(no subject)

            I’ve been staying up too late editing for the past couple of nights, and right now my head feels like a rhinocerous just fucked it, but tonight promises to be relaxing. Gonna watch last night’s LOST, which I missed, and MY NAME IS EARL, which is brilliantly funny. Hopefully start a new book and then pass out sleeping for at least six hours. During this span of mysterious "sleep," I am hoping that my Tourette's-aching muscles will finally relax, so I can at least START a day without being sore. Med changing sucks.
           Ah, well. I think it’s time for a little FWMA. That’s short for Fuck With My Art. I’m going to write a quick little piece here and I invite you to mess with it. Rewrite it. Give it a backstory, or continue it with your own writing. Paint it. Take a picture that fits with the story. Write a song for ukulele. Last time grafunkel produced an awesome drawing based off the story, chuckdawg did a stick-figure illustration of it, and pensylvania_joe did a rewrite that was better than mine.
            All I ask is that you let me know where your contribution is at. Put it in your own LiveJournal, e-mail it to me, post it in the comments, whatever you want.
            Just have some fun with it. Now, I’ve a tiny bit of an idea in my head, let’s see if I can just sit here – with Kula Shaker singing “Mystical Machine Gun” – and turn it into a a short little story.

---

            This is not a happy story.
                        She was sitting on the stairs of her apartment building the first time I saw her. The steps were concrete, but the porch itself was wood, old and warped and ready to collapse. Obviously I noticed her white hair, first, but it only held my attention until I looked at the rest of her. She was so fucking beautiful. No description of her is going to do her justice. You just think of a beautiful woman with snow-white hair, and then make her more beautiful, and that was her. Not untouchable beauty, somehow, but no less devastating.
           The next thing I noticed was that she was crushing walnuts between her thumb and index finger. She’d smash one open like that, pick out the meat, and drop the shell into the grass of the yard. I was kinda staring at her, but she didn’t seem to mind. She wasn’t pissed, either. After a minute or two, she reached behind her back and pulled out a well-thumbed copy of The Man in the High Castle by Phillip K. Dick and started reading.
            I surveyed the whole situation again, and suddenly my pants were too tight. Before I knew what I was doing, I had walked up the sidewalk to her. She peered over the top of her book and looked me in the eyes. I said, and I quote…
            “You good!”
            She began to laugh hysterically, which all but crushed my ego, until I realized I’d just made myself sound like I had water on the brain. I apologized and told her what a great book that was, but that I’d better leave her alone. She asked if I’d read it for a class and I said no. So she smiled and we went inside.
            Her apartment smelled like jasmine and basil, and immediately made me feel comfortable. The temperature was perfect, she had homemade lemonade, and every book on her shelf was amazing. We talked for hours, and I learned that she was not albino, but her hair had still been completely white since the day she was born. It never took dye, she said, but she didn’t really want it to.
            We talked for hours, until it was dark outside. I finally asked her about the walnuts, and she hesitated for a moment, like she was about to reveal her secret identity. Which she sort-of did. Along with the white hair had come the ability to self-regulate the chemicals that her body and brain produced, just by thinking about it.
            If she was running from something, she released adrenaline and endorphins and kicked into overdrive. If she was having difficulty sleeping, she’d slowly eke out serotonin until she was gone for the night. Scraped up her arm? A quick dopamine adjustment and more endorphins pumped, until she barely noticed -- not to mention that she instantly sent hoards of white blood cells and kicked in her B1 cells to overproduce antibodies.
            She demonstrated her abilities by lifting me off my chair with one arm. Then she carried me to her bedroom, where we did things that I’m not going to get into here. Suffice it to say that being with somebody who can control the electrochemical reaction in her brain to hold off her orgasm until you’re ready to have one as well is absolutely brilliant.
            We started dating, which involved lots of cooking, talking, and fucking. Everything was amazing until I came to visit her one day and found her front door was unlocked. I went inside, and she was sitting on the couch, with a steak-knife through her heart. On the wall behind her, the word “ENOUGH” written with a sharpie.
            I’ve gone over the scene a million times in my head, and I swear it wasn’t suicide. Her arms were in the wrong place…I mean, unless she put them there after she…look, I don’t know. The police called it a suicide and cremated the next day, claiming no next of kin.
            When I went back to her apartment two days later, it was empty, and somebody was already moving in. Nobody in the building could tell me what happened to her, or what had happened to all her stuff, or when she moved in, or what music she listened to, or what her hair smelled like after a long day, or why such a senseless thing had happened, or what the hell you’re supposed to do when the perfect girl dies, leaving you with the painful realization that nothing in the world will ever be that amazing again, and that without her by your side…you’re just like everybody else.

---

benjamin
Current Music at: http://www.last.fm/user/benchilada/