As always follows when I reach the end of the first draft of anything, I go back and re-read and hate myself for trying to think I can pull anything real off, much more so an entire book.
After some time, sometimes longer times than other times, I finally get over myself and itch to start re-writing and gather the millions of turbulent threads flickering everywhere.
I have some chapters left, I guess I can count the amount on one hand, and for some reason I just read this paragraph now and thought I should post it.
It is from the 13th chapter and to the three people who read this blog, not counting the Asian people and the women, here it is, completely out of context.
It is painful to me to post it because I know how entirely unperfect and unpolished it is. But hey, it's okay to be fragile too. Sooo...Here it is:
Laurlyn was sitting on her bed inside the small yellow house in her room. She was naked. Her curtains were open and outside she could see the brilliant starry sky, a half crescent moon luminously white, visible if she lay back.
The top of the world was a big lump of sheer blackness in the horizon, a breast or the back of a curled-up fetus. In an open palm she saw three shards of glass.
The first one was long and thin, its edges razor sharp, thin layers of olive running through the concurrent hue of bottle-green. The second was larger, flatter, the color of a remorseful blue, almost sapphire. And the third…
Laurlyn looked at it in her open palm, stared at it, tried to comprehend its full meaning.The shard was the only shard of the three that had been intentionally created rather than the other two which had been brought into conception through destruction. This shard had been meant to be a shard.
The shard had been formed into a delicate icicle of furious burgundy, edges softened and polished with meticulous care.
And of the three shards, this was the one she felt with greatest weight in her open palm, felt it deepen into her hand as if it was a cold lead bullet.
He had been an apprentice glass-blower, hard, rough and aglow like the molten sand he twirled around at the end of the iron tube he used to heave air into.
Laurlyn had seen him do it many times, create glass. She had seen him dip the glowing spheres of liquefied sand into different types of color-dust, coloring the glass with random patterns, with stripes that ran through it. She had sat transfixed and seen him sweat; see his great body in wetness by the air and the humidity and the sheer warmth of the fire and the exhaustion of constantly having to fill his lungs and empty them again.
In her memory of him, she saw the fury which he poured relentlessly into his work. She saw his great, hovering body sleek and glossy in sweat and soot.
And yet, when she thought about him in this way, Laurlyn could not help but remember those rare times she had seen him blow gently into the tube, a tender breath that created the smallest sphere of air inside the thin glass. She could not help see him with gentleness as he delicately worked the material, as he softened edges by polishing and as he held the finished product with an almost obscene amount of carefulness.
Nevertheless; him standing there, heaving and sweating before the great fire was the most potent image she had of him. As well as the time he had raped her.
It had taken her years to understand that he had raped her. Laurlyn had thought it was normal, that this was what sex was, that the dominating weight of his body pressing against her, forcing her to oblivion was the way it was meant to be.
It was always painful for her, but she never said anything. She never fished for something better. So perhaps it was willing rape he was guilty of.
He never said much to her, in or out of bed. He never told her what he was thinking. Perhaps he didn’t think at all. Perhaps he just existed whenever he either breathed life into the glass or was on top of her, pressing, moving, making no sound as he pounded at her with fury.
Laurlyn did not know.
The shard she now held in her hand seemed to drag light into it, casting strange reflections on her skin. Stains. Taints of blood, small smears and blotches and blemishes.
He had created that shard as an exercise, trying to see on which scale he could operate. He had put the sand and melted it to an almost incandescent liquid, cut a small portion off and colored it red with dust.
He had failed in his experiment and the sphere had collapsed into itself. But nonetheless, he had formed the failed piece of glass gently, his brow furrowed in concentration as great balls of sweat fell down his strong, bull-like neck.
Later, when the glass had cooled he had polished it meticulously and formed it into what always looked to her like a newly budded leaf.“You can have it if you want,” he had said when he had finished.” Or else I’ll throw it away.”
Laurlyn had taken it, amazed by how cold it felt in her open palm.
That night he had been especially violent with her, dragging her by the hair, throwing her around as if she was a rag doll, using her, driving her under and pushing her, kneading her as if she was the glass he worked with. His fingers were always rough and cracked from the material and the scalding heat, his hair seemed always wet as did his colossal body.
She had thought that in a way, she was like glass to him.
But he never treated her like he treated the glass, except perhaps the phase where he was blowing air, rough, angry air from his great lungs which expanded to monstrous proportions before emptying themselves to small flaps of skin.
She thought he had hurt her badly, that he had ripped her up. She was sore and there was a little bleeding. She told him. He let her be alone for a while.The wound healed, eventually, and he became a little gentler. But only a little, and only for a small period. It all went back to normal sooner than later, but the last times they made love he refused to wear a condom and Laurlyn did not know how to obtain any sort of birth-controlling items. It was another time.
The abortion she took was agony to her and came to haunt her as much as the death of Neil Asstor did. She named her dead child after him.
Laurlyn hated herself when she was with that man who created the glass. Laurlyn hated him. The inexhaustible sexuality that he kept vigilantly alive as he did the flame he used to melt the sand in, the roughness of his fingers, the stains, the sweat, the acrid smell of that fire and those sands and dusts…She hated all that.
But there was something, something she felt when she was under him, when his entire body was pressing her into a small dent in the bed… In those moments she never regretted it. She loved him in those moments, when he seemed to compress her and break her into tiny pieces.She was more glass then than she had ever been before or ever would come to be.But those moments were rare. Not the moments she was under him, but the moments she loved him whilst he was on top. Mostly she just felt the hate, the disgust, the anger with him, with his stilled tongue and with the way he moved. He was a big, slow animal. He was an elephant. An elephant working with glass.
Laurlyn hated him and she hated herself. Forgiveness was rare to her, and pity was rarer. There was not much left to break when they ended it for reasons he left unexplained, and he was not the one who had lead her to the top of the world to kill herself.
