Kunstkammer

I’m pulled forth from a heavy, artificial sleep, my senses laced with the milky drunk of Propofol.  I hear the monotone hum of white noise that gradually increases its pace, approaching my recovering conscious mind with a speed that accentuates the fact that my limbs are not recovered and that they hang heavy from my torso, as if shot up with half-set concrete that clings to every inch of bone and muscle.  My head begins to swirl as my sinuses are sucker punched by the rich, spicy aroma of aged wood and a more confusing odor that lingers like perfume, but burns like rubbing alcohol, all of which are hooded in a musty, metallic scent that reminds me of an old, rarely inhabited basement.  My eyelids finally begin their slow ascension, and as the cataract-like haze begins to burn off, my eyes start to focus on the view that extends beyond my eyelashes, which have eerily morphed into thick prison bars that mar the natural light that is struggling to awaken me entirely.  I feel the urgent alarm from deep within that wants so desperately to summon my fight or flight instinct, but like the rest of me, it has not recovered and remains tucked under the blanket of anesthesia, so I lay there, vulnerable, waiting for the lethargy to release me. 

I come to with a violent jolt.  My entire body is warm and coated in a thin layer of sweat.  I am bathed in late morning sunlight that fools my body into thinking I have a fever that needs to break.  I wipe my forehead with my right hand and let it slowly slide down my right cheek, to my neck, finally dropping it to the sticky, moist flesh of my stomach.  I immediately sit up and look down my naked body, panic stricken by the knowledge that prior to my black out I was fully clothed.  I begin to inspect my body with frantic eyes and hands, while trying to mentally zone in on any radiating pain that would give away if I had been injured, abused, or violated.  To my great relief all flesh is intact and the only insult I seem to have suffered as of yet is the unlawful drugging and the rape of my modesty.  I start to scan the floor around me for my clothes and undergarments, but there is nothing within the room; no furniture, no carpeting, not a thing spoils the mature hardwood floor.  Out of sheer disbelief I begin a second search of my confines, and as I turn my head to the left my eyes are momentarily blinded by the glint of an ethereal light.  I stand up to investigate further, when I am dumbstruck by the new angle that has been given to the starburst.  Overwhelmed by disbelief, I walk forwards, my anxious hand extended before me preparing to succumb to the reality of my finding, while my head slowly raises and my mind attempts to grasp and process the enormity of the fact that I am enclosed within a glass dome; a bell jar. 

My fingers hover before the glass, as my mind weighs which finger I should use to release the profound reality of my situation upon me.  As if moving of its own accord, my right middle finger presses into the warm glass, my remaining fingers, thumb, and palm following suit.  I place my left hand on the glass and then bring my face just centimeters from the transparent wall, gazing out at the most ordinary of views.  I’m in a small room.  Before me is an ornate cottage window, trimmed in a seasoned, splintered wood and bejeweled with six seeded glass panes.  To the left of the window, butting up against the uneven, yellowing, plaster wall is an antique desk composed of shelves, drawers, and cubbies of varying sizes and shapes.  The desk surface is cluttered with papers; some crumpled others merely mistreated by rough hands that have pushed them off to this side and that corner.  There are pencils that bear teeth indentations, fountain pens stained with ink blotches from careless hands, empty wooden picture frames, and books with worn spines stacked unevenly; some books lay open, others bear the scar of pages with dog-eared corners.  The walls of the room are adorned with maps of exotic and domestic locales, photographs of indigenous people I’ve only read of in tales of travel, of wild animals and flightless birds long extinct, and illustrations of deep sea dwellers that resemble visions from nightmares or dark fairy tales.  Tucked in one corner of the room is a tattered, moss green velvet chair that looks as if it was resurrected from the bowels of a trash heap and stretching across the floor of the room is a faded, moth eaten oriental rug that I can tell once proudly flaunted rich jewel tones.  Just a few feet from the chair is the warped, wooden door; shut, and as the gaps reveal, locked.  Thinking on the grand picture I am able to deduce that this is someone’s study, but in terms of my crystalline prison, I’m as ignorant as ever as to the questions of who, what, where, and why. 

As the sun’s position gradually shifts, my cell slowly cools and I’m caught off guard by the minutest whirl of a breeze that envelops me.  I look above me to see that the dome is punctured by several small holes, clearly my source of oxygen, and vital for my survival.  My mind flirts with the idea that my captor wants me alive.  As I slowly turn around I am frozen with fear at the horror before me.  A primitive wooden cabinet stands open.  Worn iron hinges, pulls, and handles adorn the doors and drawers of the cabinet, but it’s the bizarre knickknacks…the morbid trophies…that fill the shelves, that drains the blood from my face and sends my stomach plummeting to the soles of my feet.  Glass jars filled with clear fluids drown nature’s oddities; a two headed pig fetus, a six fingered hand, a five eyed fish.  Insects painted in the most stunning hues and shimmering in an otherworldly iridescence are pinned to linen wrapped panels.  Snake skins and small animal pelts hang on the cabinets back panels.  I see small glass containers containing collections of teeth; incisors, molars, gold, even a few that bear precious gems.  Skulls of odd shapes and sizes, some even resembling that of humans, stare back at me with their deep, dark, forlorn sockets.  Patches of tattooed flesh are stitched to canvas and sealed behind museum grade glass.  My body is numb and trembling with fear.  I bring my hands to my mouth to stifle my inaudible screams, when my eyes catch sight of my mental undoing.  Just a few inches from the bell jar that holds me captive, is an array of cold, scientific implements, some medieval in appearance, laying in wait for my abductor to return and with dexterous hands and meticulous precision and skill, violently craft me into an exhibit in the Cabinet of Curiosities.

E.A. O'Connell

It All Started With A Kiss

It all started with a kiss

On an unwashed head

Small and wet, rosy and impressionable

I’ve kissed you a thousand times over

And a thousand times more

Never kissing the same sentiment twice

Growth with each second, every minute

Deepening and widening

A universal declaration

All with just a kiss

Mother kisses baby

Baby kisses mommy

And a light is lit

Illuminating a silhouette within the blush

Reaffirming a greater knowing

In a gesture so simple, so profound

A sentiment of the purest nature

And it all started with a kiss

As he held my face in his hands

Elizabeth A.K. O'Connell

A Letter To A Sister

I am a sister and so I can easily pull emotions from within to put to paper.  This is an excerpt of a fictional piece I began writing a few years back about the bond, love, and energy that exists in such a relationship.  Sometimes sisters quarrel and this excerpt captures one side of the story...so to say 


A Letter To A Sister

It is in moments of great sadness that I turn to you, looking for that ray of light, hopeful for that ray of light.  In moments of nightmarish horrors that I curl up next to you, and remember how to breathe.  I could never tell you these things, they would be too personal, and I don’t do personal.  At least not vocally.  Built strong, built durable, I can be beaten down by the stabbing words thrown from your mouth and rise up unscathed to the naked eye.  But you, you know where they have landed, certain with your aim of where to send them, deep into the flesh, down into the darkness, particular of which parts should be spared the hemorrhage of days old septic hurt.  That is left for your final blow, that binds my arms to a holy figure instructing me silently to whisper my pain, fall on my time, out of sight from your torment. 

And here at this age, I can’t find my way so easily to your door, and ask if I could sleep in your bed tonight because of the nightmares, and I won’t remember how to breathe without you there to tell me, and I will fade into the shadows of my fear and my anguish, praying that if sleep takes me I will remember to take in oxygen and exhale forgiveness, so I can wake up and know that I am still alive.  See it’s your job to keep my aware of my existence, otherwise I lose my train of thought and lean towards a questionable mortality, questionable in whether I am truly living this life or just writing it in my head, to be read by a patron in a chain bookstore.  And you didn’t ask for this job, and I never knew it would be so needed, but when do we ever really know what our place is, unless someone makes it for us; until someone makes it for us. 

Your burden is me, to keep me in the rational and to encourage the art that fears me with failure.  You’re to guide me in a direction that you too are going, because in all honestly you lead the pack and you always have, and I follow happily and without question, because you are my one true friend, my first friend.  What will I do if I can never find your door, and make my place next to you, and you aren’t there to remind me that breathing is how we see tomorrow, and the day after, and the day following that day?  Will I be strong enough to take that risk, risking self imposed insomnia out of fear that the blood we shared, that keeps us rosy, would run out; puddles pooling in sunken ground, no longer sturdy and capable of supporting the weight from us both.  And we know how that plays out.  I am after all the heavier of us two, but you do always say to take the weight off my shoulders. 

So I take two steps to the left and you stand transfixed on the reflection in the puddle, looking deeper and deeper into the hole, and I take four more steps to the left as your face loses color, and I take six more steps to the left, as your mouth curls around the word as it sometimes does the world, and as my shape becomes more of a smear, you reach out your arm, and reach back towards my arm, and your neck turns to direct your eyes to where mine would be, and without thinking as you often do, you utter “We,” but me has to be for there to be a we, and in this moment, on that day you sent me away to a foreign soil that cuts between my toes with every step I take that sends me farther away from you.  Without a map I get lost easily, and I’m getting quite scared with these new surroundings, but if I must I will adapt, but not by choice, by laws of science, that stipulate that only the fittest survive, and I may be cut, I may be bruised, and sore and tired, I may need time, but I will learn to remind myself to breathe and I will find my way and I won’t remember how I need you, and my hands will be empty, but they will be ready when a hand comes along, a familiar hand that fits perfectly into mine, and can squeeze me a “Hello” and will hold tight to “We.”  I will remember, because if there is one job in this life I know how to do, it is to be your sister, and to be your sister is a privilege and an honor I still fear I will not measure up to, but that’s a chance I’m willing to take, after all I’m the only one who has this job and if mistakes happen along the way, we don’t decide if my job is terminated, that belongs to another, so for all we know I could be employee of the month. 

Be patient with this human, imperfection runs through me, as does compassion and loyalty.  Don’t lose faith.  The night has proven to be much more strong willed than I, so I find my end, and I find my breath, and I lay my head towards the direction of your room, and I set out to banish my dark horrors alone, inhaling oxygen, exhaling…..      

E.A. O'Connell

She Is

She Is

She is the silly little girl

With nonsensical thoughts

That ramble and rush

In waxy, inky hues

Coloring a world from white

She is the dreamy headed dandelion

A thousand wishes blossom

That release in a breeze

Humming a song of freedom

Not bound by boundaries

She is the ever phasing moon

Warmth at the core of a frosty, brilliant light

A beacon for far reaching possibilities

The keeper of silent secrets

A generous promise to all impractical dreamers

E.A. O'Connell

Lemmings To The Movement

Dark and wet,

the earth radiates a scent of green

and a metallic taste on tip of tongue

Weathered grasses brush legs,

with touch of an uncertain lover

whose calloused hands reveal life of true toil

The horizon crests in a wave,

threatened by distant lightning,

spurred by the heated atmospheric tension

As the wanderers congregate,

stepping to the edge in unison

oblivious of the age old map above,

unacquainted with lost civilization below

Misguided by voices of generations gone slant

the persuading magnetic pull,

forces hasty retreat

but not before the brief hesitating stun

of perilous possibilities

But then washes the never mind,

and the thought hazing drive,

so head first they die,

an innate diving blind

E.A. O’Connell

All Hallows' Eve

An early Hallowe'en post.

All Hallows’ Eve

The mosaic tide of rusty, golden, and burnt leaves gently coasts across cold stone and hardening earth, collecting like lost trinkets in pockets beneath trunks and posts.  Once waxy and green, the vibrant decaying flesh finds magnificent splendor in its final hours, it’s the smell of nature’s peace with the closing of another season that elicits a calendar of memories; hot apple cider simmering on the stove, warm spices for baking, hills of orange pumpkins nestled in their yellowing green vines, ripe for the picking.  The final October sun sets on the witchy eve, as clocks tick and tock and chime the All Hallows’ call, summoning angels, thieves, fairies, ghouls and goblins to undertake their wicked crawl.  Porches house and windows frame the burning Cheshire cat grins and sinister horseman brows, carved on the plump faces of Jacks, as haunting green scepters trail an alien glow along dark pathways and within dimly lit portals.  Distant howling sets rounded ear on point, as an undistracted focus attempts to distinguish between a neighborhood dog’s desire to be stretched out before a warm hearth and the warning howl that bellows from Hell’s Hounds.  Muted feathery gargoyle guardians perched on high branches and within knotty trunks, cautiously watch with wide eyes as the Shadow People creep and skip, dancing a peculiar rhythm that keeps time with the willowy voices and child-like laughter that resonates under the vellum thin veil that for this one night is lifted, allowing the dead to walk amongst the living and the living to masquerade as the dead.

Soul Searcher

This is merely an unedited excerpt of something I've been writing...it delves into the idea that while we sleep our souls travel.  More work to be done in due time.


Soul Searcher

    

It began on a cool September night, around 1:30 in the morning when I was awoken with a startle from a rather odd dream my mind was concocting.  I was back at my childhood residence, a home where my heart certainly still was, and I was horrified that the once cozy quarters had taken on the look of a fun house.  The foyer’s warm brown sugar carpeting was stripped away, replaced by a cold black and white diamond patterned marble floor.  The walls were papered with a stark white that took on a nearly blue hue and was designed with methodically placed black Rorschachesque blemishes.  A crystal chandelier hung from the upstairs hall ceiling on a long clear chain and hovered only six, maybe seven, feet above the marble floor.  The original front door that once offered a welcoming character to the home’s façade was replaced by a thick black door with three slim, rectangular windows running down the center.  All decor on the first floor of the home was black, white, or transparent. 

I stood on the stairs infuriated by the unwelcome makeover to my childhood home, and started to scream a blood curdling wail that caused my body to bend and contort, my fists to clench and my eyes to shut tight, but not a sound echoed from my lungs.  A young blonde girl with her hair in a prim ponytail and her not much older, much blonder brother with coarsely chopped mane appeared from the breakfast room, and were shortly joined by their agitated mother who couldn’t hide the uninvited fear that had settled so unevenly on her face, in that delicate space between flesh and bone.  She pulled her children to her body in a protective embrace; her left hand clasping her daughter’s left shoulder, her right hand digging in the same manner into her son’s right arm.  Summoning anger to project through her insecurity, she yelled, “You don’t live here anymore!  This is our house!  You must leave now!” 

I looked towards the two substantial windows that lined the upstairs landing and there were no panes within them, just empty space that from my angle looked out on the tall trees that towered over two blocks of homes.  A soothing warm, spring-like breeze swirled around me, luring me up the stairs to the windowless wall.  I could still hear the mother demanding my departure, but her voice grew distant as everything outside the window began to drain of color and lose defining lines.  The entire world had gone white, blinding white, like sunlight that kept intensifying until it radiated through my flesh, making my eyes squint and then forcing them shut, but even under the safe cover of my eyelids the light still penetrated my eyes.  I heard the drone of white noise and just as I felt I might succumb to the hypnotic hum, I felt the floor beneath my feet disintegrate, and I dropped, falling at such an alarming rate it no longer felt like I was plummeting, I felt static.  And as I began to feel the rush of familiar songs, voices, scents, and touches coming over me, and I, just a hairsbreadth from placing my finger on the familiar, awoke with the whip of my neck, now facing the terrace off my bedroom, eyes locked on the tall, dense shadow, darkening the balcony.   

      

I felt no alarm bells going off in my woman’s intuition, no fear.  I just kept my eyes on the shadow, trying to let them adjust and focus in the harsh shades of night that seemed too bright compared to the womb-like protection and shade my eyelids provided mere seconds ago.  I finally broke my gaze and rolled my eyes to the ceiling.  I snuck a quick peek and still the shadow was there, angled into the concrete railing and the column that bore a gaping mouthed gargoyle, who’s accusatory eyes questioned every person, dog, and specter that passed below my twenty-three story penthouse.  Eyes to the ceiling, I exhaled a soothing breath and felt goose bumps alight over my flesh as the cool evening breeze blew into my bedroom from the open French doors, billowing the gauzy curtains that framed the threshold.  I pulled my downy, white comforter over my shoulder as I rolled in the opposite direction, away from the senseless distraction that kept me from sleep.  In my head was a running one person conversation about the ludicrous thought that it could be anything more than a play of the moonlight and the dark corners, embellished columns, and ornamental potted plants that adorned my balcony.  Nobody, nothing, could gain access to my apartment without authorization from more than one source.  Without sneaking another peek, I fell into a welcome sleep.

I could feel myself boiling with rage, trying to express myself through a rabid snarl, that it was mine, it was my home.  I was clinging to the ebony railing, my fingernails embedding into the wood, through layers of stain and varnish.  Her words rushed me with a smug certainty that she could banish my fury.  “You don’t live here anymore!  This is our house!  You must leave now!”  I released the banister and as I turned to curse her, I felt a pull that reached into my body and grasped my lungs, dragging me towards the Rorschach blotch that had deceptively looked harmless, but was morphing in a flipbook fashion; bat, butterfly, pelvis, shark jaws, face mask, skull.  The vacant white sockets took on a sinister, angular shape, staring at me as it bowed forward, its mouth gaping wider, wider, wider, until it was inhaling me with a ferocity that sucked me in with the power of a natural disaster, and as I felt myself being decimated into tiny particles, I could here her repeatedly banishing me from her home.

With a dramatic gasp of breath, I sat up and threw the covers off my body, stepping onto the cold bamboo floor.  I walked into my dark bathroom; filling the glass I kept by the sink with water and swishing it around in my mouth, spitting it down the drain.  I took a sip and felt it bring back to life my arid throat.  Taking another sip, I emptied the remaining water into the sink, placed the glass on the blush marble counter with an echoing clink, and walked towards the French doors that encompassed a majority of the far wall in my bathroom.  I looked up at the night sky, catching sight of Orion’s belt, and as my eyes set out on a quest to map other constellations, I saw the dark mass in the same spot it was however long ago.  I tried to determine if there was anything more to the mass than shadow, but I couldn’t really make out any defining lines or sinews that would betray a well designed veil of deceit.  I shook my head at how ridiculous an idea it would be for a person, a man, to make his way onto my terrace undetected and at such a height. 

I returned to my room and sat on the edge of my bed, taking note that the shadow was still there.  As I climbed into bed I glanced at the lilac Moonbeam clock on my bedside table, the long and short arms marking the time as 2:59am.  I lay back on my pillows and turned one last time to glimpse the shadow before surrendering to a vulnerable suspension of consciousness, when I noticed the shadow had taken leave of my balcony.  I looked to the clock and saw that it was 3:00am.  Only a minute, perhaps even less, had passed since I verified its presence, but by some strange circumstance with either city lighting at this height or lunar glow at that angle, it had vanished.  I went right to the doors, stepping out on the terrace, but there wasn’t a shadow, corner, column, or potted plant that compared to or could mimic the mass that stood here no more than two minutes ago.  I scanned both wings of the terrace before returning to my bed, succumbing to a sleep that came too easily after such an unforeseen manifestation and even more abrupt departure.        

E.A. O'Connell