink over grey stacks on the edge of the sky, sinking and sinking. The sporadic click of the buzzing street light catches the woman's glances as moths swell in flurries until exhausted or burned. Chill falls but still they sit and sit.