Author has written 1 story for General. A place for me to keep my writing, mostly unfinished. Love me, love me, say that you love me.
Claire clasped her hand to one knee, rocked a little, up and down her spine. "You know how I'd do it?"
She was pulling me down that road and I wasn't going to go there. "Let's go to the beach, okay? It's so hot, it's making us crazy."
She didn't even hear me. Her eyes looked dreamy, like someone in love. "I'd gas myself. That's the way. They say it's just like going to sleep."
She reminded me of a woman lying down in snow. Just lying down for a little while, she just wanted to rest, and it wasn't as cold as she thought. She was so sleepy. It was the surrender she wanted. To stop fighting the storm and the enveloping night, to lie down in whiteness and sleep. I understood. I used to dream I was skin-diving down a coral wall. Euphoria set in as the nitrogen built up in my bloodstream, and the only direction was down into darkness and forgetting.
I had to wake her up. Slap her face, march her around, feed her black coffee. I told her about the Japanese sailor adrift for four days when he killed himself. "They found him twenty minutes later. He was still warm."
We heard the hum of someone running a lawn mower down the street. The sweetness of jasmine took the rest of the air. She sighed, filling out ribs as sharp as the blades of the mower. "But how long can a person float, looking at an empty horizon? How long do you drift before you call it quits?"
What answer could I give her? I'd been doing it for years. She was my life raft, my turtle. I lay down, put my head on her shoulder. She smelled of sweat and L'Air du Temps, but now dusty blue, as if her melancholy had stained the perfume.
"Anything can happen," I said.
White Oleander, Janet Fitch
Our songs, for the most part, were love songs. Each selection tried to turn the conversation in a more intimate direction. But the Lisbon girls kept to impersonal topics. (We leaned in and commented on their perfume. They said it was probably the magnolias.) After awhile, our songs turned sadder and sappier. That was when the girls played "So Far Away." We noticed the shift at once (they had let their hand linger on our wrist) and followed with "Bridge over Troubled Water," turning up the volume because the song expressed more than any other how we felt about the girls, how we wanted to help them. When it finished, we waited for their response. After a long pause, their turntable began grinding again, and we heard the song which even now, in the Muzak of malls, makes us stop and stare back into a lost time:
Hey, have you ever tried
Really reaching out for the other side
I may be climbing on rainbows,
But, baby, here goes:
Dreams, they're for those who sleep
Life, it's for us to keep
And if you're wondering what this song is leading to
I want to make it with you. The line went dead. (Without warning, the girls had thrown their arms around us, confessed hotly into our ears, and left the room.) For some minutes, we stood motionless, listening to the buzz of the telephone line. Then in began to beep angrily, and a recording told us to hang up our phone and hang it up now.
We had never dreamed the girls might love us back. The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
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