NEW WRITING: The belt.

 

He wore a t-shirt - bubblegum pink, cargo pants that sagged - they'd seen their day. His feet were naked - like they always seemed to be now. His dirty blond hair - shorn to within an inch of creation, sat awkwardly on his crooked skull. He was tall, narrow, built like a spike. He had eyes that were a sad blue, a sad blue that saw everything with an air of detachment - uncoupled, vague, lost, His bitten lips often mentioned the fact, hiding the word in a whisper - "lost."

He knew - on all those multiple layers of knowing, that he was spent as an entity, but he was still going through the motions. He had choices still to make, everyone had choices, but his had always run the same way. His fingers would grope blindly towards the place where choices were random and plentiful, where the air was benign, and seethed with fulfilment. He would wonder and he would envy, as he felt so many choices slide and scatter across his open palm, tingling with pregnant expectation - and then he would lose them. Everything, all that could be, passed through the gap between his fingers, and be gone - always.

He looked thoughtful as he raised his open hand, sliding it through the thin air - like an aeroplane in trouble. His fingers were elegant, slim, and long - piano playing fingers his mother always chided him. He had never had the patience for lessons, so his fingers had gone to waste. The air was steady around him, but his hand wouldn't stop shaking - air turbulence, he smirked, but he knew better.

Life had been harsher than he had know possible, and he knew in his scrawny gut that harsher was still to come. He studied his shaking hand as if it were an appendage of someone or something else, then dropped it to his side in mild disgust. His fingers sought to stroke his thigh in comfort, but he wouldn't let them.

He pulled up his sagging cargo pants, with those elegant fingers - his belt had gone; he couldn't remember where or when. He had woken from a dream, an impossible dream, a dream that flowed outwards from his point of origin, from that tiny frightened shining dot that was him, had always been him, hiding as it did, in a small damp corner of himself. The dream flowed out - a ripple on a tide. The ripple grew, grew, and grew. He was soon a tidal wave in electric blue, a wave that glistened across stars, a wave that furled and jumbled its way across every corner of the cosmos, and he was god for that moment, that dream moment, and he and all creation knew it.

And then he woke, and his belt was gone. He'd railed at the world around him - for a short time, but it was wasted, no one looked, no one saw. So he gazed instead, down at his thin waist, his angular bony hips, and knew that he really didn't need a belt, a piece of string would do just as well. It was easy to find string - a belt in the making. He smiled a smile that only he could share, and how only he knew how to.