He watches as the water pours from the halo of his hair, forming emaciated columns that stretch to the murky depths below. His sight is not what it once was, or ever was; anything a foot from his face dissolves into a thick, Bay fog. The liquid that splashes and anoints him, is a release, a penance. He lathers himself with the soap, heavy with peppermint oil. It stings him, and his flesh blushes with the burn of it. The soap is a flagellants anele, that scrubs the sins away. He watches the sin, the cares, the desires thicken into a foam that is sluiced from his body to flee and be forgotten in drains and pipes.
He drags his hand down his face, it pulls at the skin and ruins the courses of temporary rivers. His splayed fingers leave new waterways behind. This is the hand of god, he muses. For did not god craft us in his image, in his flawed perfection. Are we not god?
It is a hubris that suffuses him, a blazing, sticky hubris - the kind that froths and rolls to a boil in the labyrinthine depths of the mind, the hungers patiently in the blood. No Theseus could free sacrifices from this minotaur. But there is nothing in this arrogance, like all forms of pride it is built upon stacks of false knowledge and empty souls. It is a lackluster sin, the gold gilding having long faded - like halos on ikons, chipped and flaked, harassed by age. Pride should not even be a sin, it has no weight like gluttony, no satisfaction like lust. Pride, in its own hubris, destroys the soil it takes root in.
Beauty is in the intolerable cruelty of the senses.
just a little story fragment... should it be continued?
He drags his hand down his face, it pulls at the skin and ruins the courses of temporary rivers. His splayed fingers leave new waterways behind. This is the hand of god, he muses. For did not god craft us in his image, in his flawed perfection. Are we not god?
It is a hubris that suffuses him, a blazing, sticky hubris - the kind that froths and rolls to a boil in the labyrinthine depths of the mind, the hungers patiently in the blood. No Theseus could free sacrifices from this minotaur. But there is nothing in this arrogance, like all forms of pride it is built upon stacks of false knowledge and empty souls. It is a lackluster sin, the gold gilding having long faded - like halos on ikons, chipped and flaked, harassed by age. Pride should not even be a sin, it has no weight like gluttony, no satisfaction like lust. Pride, in its own hubris, destroys the soil it takes root in.
Beauty is in the intolerable cruelty of the senses.
just a little story fragment... should it be continued?
i want so very badly to be supportive but usually i need:
1. a character that i feel connected to, sympathetic with
if i can't have that, i'll take:
2. sparse prose peppered with a few powerful word clusters cropping up like wildflowers in a field.
and if i can't have that, i'll take:
3. action, a plot that moves like a full river, pulling me along, over, in, under.
so. what to say? these are just elements that i need. for other tastes this story fragment is perhaps just perfect. write it if you feel compelled to, because this story needs out of your head! if not, i know you have a jumble more stories, words, characters, moments up there in your glorious brain waiting to get out and be freed upon the paper or keyboard.
i think you're tops.