Pale Apocalypse Radio - Amelie Andrezel & The Sovereign Nothings

I just (just!) wrote this, and I am SO EXCITED about it.  Seriously, I think this the best songwriting I’ve done in a long time.

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These are the coin purse scratches

That mark up my radiator; these stitches are my

Constellations of you.

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Yellow horizon swollen

With grey-purple morning rain, I’m

Full up with fever — storm’s breaking soon.

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Scan the dial over to

Pale apocalypse radio, nobody’s

Angels care about savin’ you.

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Scan the dial over to

Pale apocalypse radio, why don’t we

Share a sound or two?

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Hurricane in the fire and rain

Roll the windows down: there is no sound.

There is no sound.

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Our hands made blood-vows to the rusted

Cross of the chassis, holy

Order of velvet and chains.

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Three more towns to go ‘til morning

Another life or two to be saved

One knife, no heart to start over again.

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Hurricane in the fire and rain.

Roll the windows down: there is no sound.

There is no sound.

We sat together in the empty room, the three of us, quietly passing the cigarette.  Smoking helped with the pain of the procedure.  Not that it helped much.  It still hurt like hell.  —But it did put things in perspective.  Everything in life hurt a little.  When things were bad, you waited for the pain to end.  When things were good, you waited for the good to let go.  That’s where you knew the pain would be.  I closed my eyes and took a drag and wondered what it would be like to live forever.  I asked them.

Adam answered first.  “Don’t believe the people who tell you it’s tragic,” he said.  “Don’t believe them when they say it’s not all it’s cut out to be.”

Eve took the cigarette.  “They’ve never lived forever,” she said.

I managed a smile.  “Neither have you.”

Her lips wavered in the cruel way that had become second-nature to me.  It had been so startling, in the beginning.  You didn’t see the waste.  But that was what the distance had been, right from the start, between the two of us.  It only took until the end to see it.

“Be patient,” she said.  

“But never with yourself,” he added, tightening the band around my bicep.  “You’ll want to push, and that’s good.  The pushing is what moves you forward.”  His eyes flickered at the corners, just for a moment.  “It’s only the others you’ll have to learn to be patient with.  You’ll want to take them with you.”

She rubbed the alcohol solution on my forearm.  “You can’t take them with you,” she commanded.

“None of them?” I asked.

Adam shook his head.  “You have to keep moving.”

He pushed the hair back out of my eyes.  I didn’t understand.  It was the kind of advice that made sense until you turned it over in your mind.  But I was too tired to argue about it.  I’m sure they were counting on that.

“Why did you choose me?” I asked instead.  I knew it didn’t matter.  But I wanted them to keep talking.  I didn’t want it to end in silence.  Silence was the only thing left to be frightened of.  Eve spread out the vials beside me on the ground.

I waited for the answer.

— 

There is an age in every life where the world shows its true shape, where the universe is no larger than the hollow cavity of a man’s half-filled lungs.  We spend our childhood in the mistaken impression that the future is an open space, that we are free to move in many directions.  But the future is mostly solid, cut by a shifting warren of tunnels.  The maze changes by the minute, distorted by our decisions, cauterized by our indecision.  It sinks and it settles.  We awake one morning to the rattle and the groan.  It has frozen into place: every path and turn and obstacle and inhibition.  

All that remains is the bleak walk to the end.  The only directions are dictated by time.

Before I met them, it was an impression that clouded my ears and blackened my senses.  I felt it acutely when my father died, in the foggy waste of the raw monotony through which I stumbled.  I suppose I was surprised to discover the full extent of the illusions; the falacies I’d been so ready to accept as truth.  

Maybe that’s just what grief feels like.  Even now—so many years later—I still don’t know.  

I’d never known my mother.  I spent my childhood, instead, side-by-side with my father: always in his workshop.  The little showroom where we sold his furniture was more home to me than my claustrophobic bed or our yellow-grey, damp kitchen had ever been.  I spent my nights staring at the ceiling; we mumbled our meals in silence.  

He came alive in his work.  

There are so many things that you forget: distorted; repeated; revised or collated or erased—until your only real memories are the ones of your own invention.  But my father in his workshop: that, I remember. 

The landscape I grew into was a silent one.  It was full of ambient noise: the impatient whine of handsaws; the dead echo of hammers; the the shuffle of feet, unseen, in the showroom.  But noise is something entirely separate from sound.  The sounds of that world were the products of his expressions.  There was volume in his lips and in his eyes as they reacted to their work.  It was the language of a world dominated not by events, but the subtle topographical shifts of an artist’s mind.  I became accustomed to that rhythm, and felt more at ease in it than the steady tide of casual events that composed the diets of my classmates.  I learned to move in time with my father.  That was how we communicated; back and forth with those tools, scratching out our sentences in wood, painting and polishing them and selling them off to the highest bidder.  I don’t suppose I ever missed the correspondence.  Not until after he was gone.

(Part II)

by Amelie Andrezel (in response to “The Prompt Game” Round 3)

There it is again, the familiar gurgle of the radiator behind me.  In the darkness of the room it is always behind me, the memory of the whisper of the thrush, longing to drip and flow.  Longing to tumble; longing to sing.

I stand from my chair where my papers are piled and I walk to the window.  The hunched outline of the city looms on the horizon, squalid and grey, the cold October rain lending it the substance of a vision.  In the sooty violet of the shifting fog, I see it for what it is:  the maddened imaginings of just so many lotus-eaters—gaunt and raving, twisted by the gaslight—the memories of specters and nothing more.  Behind me, in the darkness, she stirs beside the fire.

Or rather, the fire stirs, and in it her reflection.  

Her complexion is like that: the pale throat of flame tipped in red, shooting and sparking.  Rosy, but never flushed; warm, but never hotter than could be left to safely burn.  She gathers the thread ends of the white shawl around her shoulders and stares out with the same hollow eyes that gaze down from the portraits on the wall.

Evangaline pushed open the heavy door and stepped into the solarium.  The sun wavered low on the thin horizon, casting strange shadows through the branches of the poplars at the far end of the lawn.  Already the valley sank in varying degrees of twilight, punctuated by thin lines and dark patches of early night.  It was as if someone had spilled a bottle of india ink from the Farm on the crest of the ridge, letting it run its slow course down the hillside, blotting the landscape as it went.  Soon, the lights would be coming on in the town, under the ugly glass of the dome.  But you couldn’t see that from the Farm.  Not that you would want to.  Evangaline shivered and let the door close behind her.

The makeshift sunroom was cluttered with overgrown plants, cuttings from this or that garden in the Old World, handed down and nursed through the generations with hope they might once more thrive in the dry hills of the North.  But their roots needed coaxing before they’d take hold in such unfamiliar ground.  Then again, Evangaline reminded herself, didn’t we all?

They sat together on the battered sofa, facing the door in the center of a blank wall.  Their work waited on the other side, unfinished.  He sighed.  It was always going to be like this, but now that it was really here, it didn’t hurt as much as he’d expected.  It struck him he’d been rationing out the pain for years, taking a small swallow every morning and once before bed.  That was going to be the hardest part: overcoming his addiction.

She held out her hand.

“I’m not ready yet,” he said.  ”Give me a minute.”

She frowned.  Her palm stretched out between them.

“I said I’m not ready,” he insisted, his voice trailing into its high register.  

She folded her hands back in her lap and shrugged.  He looked away.  They stared at their opposite corners of the room.  He began to crack his knuckles, manipulating the joints one by one.  The mournful popping sound filled the space between them.

The night gets cold and I am in France again.

The darkness is the same, here and there, in the corners of the ceiling.  Perhaps I will open the window and step out on to the balcony.  It will be quiet; it is always quiet.  Here is a world of silent music.  Even now, on my country lane, I catch myself listening for it.  The motes of dust tumble by, slowly, on the beat.  

I cannot recall the words.  

My head is too full already.  I am too much of memory, too much found to grasp the ends of strings once lost, frayed edges that once unraveled a city.

Here is the night.  I go walking in France. 

Time is long and space is empty and there is room to be so many people in a box that is no bigger than a shoebox; slightly larger than a fist.

I don’t want you but I could have you and still, I know: I’ll never know you.  The mystery is the wanting all in itself—a chase.  A chase with hidden corners and a fight that isn’t fair and weapons dipped in poison asymmetry.  We are all eyes, but only one of us is watching.

I won’t have the chance to ask you my questions, or dig in my nails, or unravel the knots that you’ve wound all around them, but I still see the thread.  You leave out the ends and tempt me to pull them.  I cannot reach them from where I sit, but I have my own instruments.  I learn to slide along the white keys, contort my fingers into knots, stretch my pitiful hands to the breaking point, just to say hello.

Space is empty and most people never touch—except, sometimes, through blunt instruments.

Farmer’s Market #2

Photo by Amelie Andrezel