PUNK PROSE: Two Stars by Colby Flanigan

I pierced my ears. No ceremony, but it’s possibly been a lifetime coming. Some things are born from looser thoughts than they appear. Permanent indentation of the skin, a puncture wound that makes me feel like myself. I think and begin to fold, to shrivel. I realized I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to be a bother, but there’s nothing that can come of it. I feel like I’m across the room. An old story about trying to grab an apple that’s just too far above my head. Your head. No way to keep moving to where I want to. I don’t want to be where I was an hour ago, half an hour ago, fifteen minutes ago, anywhere. I want to stay where my new life is. I want to be where the good people are. I think they are just about where they should be, just give them a minute now.

I realized the good people won’t do anything until they see my ears, because I can’t be beautiful. I’ll have to make a bit of a fuss, but I’ll let go of my hair, and then they can do what they will. I really don’t know what they will do. Who’s to say they’re good people at all? I don’t know if words will fail me because they can, they have, they will. I can just see the red of it all. The deep red.

They aren’t there yet, so I just won’t see them until I need to. For now, I’m feeling the pulsing, the charm, and the blood. I think about it for just a moment, the red, the red, the red. It feels good. It feels like my body is agreeing with me, like it wants me to get better, like it knows this is how I get better. The red feels more purple, a dark purple, like the night sky. It feels like the kind of dark night sky purple that can hold a shimmer well. It’s the kind that makes me want to live within it. I feel so safe where the shimmer meets the purple and the beauty of the night sky’s stars. Stars starting to stare back at me, but they love me.

I shut the door, breath in the bottled air, and feel a stinging, salty tear run down my face. It wasn’t a real tear; I could have cried in that moment though. Bumpy movement, honest light to sting me, yellow, with movement in the day sky. The kind of white fuzz you only see drawn on paper. The kind that looks like something else. A crow maybe.

People, good nor bad, scarce. My back meets cotton like an old friend, with another touch of red for good measure. The red feels like a cruel joke to the silver now residing in my ear. It’s real silver, the reflection of the red is a cruel joke, because it should be purple, because the silver sees what I see. The silver sees the purple night sky. I think it loves it as much as I do, of course it does. Of course it does. Oh, of course it does! I see it! I see it on stage! It looks just like me, like the most beautiful part of me I’ve ever seen! Stage lights are appearing like magic, you can see me shimmer like stars in the dark purple night sky for as far as the eye can see. Every eye! Even the eyes that move with me while I fly to the end. The stage grows with me while I move to the end of the dark purple night sky. I am the thing to be right now, I swear it! Now I can feel the tears. They feel so very real. I can feel rose pedals like a beautiful mist on my skin. It feels so beautiful. Cascading red rose pedals, they stay red, they don’t feel like they need to change right now. Right now everything is so beautiful. I think I might be beautiful.

I bite my lip and take of a piece of skin that was way bigger than anticipated. I jaggedly get up from my feeling, and cross to the kitchen, I find a towel there that takes my blood. This is a dark, musty red, it wants to be brown, it is a dark as a swamp, it is decidedly not beautiful. As I am draining, a shot comes from behind me.

“Oh my god what is that!”

I say something back.

“Huh. Well you should get a little feather and dangle it. Or maybe something bright pink.”

I say something else.

“Maybe I’ll start calling you Mary.”

I left after that. Suddenly every murmur became the sound of metal knifes falling to the ground. A war beyond my bedroom wall. I couldn’t be living like this in truth. People don’t find themselves with me always. I feel different. Black clouds don’t look like anything really. Like a smog. Something less purple more orange. Like a fiery abyss, something between worlds. Something that begs for your lungs to give up, or something that can’t keep up with the wind. Something that may or may not burn when you touch it with your skin. Not a dragon’s breath. You can move, but slowly. Not everything works the way it should.

It started to be too much. It started to become that dragon’s breath in a way that felt too serious to put into words. I don’t know if it used to be different, or if the envy I feel has just become too parasitic to keep living. Jealousy. I can’t cross a river on a burning boat, even though all I see are happy people who love everything they have. Like walking on broken glass placed by the ones you love. They didn’t want to put it down, but they did. Swamp blood. A swamp of brown blood to be crossed on a burning boat through the smog from the dragon. But I can still see so clearly. To have a day in in the right shoe. To be in the left shoe. No more lost punks, and enough of tough.

Never Mary anymore.

Swamp to river to dry and to food. Feeling sunken. The war races, right around and back again. Back to the safety, where I meet a familiar friend. Something, maybe nothing, but it looks like silver. It looks like the silver that looks back to me. The kind of silver that can break, but it doesn’t. It looks back at me, and then the silver on my ears stand proud. Suddenly the shoes are at least tied, and even though the red dried itself up, I can still feel the night sky. Two stars that make me beautiful.

--Colby Flanigan