If you haven't checked out the TLS Angst Contest entries because you just aren't sure which ones you really want to read and don't have time to read all of them... no worries. I've got a teaser from each entry for you and I'll be posting two a day, everyday until public voting opens on August 14th! This way, you can read all of them or just the ones that grab you! There are SO MANY excellent entries in this one contest that I'd hate for you all to miss out on this, so you can find me here, each day... hooking you up with some angsty teasers!
Let's go:
I was fucked up the first time we met.
In some rank, party-weary drug den and you shouldn't have been there. It was wrong, in so many ways. Not because you managed to land yourself in my peripheral vision. That was as good as pinning a target to your back. Not because you put yourself right in the path of my storm. Not because you showed up at that dirty, shitty house looking better than a mouthful of clean air. Better than an unbroken horizon. Better than you had any right to.
People only came here to rough up their souls, but you showed up fresh as a fucking daisy.
You were dressed in cobalt and I was coated, inside and out, in black.
You were a bluebird and I was as haunted as a graveyard, tripping over tombstones.
I held you off for over an hour, even though I knew you were looking for me. Moved when I needed to, finding another dark corner, another companion offering another bump of something to ease the comedown. You flitted through the squalor as though you didn't even notice it, the only person there whose face wasn't slackened by time or gluttony or greed. Everyone else here was rushing double-time toward death and you were skipping in the opposite direction. You only caught up with me because I was too far gone to evade you any more. Pinned me to a corner and I winced when all the darkness was pushed back, just for a second.
Like you had the sun on a string, bright enough to blind.
"What did you come here for?" I asked and you did something extraordinary with your mouth. Let your eyes fall to my feet and then crawl all the way back up to my face before your lips pulled back and you smiled at me. One that started soft and sweet, but ended deeper and dirtier than I thought you were capable of. You were a bluebird and a sunbeam and you weren't supposed to want certain dark things like me.
If you did, you were supposed to keep it a secret.
"I don't know, but I think I'm looking at it," you laughed.
A mouthful of you would be my next addiction, I was sure of it. You looked pretty enough to eat, all in one bite. Enticing enough to burrow ulcers right through my stomach. Decadent enough to make me sick, because I was a glutton who could never make myself stop.
Sweet enough to make my gums bleed, because my heart just couldn't do that shit anymore.
"You're too good for me. I'll ruin you." I tried to be honest, but I think it was your drug of choice. Honesty. I'm sure it burns in ways that powders just can't. Numbs in ways that pills just won't. Hits heavier than the slow melt of gelatin capsules, or the even slower settle onto the bottom of a bottle of liquor. Smokes harder and stronger and faster than any combination of narcotic with any method of ingestion.
Smoke. Sniff. Swallow.
You took what I offered and downed it whole.
"You're exactly what I want."
Would be Bluebird Read more here: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/9515667/1/Would-be-Bluebird
The whisky bottle in my hands gurgles as I pour its contents down the drain. It plummets the way I did a long time ago, receding until only mere drops remain. I grip the neck of the bottle, choking it in my fist as I lift it up and smash it down in the sink. With a loud crash, it breaks into smithereens. The remains just sit there because like everything else, there's no going back once the damage is done.
Despite my outburst, my anger is not yet depleted. Slamming my fists against the laminate counter top, I cause shards of glass to tinkle a wind chime melody against the stainless steel. My head falls back. A deep, throaty, humorless laugh rustles my chest.
Wind chimes.
I kick the cupboard door over and over until its wood splinters, and the usefulness is as devastated as the glass and my errant life before it.
The last thing I want to hear is the reminder of metal tubes clanging together as if they were some sort of music. I grab my keys off the table, squeezing so they can't create a metal vibration induced harmony. It's a sound I can't escape even when faced with an apocalypse that was previously only an actuality in cheesy sci-fi movies.
I have a million other things to worry about. Our existence is about to be ripped right out from under us, or likely, straight through us. It's a force I can't comprehend. It's an overwhelming shock. I should be mourning the future I'll never have or seeking comfort in my final hours; instead, I'm stuck on something that should have been buried a long time ago.
The pain of the keys digging into my palm matches the pain of the memory that the wind chimes resurrect. I see her in an ivory dress with a touch of sunburn on her cheeks, spinning around as the wind picks up, and her front porch orchestra plays a unique symphony.
Maybe I should have seen her "quirky" as "crazy" all along.
I have to get out of here.
The flimsy screen door slams shut behind me, but I don't close the main one. There's no point now. If someone wants in, they can have at it. Goodbye house. Goodbye mediocre life I hid away in.
What a waste.
Chasing My Demise Read more here: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/9515370/1/Chasing-My-Demise
Please scroll through our previous blog posts for more teasers, and stay tuned, each day, for more.
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