Demetrius

Because when he was there, it was like catching a drizzle, and when he was gone, it was something worse. Emptiness, the kind in a house after the last box has been packed and loaded; emptiness harder than emptiness alone, because it was not truly empty but a quarter full of a dull, achy hurt, just enough to slosh around at the bottom and make some noise. She didn't want it to be that way, but it was. There was something possessing about him, about the way he would not be possessed. Or, at least, not by her. Not that she would give him the satisfaction of open pursuit. She wasn't that far into the forest yet. But the want was undeniable, so she let it sit there, as undisturbed and untended as it was unintended.

Because she doesn't know how to understand him. He's like starting a story in the middle, the first hundred or so pages ripped out or blacked out, redacted, redacted, redacted. His open book is no good to her. She doesn't speak that damn language, anyhow.

Honesty

Sometimes I want to take my reasons and throw them on the ground in front of all of them, everyone. I want to tell them that they're all there, every last explanation, every last why. Count. I dare you, you sick bastards. Count these small things, the ones that matter so much that you'll throw them away at a moment's notice. Excuse. Justification. Unsatisfactory. Just plain damn not good enough. But they are there. And that is the one thing that you cannot deny.

Don't Jump, Part 2

HONOR
No! Of course not! Why, do I seem...I mean, do I give off the appearance of someone who--

John
Hold on. Have you?

HONOR
Have I what?

JOHN
Done this before.

Honor
...maybe.

JOHN
Before as in, one crazy night in the boy's dorm at college twenty years ago? Or before as in...more than once?

Honor
Ten years ago, thanks. And no, you're my first...

JOHN
Okay.

HONOR
...this year. I've done...well, four others.

JOHN
Four?! And you've chickened out every time?

HONOR
"Chickened out"? Really nice. What is this, the third grade?

JOHN
Four times?

HONOR
You're really not what I expected. Your tactics aren't normal at all.

JOHN

I'm not normal.

HONOR
They usually ask nice, harmless questions. What's your name is the first one.

Beat.

HONOR
Oh, come on. I'm feeding it to you. Just ask me.

JOHN
What's your name?

HONOR
It's Honor.

JOHN
Anna?

HONOR
No, HONOR. H-O--

JOHN
Oh.

Beat.

HONOR
You really suck at this, don't you? Aren't you going to ask me anything else?

JOHN
Such as?

HONOR
Everyone's approach is slightly different. Not so different, but it varies, I guess. Some get personal. They tell me their names, too.

JOHN
I'm John.

HONOR
Then they just...ask me about myself. Little details. Children. They always ask if I have children.

JOHN
Do you have children?

HONOR
God, no. Twice I lied and said I did. A girl, two years old, father left me when I was pregnant. Cute little thing with blond curls. I was just trying to help them out, because God forbid you are a woman without a child. Suicidal, fine, but never alone.

Beat.

HONOR (CONT’D)
So? Got any ideas of your own? Any other questions for me?

JOHN
When did you start faking suicide attempts as a hobby?

HONOR
Who says I'm faking? Who says I'm not one-hundred-percent serious right now and just screwing with you?

JOHN
I won't tell on you.

HONOR
It started, like, four years ago. It was real the first time. It really was. I thought it was. I was so lonely, and I guess I convinced myself that that was the only way out. I lived in Utah before that. I used to rock climb a lot. So many great outdoor cliffs. I loved it. You couldn't think about falling or you got stuck. You had to focus on getting higher without thinking about how high you were. It was so zen, just...looking around. It kept me sane. And then I lost my job and had to move to New Jersey. Have you ever been to New Jersey, John?

JOHN
I think everyone has, at some point.

HONOR
Yes. Just passing through on your way to New York or something, right? But still, you saw a good amount of the state?

JOHN
Sure.

HONOR
Then you understand where I'm coming from. Everything got so gray. So I decided to go back to Washington.

JOHN
I thought you lived in Utah.

HONOR
No, I grew up in Washington. It's kinda gray there, too, but I had started to dream about it. About fourth grade.

JOHN
Fourth grade?

HONOR
The year that we drove into the city for a field trip to the Space Needle. I got the stomach flu that week, and I never really got around to visiting it before I moved away. Anyway, once I was exiled to Jersey, I was having all these dreams about how incredibly great it would be to go there and go up high and look down again.

Don't Jump, Pt. 1.

What I did for internship. Tell me if you'd like to keep on reading/give me some feedback, plz.

Honor, a woman in her early thirties, is standing on raised platform (the roof of the building), looking down. As the lights go up, a muffled crowd can be heard below, in a general state of panic. One woman shouts, don't jump. Honor rolls her head around on her neck, basking in it.

John (an average-looking man in his mid-forties, very middle-management, with a glazed, recited look and feel to everything he says and does) enters from upstage right, like he's just come up onto the roof.

JOHN

Excuse me.

Honor jumps, puts her hand to her chest, a pantomime of what frightened should be.

HONOR

God. You scared me.

JOHN

Ah. Yeah, that probably wasn't a great idea...

They stare at each other awkwardly for a moment. John coughs.

JOHN (CONT'D)

Um, ma'am, I'm going to have to ask you to get down from the ledge there. It's against building protocol for non-security employees to be up on the roof like that. So if you could just...

HONOR

Are you joking?

JOHN

No, those are the rules.

HONOR

I know those are the rules. Those are the rules everywhere. I don't care about the rules. I'm going to jump.

This had honestly not occurred to John before now. He is mildly surprised to receive this news.

JOHN

Oh. Huh. That's...don't do that.

HONOR

(theatrical)

If you've come here to stop me, you can save your breath. I'm not going to listen.

JOHN

Well, it's probably not all that--

HONOR

There's nothing you can say. My mind is made up.

JOHN

You could at least hear me out. Common courtesy being what it is.

HONOR

Why bother? I already know what you're going to say. It's just not worth it anymore. Every day is a worthless circle. Get up, brush my teeth, take a shower, go to work, get home, go to sleep, rinse, repeat. Life is not worth living.

JOHN

Then jump.

HONOR

...excuse me?

JOHN

Listen, don't take this the wrong way, but you're kind of pissing me off right now.

HONOR

I'm what?!

JOHN

You think that everyone who wears a tie and drinks coffee out of a 'Life's a Beach' mug doesn't think strikingly similar things about all of their strikingly similar lives? What the hell makes you so special? Hmm? That you get to stand up here and bitch about it to everyone? That you get to quit instead of sucking it up and typing up expense reports like the rest of us? If you want to jump, go ahead and jump. Who am I to stop you?

HONOR

(knocked off balance by his words, to herself)

But...well. This is interesting. A new technique, or something? It must be. I've never heard anything like that before.

JOHN

Before? Like you've been in this situation before?

Honor laughs awkwardly.

Dear Lady Gaga,

I think you're pretty cool. Okay? I really do. I admit that when I saw your first music video, I sort of wanted to take something very pointy to your skull, because like we need another slutty blond girl singing about how easy it is to get into her sparkly spandex American Apparel hot pants when she's drunk. But once you busted out the nipple fireworks and killed Alexander Skarsgard, I went over to the dark side. Because, let's face it, no one can pull off Muppet genocide like you do.

But when you make me go through 20 minutes of scantily clad backup dancers with bowl cuts violating each other and cigarette sunglasses and chunks of meat wrapped in barbed wire and no eyebrows and American Flag jumpsuits and rosary-eating nuns in red rubber habits and going back to normal for five seconds only to bust out a machine gun bra in the next shot and lesbian prisons and your entire face randomly dissolving and scaring the shit out of me all for no ostensible reason (considering that none of that has anything AT ALL to do with what you are talking about), only for me to excuse everything once you start singing and get Allejandro stuck in my head? NOT COOL, GAGA. REALLY NOT COOL AT ALL.



P.S. Do me.

Thrust

I will not write about the boy. I will not I will not I will not. The names on the list may matter less than the size or the shape. A rose by any other name, and all that. Words are no good anymore, anyways. They told me to try not to think in words for thirty seconds. Most of them couldn’t make it, but I did, I made it and now I can’t unmake it. Everything is motion. Smooth and rough and desperate. Everything is motion.

I can’t describe it. But I will sure as hell try.

It’s fluid, the way water still moves over rocks and fish and bare feet. It’s a growl that only I can hear. It’s the way his eyes shift and glaze over while I speak to him, because, like I said, words are no good anymore, and he knew it before me. It’s a scream a scream a scream, because of course my rebel yell would conform to the rule of three. It’s that one extra bend out of distraction before the plastic snaps and bites your fingers, a sudden sting inside a trance. It’s those fingers, curling, grasping, clawing, clutching his pencil for dear life. No one else knows that. They think that he’s just writing, just dashing off another witty epithet to be used later. But I know. I see him. We live in the same zip code, all alone, never speaking, and we are falling down the same rabbit hole.

Masterpiece

I took my time.

He watched me set up. I don't think he believed me, that I would do it. But once the signs grew more apparent, he began to panic. A small waver in his smirk, at first. That tiny flash of knowing. And then that chuckle, nerves showing underneath his thin skin of superiority. He accused me of having no creative eye. He said I was selling out. He called me an idealist with one breath and a cynic with the next. He screamed at me, words and spit hurtling from his mouth and splattering across my face. But my grip on the paintbrush never slipped.

My hands stayed steady as I grew closer. My face remained impassive. My arms flowed. I took my time. Line by line, stroke by sweeping stroke, I painted over him until he was nothing but an angry pair of lips, spewing insults and black ink.

And then, suddenly, I paused. I paused for the first time in days, staring up at that Earth-shattering mouth. That mouth had known me. My world was once held in the shallow dip of that tongue. The willing brush strained against my hesitating hands.

The mouth noticed my indecision, and it smiled lazily. I watched, transfixed, as its lips parted, its tongue already sculpting its next enticing phrase. Did you...

It was not I who did it. It was the brush that shot up before the mouth could string together any more words for my noose, dragging my arm along with it. The brush knew better. In three swift strokes, there was no mouth, expunged from reality, leaving only canvas and thin air in its place. The thinnest.

Gently, carefully, I set the paintbrush down.

I stood up straight, staring at the screaming emptiness, and I realized that there was a certain ease in facing an oblivion of my own making.