Skein Home
Author's Works
View without comments
 

Death got young in her old age, the tears of the grieving family falling like aloe vera on her dry skin. ^[1] Death got cosmetics, got cosmetic surgery, got wrinkle creams and eyeliner and sassafras exfoliant for her cracking back and linseed oil for her splintering legs, got tucks and nips and inches off her hips, bust, and thighs. ^[2] Death got looks on the street, got offers for an ad campaign, got visions of infinite images of herself plastered on the walls of a subway car, her face never out of view, got boys to stop taking the subway just so they might catch her milky-white eye. Death got young and wore her hair short and painted her room with glow-in-the-dark paint so it would glimmer for a little after she turned out the light. She painted circles on the walls and stars on the ceiling and flowers on the floor; she put posters of kittens and pictures of all her friends on the walls; she brought boys back to her room to kiss, washed in the shine of her special paint, and the boys would always say "you're so beautiful" and she would always touch them on the tip of their nose with her false fingernail and the boys would feel it almost passing through. ^[3] Death wannabe treated like a lady, understand? Just cause she dress in black don't mean she like it rough.
 

Death got young, too young, took too many lovers, watched too many sad movies. ^[4] Hidden in a corner of her makeup mirror I have seen a picture of her from long ago, her hair in waves almost down to her toes, catching on the bracelets on her ankles, someone off to the side, their face blurred. ^[5] She won't say who it is.
 

Death like buttercups falls softly on my skin, her tiny hands tracing circles on my chest. "I love your chest hair," she says, "I run my fingers through it and it parts like the sea," she says. She comes to me when I come back from the grocery store and I don't know where she got it but she brings me a flower that smells like a skunk and she says "tell me I'm pretty" and I say "you know you are" and "I don't like flowers" and she comes and sits on my lap, the eternal spring of her black youth falling heavily on my chest. ^[6] "Will you cry for me when I leave you?" she asks, and I pull her skirt down, tighter, over her knees. She's aging as I watch. Death got young but not for too long now.
 

brantley: This would work great as a spoken word over some synthpoppy groove.(That's a compliment where I come from). sprice: That's quite a compliment, Brantley. ;) Mike, I like pieces of this. I wouldn't call it shite, but I would call it a tad too confusing to hold together. As prose, it's a pretty sketch-- a prose napkin drawing. I like Brantley's analysis. I just picked up Momus' "20 Vodka Jellies", though, so I may be predisposed in that direction. eppy: Yeah, fair enough. All my prose comes out like song lyrics these days. I've decided I like the end a lot, and the beginning, but the middle is odd. Maybe I should post this song I did that encorporates spoken-word and singing. People seem to like it. I've also been toying with the idea of making my sectional stories into sorta song-cycles...and Momus is COOL. alecia: Yay Momus! I like how you've taken lots of stereotypes and archetypes and twisted them with the presence of death... I'd love to see you play with this a bit more. There are wonderful moments and images here (the glowing paint, for instance, is a neat touch), but I agree with Scott, it does get confusing. Could you either break it up into more of a lyric, or fill in some of the spaces to clarify the prose? eppy: I'll give a whack at it. (And even put it through a spell-checker this time!) Thanks for the feedback, all--it's been quite useful! j_moody: i don't know MOMUS from my mother's tomato bisque, but i like this piece. i find it very evocative and i get pleasantly vague imagery from it all the way through-- the fingernail pressing in, chest hair, her features, trying to fit buttercups in. whatever you do i think it will be good. brantley: Confused. Are the footnotes meant to be "insertions" into it or are they meant to be footnotes, with a freedom of whether the reader reads them before, after, separately or selectively? eppy: Er, they're mostly just supposed to be footnotes. I've already revised it with some insertions, so in that sense, no, they're not meant to be insertions and you can read them whenever you want. samira: About those footnotes, they actually added to my confusion, becasue I could not come up with a good time to read them. I found myself either loosing the thread when I headed over to read them as they came, or lost the feel of the piece when I read them at the end. IThat said, I think thatthey are a neat idea and would like to see you play with both footnotes and insertions to see what gets the ideas in and separates them out without distracting or loosing the reader too much. sprice: Hm, skein-ish question... so now my initial comments don't necessarily apply, since the piece is pretty radically redone. Something for us to think about is whether and how we want to deal with comments made before a revision. Perhaps allow the author to wipe the comment slate clean? Or better, tag all the comments existing at that point as "old" so that they appear differently --labelled as (old draft) or in dark grey instead of black? sprice: I enjoyed being able to choose when to read the footnotes, and even enjoyed being confused a bit so that I circled around and redressed a few lines that I'd nearly glossed. I also like that with skein I could make the footnotes disappear entirely... and in fact since the piece appears that way when you first visit (something I otherwise don't always like about skein), hitting "view with comments" suddenly uncovers a bunch of new text-- like discovering the author's manuscript, complete with deleted passages, or a second story that had a love affair with the first. Seeing the comments for this one in fact have that feel, since the narrator/footnoter comes in midway through with an "I" that we don't quite ever identify. sprice: My goodness, but I love that last paragraph and its footnote. From the beginning of the piece, death and linseed oil and an anonymous Javanese family, to this intimacy, speficity, personaliy... all without ever being told who the narrator/commenter is. eppy: I was a little unsure whether I should do a whole 'nother post for the revision or not, since it was not really a touch-up, but not really a total overhaul, either. Anyway, I'm glad the old comments are still there, like an old copy of a piece handed out to a workshop. One thing to consider about the footnotes is that I think I am going to use this for a spoken-word thing too, in which case they won't apply anymore--but I don't know if that's annoying or interesting. The revealing aspects are pretty neat, but I hadn't considered them at the time. I was definitely interested in seeing what would happen when I turned it from a straight-ahead rant-thing into a more HTML-y piece. Still, would the footnotes work better at the bottom? I think, with the footnotes, this shouldn't get too long, because then it would just get utterly incomprehensible. But. Thanks for the comments, y'all. I'll try and post the musical version in a week or two, but I have to, er, make it first. sprice: Hm, a shot-from-the-hip idea, but could you do the footnotes in a second voice, or with different underlaid music (a la Scarborough Fair/Canticle)? They're long enough that they constitute a viable second half for the piece, and JC, what happens there at the end with that second voice is great. Hm. Though to draw out that development might require more complexity/work/listening effort than would be fun/comfortable for the synth-pop idea. samira: On the subject of posting revisions, I would have liked to see the revision as a totally seperate post, so that I could go back and look at what had changed. Add comment