She Loved Him

I like to think that most of my writing comes from someplace - things I've seen, heard, experienced, etc. and I guess most of the time it does. But there are some moments when phrases pop into my head and won't leave me alone for weeks. Lots of the time, these phrases, or words, are seemingly unconnected to anything in my experience or observations. They are like ghost stories, begging to be laid to rest. This is one of those stories.

He dragged on his cigarette vindictively, as though it owed him something it was unwilling or unable to pay. Truth be told, he lived his life this way, holding all organic and inorganic matter accountable for its treachery against him. He was outrageous. Every interaction with him lasting longer than five minutes somehow became a bargain plea; his luckless victims were put on trial for their crimes, while he assumed the role of the all-righteous judge, doling out death penalties on the souls of sinners and saints alike. It was a part he was born to play.

Sara knew this about him, had been warned by countless of the accused that he would destroy her, but she wouldn’t listen. The history of the world is full of women falling in love with bad men. Not as a generality, of course; that is a gregarious misconception. As a stereotype, however, it rings true more often than either sex would like to admit. So she loved him. She loved him utterly for three years while the tempestuous dregs of his wrath fell on her quivering lips with more vengeance and ferocity than that poor girl ever deserved. She loved him until the night she died. 

The House

As a foreword, so to speak, I would like to make it known what sort of things I will be posting. To be brief, there will most likely be a little bit of everything - fiction, nonfiction, journal entries, what have you. The goal is simply to write. 

This first piece is fiction, it is short, it is incomplete, and it is called The House:

                The house wasn’t the same to her anymore. She couldn’t describe to herself why, but the change was real, a tangible difference that hung in the air and rested on everything. The closest equation she could make was that the house, and everything in it, all the old familiar rooms and objects, had once been a dear friend, but time and space had estranged them from one another so that their meeting again was less like a reunion and more like an awkward reintroduction. It wasn’t warm, congenial, or reminiscent. It was hollow, empty, the shell of what had been – all of the structure and appearance, none of the life. All this was strange to her, but, stranger still, was how resigned she was to it all. There was none of the wishing she felt something for the old home, no nostalgia for nostalgia. All that was left was an insufficient melancholy, too immature to be connected with any ache or longing for anything. It was a self-aware melancholy. It knew itself, but did not know what it was, or how it had come to be. Melancholy is melancholy, there is nothing more. She knew it, had known it for years, but as she tread slowly through the house, peeking in at the doors, touching all the old things, it subdued her with such pulsing determination that she could not ignore it. 

- Benjamin Beam -