I like present tense. Here is my escape drabble.

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The icy glass sparkles on the bar, drips of condensation carving out elaborate patterns on the frosty surface, decorative windows revealing the amber liquid within. The man behind the glass stares into the patterns, his eyes blank but his mind not yet there. With one fluid motiont, one quick swallow, the whiskey is gone, leaving an empty tumbler and a burning throat as its only proof of ever having existed.

"Get me another double, John" says the man, praying that the next drink will do what this one did not, that the next burning swallow will take him away.

I sent what I think should be the first essay off to ita, who is the subject of it. That felt pretty damn fine.

Go Allyson, with the attempting to publish!

That felt pretty damn fine.

Doesn't it, though? There's a sort of "HOOOO, yeah!" touch to getting something really on its way.

Nova, I like.

I've written about this before, I think.

Freefall

Fractured metal in the grass, the nauseating reek of eucalyptus from a thousand scattered buttons. The universe has collapsed in upon itself, becoming a small hideous ball of screaming and heat and pain and fear.

Above my throat, a line of jagged glass. Before the Caddy was forced from the hill, this was the rear window. At some point, during the shocking tumbling insanity of freefall, the child called Eve was torn from my lap, torn from her jammed useless seatbelt, torn into eternity.

On shattered legs, I escape my presumptive tomb. There will be no escape from the nightmares.

*wince*

That's good. Hurts, but it's good.

Thanks, NC.

One more.

New Years Eve, 1975-76

The dream is perfect.

I'm young again, vibrant, and he's alive - I'm less in a dream than in a memory, sitting in the Keystone in Berkeley. It's New Years Eve. He's locked up with the piano; Garcia's on guitar, Matt Kelly blowing the roof out on the harmonica. Is it raining? I don't think so. I watch him, concentrated, not smiling mostly, and he runs an arpeggio during "Catfish John", so perfect, and he looks up for just one moment and we lock eyes and the sun, the fucking sun, comes up.

I lay on the threshold of morning, desperate to escape back into the night just gone, the night long gone.

Amazing drabbles, every one. I've been a little behind.

This seems to be my theme, I guess (Nova, if you say something about how happy it is to see caustic people dying, I may have to hunt you down and shoot you.):

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Mother chatted quietly to Dad. His work-roughened hands gripped his knees and he nodded gravely in response. I sat beside them but watched my brother where he knelt, leaning against his chair with his face hidden in his hands, all the tension gone out of him. His wife hid in the bedroom.

When they arrived, men in dark suits carrying a stretcher, they scanned the living room with anxious expressions then turned toward the bedroom. My mother called them back, waving gently at my brother. “He’s here,” she said.

He wasn’t, though. He’d escaped. I could hear the bastard laughing.

I've got a couple of thoughts for future drabbles. One is "under the bed" and the other is "first time living on your own." My brain functions in drabble land when I get up in the morning.

This is more about an escape that hasn't happened yet. Up close and personal.
The reason I get nervous while writing is because it’s not just a book, it’s my get out of jail free card. I know it’s not. But part of me needs one. So that I can tell fourteen-year-old me that I’m not just weird, I’m an artist.So that every therapist who put her hand on my leg and pushed it too hard murmuring “My, you’re involved, aren’t you?”would know it’s not just meat she was shoving.(And anyway, anything would hurt if you squeezed it like that. Damn. Although the joke was on her, the one who used this word for the first time. Cause I was sixteen and told her about litmag, and well, whatever I considered my involvements...it wasn’t till I finished that I realized “involved” meant “physically fucked up.” Which was weird to me because I really wasn’t involved in that, at all. I just watched.)

And I could stop hearing those voices that say I have no skills, the little shudder I still get when I read paperwork that calls me “indigent.”And think of those times on food stamps as like my Mapplethorpe period, instead of thinking of how it felt in line having strangers eyefuck my purchases.God forbid I don’t dig for change to buy chocolate with.(Which I did, about once a week for a year.Because I want to be right all the time. I need to escape that, too.)