crooked lizardqueen Theres a science to the clock with every move and overlapping of the crooked golden Roman numerals. Out of everything in the room to live in, I always chose the clock. Maybe because it moved, or maybe because it made time seem to go by faster. That year i probably spent more time gazing into that clock than anything else. It was possibly what saved me. Sometimes I would live in its hands, gliding across the fat golden Roman numerals, sometimes the numerals themselves, hiding behind the V's and I's, enjoying the arial view. We'd play games. I would count as fast as i could in my head beginning with the second hand on the twelve, id stop when the second hand had made a full rotation back to the 12 again, then compare my number to the clocks 60 seconds. Once i nearly quadrupled the speed of the second hand. This made the time go by faster until he left. We called it racing. Racing the clock. 010602 ... werewolf The house was ancient. Paint peeled so gracefully away it merely seemed yet to be painted. And it hid its age well enough to always have been considered sufficiently new by those passing it inattentively as almost all did. It was always the type of place people thought somebody lived in, and so no one ever thought to enter, or to close it down. Someone had to live in there, a hermit, they imagined, who stayed up late at night and hammered nails into wrong walls or his own hands, who falling asleep would often punch himself in terror, or would rock like an unmoored fetus in an effort to jar the headboards of his bed, likely the only furniture, into a nice bead just to feel that shake and only the shake, just so he could fall asleep suddenly and not gradually, not in the space where thoughts creep in, but in a rhythm. But no one lived there. The noises the villagers heard at night, the scenes they thought they saw were really the crickets hiding behind overgrown grass, the whole mingled scene of them glowing and their twitching bone structures which sort of made the grass bounce aggressively just happened to lend easily to the house's larger illusion adn the crickets may have done it purposefully to be left alone had they known to. But the house was empty. One day, not today, a curious boy went in there to find a space where no one else would go so he could masturbate. His favorite thing to masturbate to was his leather bag of glass marbles he had played with since he was young. The marbles inside were clear and spiraling like conjoined twins of slight distinctions, of matter and light, full of mythos: centaurs wrestling to the death, mermaids flapjacking back towards water too far away, nymphs hunting lame schoolchildren and abducting them to be their gods, athena bounding after a mother bear whose wounded fetus housed the sweetest music ever inside of its unopened eyes, on its eyelids like sheetmusic unlit, all of this was, in the intensity of those marbles' minutia, clear to everyone's eyes including his, though he loved them the most. But he always kept the bag closed, the drawstring looped twice and knotted while he played with himself. On the bag there was a picture of an asexual jester who always seemed to be winking at him, always from slightly different positions. Once he had spilt his semen hot all over it, and was forced to wipe it against wet grass giving the jester a green tint and obscuring any evidence of that winking. He felt devastated to lose that winking, to have ruined it with the inevitability tracjetory of his attraction to it. It had all been so perfect, something he could hide so easily, something he could devote every stolen hour to. So though he knew not of age's cliches, with that winking gone, he came into the house as a desperate old maid. The house's door swung for hours after he opened it once and walked in. Passing cars and passing drivers commented on how new the house must be with its freshly swinging door and undivulged colors. When will it be painted they wondered. The boy looked out the window at them and when they passed he wished they would come back, wished their car would pass by over and over again in slow motion, but they were gone. There was no longer a point for a window. He might as well be locked in the house, cramped in its wooden curves and gradual cutoffs, rooms leading into rooms, all empty of furniture, save a swinging light here or there, unlit and ominously unlighteable, no light switches to be seen. But if he looked down, almost afraid of finding no floor at all, afraid of ensuing vertigo, he would find a hammer and a single nail, and then he would be unable to do anything but find a wall. There was no wrong wall. And he would pound and pound it in, hitting his thumb purple, but not caring, not caring like he had the time his father had tried to show him, this time just pounding and pounding away in the half dark smelly woodgrave, feeling the ghosts of sap and green lamenting their terrible fall to ineffectual doorways. He'd hear their secret parties, lavish costumes and orgies next to him, behind him, anywhere he wasn't looking but could sense, mocking him, teasing him, as extravagantly angry at him as they were the house. And the nail would sink through the wall nice and easy and he would remain and stand for a while looking at it, blank eyes with a curled snarled lip, his pants still uncommitedly down, elastic bands and loose fabric enduring his penis, as he continued to stare; feeling empty and tired, as if he was an ancient but everyone kept seeing him as new. But he never looked down, the hammer sat and dulled in the shadows, as he looked out the window in hopes of another car to pass by in slow motion knowing it would not notice him or the furious grasses but rather the front porch wavering, or is it becoming? And they're already saying..."how new it looks, if only its colors were drawn out. But what kind of hermit would live there? Do you hear a pounding?" 030608 ... x i'd read all that but you're boring as fuck 030608 ... x btw, i'm mean and i'm sorry 030608 ... werewolf that's funny, because it was about people like you. but you're right, i am boring as fuck, and fuck's pretty boring. 030608 ... x you must be fucking the wrong people 030608 ... werewolf it was ironic. and you're not mean right? you're bored. apparently it's my fault. 030608 what's it to you? who go blather from