you're too young & eager to love (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
impertinences) wrote2011-06-09 12:34 am
impertinences) wrote2011-06-09 12:34 am
Entry tags:
close enough to start a war
Teenager Emere.
Totally not incest. I wanted to explore her and Brando's actual relationship. Of course, Emere is so messed up and sexual that it's always a little awkward with tension anyway.
I stopped because I ran out of steam. I'll learn to write something of length one of these days.
She has that razor sadness that only gets worse.
- 9th & Hennepin
On screen Stanley is screaming a woman’s name – drawing it out, filling two syllables with raging despair. You move your lips to the calling, forming the shape of such a longing around the filter of your cigarette. Your brother, like a heavy weight you burden beneath, is blocking the right corner of the television and has a scowling expression on his impassive face. The type of look that’s accomplished around the eyes and not at all by the mouth. The type of look that your mother, you tease, had him perfect.
You grab the back of his shirt and pull. Brando sits on the edge of your bed, the sides of his knees touching yours, and you grind your cigarette out. You are older, but not by much, and sometimes you find yourself studying the side of his face too intimately. Like you expect his cheekbones to be as sharp as yours. His hair to hold the smell of last night’s tequila shots and sweat. You pop your gum and turn back to the movie.
“He rapes her.” He is neither surprised nor disturbed. “Why?”
You shrug one of your shoulders, adjust the falling strap of your lavender bra languidly, just to catch the way his sixteen-year-old eyes following the path of your plucking fingers. “That’s desire to some people.”
He doesn’t ask you much, and he doesn’t ask much of you. You would disappoint him if he did. There are times, though, when you remember what being a sibling entails. When you crawl into his bed and smooth aside his hair, briefly, unaccustomed to touching in a casual sense. Even young as you are you have difficult excluding sex for understanding. So you lay too close, speak too softly, and promise nothing.
The in-between periods are the worst, those morning hours that are too dark to be called such. Everything creaks and cries. You cannot forget privacy, because you’ve never known it. You would tell him you’re grateful for his allowances, for his silence when you slide into his bed, but the alcohol or drugs always make you too tired. (Besides, Brando would pretend not to hear, and you’d regret it during the day.) You pity him for his alertness, because there are almost always men around and very rarely just one. The lurking wolf-like types, the kinds that make you want to whisper Mephistopheles. They match your mother’s diner grease stains, her lipstick-stained teeth.
You laugh too loudly, grinning in the dark. “That’s her breakfast, lunch, and dinner right there.”
Sometimes, he wakes up with his arm around your waist – the type of thinness he associates with needles. Most times, you shove him away in your sleep.
You think he’s asexual, homosexual, something. You tell him over your usual breakfast (a cigarette and black coffee) while there’s still sleep in his eyes. In discussing the topic, you blame the lack of a stable father figure while Maine says Brando’s good looking enough to get away with liking dogs. You have the type of laughter that scratches your throat and seems insincere. It’s a noise that your mother calls rugged, like she’s still hoping your breasts will one day disappear and your anatomy will shift to a man’s. Like you, she’s never liked to feel threatened by another woman.
It makes you wonder whether Brando is keeping his girls away from her or you.
Your brother will undo the buttons of your dress if you ask nicely enough, if you pretend to stumble in your high heels. He’ll pull your hair back with the annoyed silence of an adult too accustomed to taking care of a child. Remove your dangling earrings. Slide off heavy rings.
The two of you don’t talk about family. You won’t allow it. You don’t have the stomach for that type of conversation, so you skirt around a bunch of nothingness. You learn how to communicate with looks and touches – a glare, a trace to the shoulder.
Brando learns that your fingers are claws. That tequila makes you sloppy, while vodka makes you bristle with indignation. Wine has you falling asleep in someone else’s car and beer causes you to be clingy – a temperament that leaves you more hung-over than the actual alcohol. You are okay with bruises, and you wear the thumbnail scratches on the insides of your arms like they’re a right of passage. He never learns whether or not you have nightmares, if you sleep with a pillow clutched to your chest, or if the mascara tracks on your cheeks are difficult to wash away.
Totally not incest. I wanted to explore her and Brando's actual relationship. Of course, Emere is so messed up and sexual that it's always a little awkward with tension anyway.
I stopped because I ran out of steam. I'll learn to write something of length one of these days.
She has that razor sadness that only gets worse.
- 9th & Hennepin
On screen Stanley is screaming a woman’s name – drawing it out, filling two syllables with raging despair. You move your lips to the calling, forming the shape of such a longing around the filter of your cigarette. Your brother, like a heavy weight you burden beneath, is blocking the right corner of the television and has a scowling expression on his impassive face. The type of look that’s accomplished around the eyes and not at all by the mouth. The type of look that your mother, you tease, had him perfect.
You grab the back of his shirt and pull. Brando sits on the edge of your bed, the sides of his knees touching yours, and you grind your cigarette out. You are older, but not by much, and sometimes you find yourself studying the side of his face too intimately. Like you expect his cheekbones to be as sharp as yours. His hair to hold the smell of last night’s tequila shots and sweat. You pop your gum and turn back to the movie.
“He rapes her.” He is neither surprised nor disturbed. “Why?”
You shrug one of your shoulders, adjust the falling strap of your lavender bra languidly, just to catch the way his sixteen-year-old eyes following the path of your plucking fingers. “That’s desire to some people.”
He doesn’t ask you much, and he doesn’t ask much of you. You would disappoint him if he did. There are times, though, when you remember what being a sibling entails. When you crawl into his bed and smooth aside his hair, briefly, unaccustomed to touching in a casual sense. Even young as you are you have difficult excluding sex for understanding. So you lay too close, speak too softly, and promise nothing.
The in-between periods are the worst, those morning hours that are too dark to be called such. Everything creaks and cries. You cannot forget privacy, because you’ve never known it. You would tell him you’re grateful for his allowances, for his silence when you slide into his bed, but the alcohol or drugs always make you too tired. (Besides, Brando would pretend not to hear, and you’d regret it during the day.) You pity him for his alertness, because there are almost always men around and very rarely just one. The lurking wolf-like types, the kinds that make you want to whisper Mephistopheles. They match your mother’s diner grease stains, her lipstick-stained teeth.
You laugh too loudly, grinning in the dark. “That’s her breakfast, lunch, and dinner right there.”
Sometimes, he wakes up with his arm around your waist – the type of thinness he associates with needles. Most times, you shove him away in your sleep.
You think he’s asexual, homosexual, something. You tell him over your usual breakfast (a cigarette and black coffee) while there’s still sleep in his eyes. In discussing the topic, you blame the lack of a stable father figure while Maine says Brando’s good looking enough to get away with liking dogs. You have the type of laughter that scratches your throat and seems insincere. It’s a noise that your mother calls rugged, like she’s still hoping your breasts will one day disappear and your anatomy will shift to a man’s. Like you, she’s never liked to feel threatened by another woman.
It makes you wonder whether Brando is keeping his girls away from her or you.
Your brother will undo the buttons of your dress if you ask nicely enough, if you pretend to stumble in your high heels. He’ll pull your hair back with the annoyed silence of an adult too accustomed to taking care of a child. Remove your dangling earrings. Slide off heavy rings.
The two of you don’t talk about family. You won’t allow it. You don’t have the stomach for that type of conversation, so you skirt around a bunch of nothingness. You learn how to communicate with looks and touches – a glare, a trace to the shoulder.
Brando learns that your fingers are claws. That tequila makes you sloppy, while vodka makes you bristle with indignation. Wine has you falling asleep in someone else’s car and beer causes you to be clingy – a temperament that leaves you more hung-over than the actual alcohol. You are okay with bruises, and you wear the thumbnail scratches on the insides of your arms like they’re a right of passage. He never learns whether or not you have nightmares, if you sleep with a pillow clutched to your chest, or if the mascara tracks on your cheeks are difficult to wash away.