Shallow Beaches

Shallow Beaches 
-LB
Explain: why listening to you worry about the state of the world—you cover climate change, presidential elections, academic strains, starvation (beginning in the first person), and career goals in a matter of minutes—and watching your hope deflate and despair consume you in your particular ease, nonchalance, and embracing way makes me want to believe that it will all actually be okay.

Explain: why these things I never cared about suddenly make me tremor and all I want to do is know everything, learn everything, fix everything, or maybe just fix you dinner and listen to you talk and never stop listening and listen to you sing if you sing because I think that you sing and I don't care if you listen to Bieber—which is big for me because things like that have always mattered to me in the most gravely important way—or if your voice sounds like screeching but I'd probably prefer that over the slow nervous warmth in your voice that matches the blue in your eyes that makes me crumble and smile without meaning to in the most high school girlish way (and I don't admit that proudly).

Explain: why the structure of your mind—or maybe lack thereof—is a hug to my tired, dark heart, and why it's been ready to leap on any collection of words for once that aren't my own or that one person's whose name is no longer claimed, but yours, and why every time I read your thoughts spewed out on the page I want to write more of my own, I want to believe that I can.
Explain why: it's 3:00 a.m. and I'm still thinking about that dinner—can I make you a vegetarian lasagna? Are you opposed to vegetarians? Do you have a secret affinity for Elsa and that stupid-looking snowman? Is it frightening to you in an I-don't-understand-it-so-I'm-either-going-to-overinstate-my-"masculinity"-or-just-try-to-avoid-it-at-all-costs sort of way that some men wear dresses and like other men or some people are just people who don't identify as either / or, just want to be seen as people? All these things and more I should learn before I make you dinner, I suppose, but I guess I just assumed that all the answers must be the answers I wanted because my previous paragraphs can't seem to be explained in any other way. Well, that and your hair falls just perfect and your eyes glimmer the dreamiest shade of blue.

Erase

By Jem Morgenstern

The wood burned. Fire tainted every color its wrathing arms could reach. Bright embers and dark ashes slowly fell onto the white floors, painting it black and spotted red. Blue wallpaper disintegrated: curling downwards, crumbling, fading to brown. Blinding yellow flames rose into the sky and bled into the blue horizon dyed orange by the rising sun. The blinding light would wave and the smoke would peer over the hills, but no eyes would look in its direction. None were near enough to witness the building’s excruciating mutation. Nobody would hear the aching wooden skeleton crack and fall apart. Nobody would smell the distinct, uniquely putrid scent of the burning evidence: the sulfurous stench of keratin, nauseating odor of heated bacteria, or fumes from unused chemicals.

No roads led here. Nobody ever wandered here. Discovery of what happened here was unlikely. If anyone did happen to find this ruin, every question they could have would forever be unanswered. The specifics of the crimes committed would never be uncovered. The identities of those involved would always be a mystery. Their stories would never be told, shared, reported. Nobody would hear about the cold nights they spent in that building - body shivering, teeth chattering, hands shaking - waiting. Waiting for the breathing to stop. Watching a body laboriously force itself to continue living until it lost the strength to keep itself running. Sometimes, it would take minutes. Sometimes, so much time would pass by that they felt their own bodies might give up before the one collapsed on the floor would finally croak out its final breath. They wanted it to last, so they could savor the intensity of seeing life inch itself out of a body with every shaking moan, every quiver of the body, every exhalation. So they wouldn’t have to clean up after themselves. So they wouldn’t have to begin the tedious process of finding another again so soon. They always wondered if anyone would notice these people were missing. They always did their best to choose lonely people. Quiet people who nobody noticed. Ones that were almost expected to disappear someday anyway.

It was when they noticed somebody had begun looking for one of their people that they fretfully decided to burn the building down. Tears rolled from their eyes, as they set their place of ritualistic pleasure ablaze. They watched the walls that housed so many memories of joy crumble to the ground. They burned their souvenirs along with it. Erased any proof of their dark avocation. Though they didn’t intend for the loss of their house of memories to put an end to their past-time. So they set out to find a place to begin again. One as hidden, as disposable, as perfect as this one. Where, even now, they continue to derive joy from watching their victims struggle to stay alive. Where, even now, there is no trail that leads to them - to their discovery, guilt, or conviction.

Souvenir on the Skin

By Jem Morgenstern

During the day, it’s so hot that even the rocks burn. Even in the shade, my skin boils. Looking through the windows, all I can see is the heat. Sitting by those windows, I can feel the heat seeping through to strip my skin of the little moisture it’s able to retain. I treasure the little water I’m allowed to use each day. I worship the plants that thrive six levels below the surface in the greenhouse we rely on to survive. I’ve never seen a bird. I’ve never stepped foot outside. All I’ve heard of the outside world is that fixing pipe H on the exterior East wall is the worst experience of our engineer’s life. Nobody else wants to talk about the outside. When they step back in, they ignore the questions I ask. Most of the time, it’s like they don’t even hear me talking. They’re always tired. They smell like dirt. They get extra water for the trouble they go through out there. The torture of the sun.

Someday, I want to go out there.

I want to feel that dry air, that dirt, the sun’s rays that burn everything they touch. Even if I can only get out there for a second, at least I’ll have felt it. Even if I only get to reach my arm through the gateway, at least a part of me will know what it feels like to be out there. A piece of me might be scarred by the sun. A patch of my skin could be a souvenir from the outside. It could be my own piece of the sun. I could look at it to remember the electric sting and the torrid air. The barren outside world would follow me on a reddened splotch of scar tissue.

But they’ll never let me out there.

I’ll never feel that air.

I’ll never be consecrated with a scar.

I’ll never be tortured by the sun.