A Tiny Piece Up On Moonsick Magazine

Short story of mine published by Spry Magazine— check it out if you have the time and interest to do so. TW for some violence. 

The Splinters Float

the pine-needle tea that she made before you  woke up and remembered the world flexes with green lines on its way to your lips.

the fire is low, orange, and smoking like your uncle used to.

you have brought candied orange slices cut so thin that they look like warped photographs of fruit rather than actual sugar.

you toss a rind into the fire the orange crinkles the orange and makes it go brown.

The citrus collapses in like an airless chest or a star that’s done being a star.

you take your tea up again, the tea that existed before you started the morning or believed in the sun for the seven-thousand-four-hundred-and-second time. that tea.

you woke up the same way you always have: mid-person, with human humming over your every bone, and a name that slips past your freckles and sinks, like an unskippable stone, into your rivered grey matter.

and then you had tea. and then you had tea.

                         - C. Essington 

Excited to have a short story in the upcoming issue of Bridge Eight

sleeping on it

everything about it goes around like a good story which takes a new room on a new tongue every night. I wish I could do the same but I’m not so good at convincing people to give me their time or their teeth or their mornings. 

the idea is that you drop yourself and then recover on waking to find that it all hangs different on the shoulders, is less pink, more amaranth, less the leaves of a turnip flower, more the hollowed chest of a cloud after rain—

go to bed across it, maybe its sheets will muddle into a word, maybe the goose feathers will conspire into a cotton-mouthed dictation, saying ah yes, the breakthrough, the meaning, the good. 

or maybe it’s just the time and how it drags through the dark like the cold body of a fish dragging through a mile of river: just about breathing without meaning to and surviving without intending survival until the thing that almost ate you the night before has starved to death, lost its ribs, its music its importance. or it could be

that you forget after you go under and come up, that if it hurts, it will have a place where it  can stop hurting, and a REM cycle is just a good way to buck the hours  off your nerves, not that it’s particularly curative,  just that it knows how to drown minutes

out of their bodies and yours.

         - c. essington

you are amazing. so talented at such a young age.

Hey there anon, you’re so lovely for saying that and maybe feeling it too. I’m working on it, I hope I can continue to write things worthy of transferring from my skull-contents to those of other humans. 

PS I like your sunglasses. 

from here, the metal of the sink trips the bright of the afternoon into one blot of silver  just thick enough  to get dim on.

from here, sleep is below us like a manta ray is below the water. we feel wings, slick and cousined to a shark, slip across our eyes. we fall in and out of ourselves, hands very close to not touching. 

from here, I’ve caught the picture of your eyes closed across the pillow, brain still shadowed, leg twitching  on the rim of a dream. I woke up before you to find the world soft, to find a privacy, the bed dented lightly with the girl of it. 

        - c. essington

the sky unclenches a mouth or two —  water trips out of the night  with the same sort of muscle your mother unbuckled to drop the bread knife on the tile. it all goes streaking past the long grey howl of window.

tonight, the house is a sound, the edges where the  rain dies into water. the roof is a flat noise painted awake by a thousand needle-wide of shots in the dark. 

the shrapnel catches in the ears, stays to make a soreness, and replicates a cloud’s shaking by jostling an eardrum. 

no wounds wake up from dreams to populate your skin. the dog is scared like the world’s already been done and undone  at least seven times 

and it has but tonight this house is a sound and the tips of bodies shaking here  only mean that it is being heard and there is an architecture to the thunder. 

                                       - c. essington 

my lungs, tonight, are fruit- baskets for the wind. I take the peaches right out of the blue-clear blows, and get to the pit; that’s my face going raw.

the breeze-burn is just the rise of blood to the skin, all that red running up to get to the windows of cheeks and pounding cell-sized fists at the border between gale and girl; that’s what I meant by a peach.

                                   - C. Essington

Sweet-Talked 

This is mainly about glorifying one’s own internal circumstances so they come across as tolerable instead of possibly taxing. 

(I know this is a writing blog, I will stop posting just art sooooon, thanks for dealing with me)

This is a finished version of a piece I posted earlier. 

               - C. Essington 

- c. essington