Stories from RhyDin & The Rings

I ebb and you flow, it's a
A bit screwed but you can't catch my love

These stars are descending
These scars are discerning

UNKLE - Mayday



Corruption is a cancer; there is no cure for the way malignant tumors grow in the mind after getting your knees dirty for the first time. It devours all the angelic parts with a hunger that has never been tested before. Less a physical complication and more a mental game where you tip-toe the line on a day to day basis, constantly questioning where you go and how you ended up there in the first place. A disease like this isn't documented in the pages of Harvard because it infects differently but the outcome is usually the same: Innocence lost.

There are no girls like the one who is named after the tempting witch that doomed mankind from the start. She exists as a rare find no matter what temple you worship at; the bars aren't littered with this type of phenomenon who is a legitimate hybrid daughter of what is wrong with this era, and what is so right with it. The confirmation is written in the bold lettering of her body that rides the spine of limbo like it was the only chariot willing to take her from the light to the dark and back again. When she can't recognize her face in the mirror she simply applies more vulpine red to her lips, a thicker line of black around her eyes, to resemble the uncanny horde of harlots that she pretends to keep company with.

It's easier to earn a dollar when you go out into the nightlife with a glassy pair of doll eyes that don't register the ugly that you face off with every hour at midnight.

These types of things all come to a head when you dream a little bigger, dare to daydream a little longer. It didn't matter how the neon lights baptized her a modern jezebel or how the anchor of dollar bills within the flimsy band of a chosen costume fluttered as feathers might at her hip bones. What she reached for wasn't just the moon or the stars, but to a heaven idolized since the moment she could chant like Nancy Sinatra. How the lyrics to You Only Live Twice would rotate off the balcony of her tongue just before a chosen song of cliche stage performances like Closer would ruin the illusion of her being a divine messenger.

A chosen path that was riddled with the exhaust of a flock of cut wearing hell raisers, pretend friendships built on fixing hair and spritzing each other with glitter-gaudy body spray and clockwork mouth pieces that threatened your station because you weren't showing enough meat for the starving crowd. It wasn't a perfect fit for this forbidden Apple but it worked enough to ensure a thin roof above her head with a little left over to play dress up. There was no regret hidden in the tunnels of dragonfly eyes (there was a touch of each pigment from the color wheel of her stare) when she panther stalked in that seedy limelight.

This is determination.

And this? This is a wrong turn.

Accepted into a flock of long legged courtesans seemed beneath her until the dollar signs began to flicker like candlelight to her portrait. Where she could taste the reverie a little more, savor it just a bit longer till reality would settle back into its rightful place once again. But his hands? They're too rough with the origami paper of her skin; she doesn't fold easily for him. Where kissing was no longer romantic because it is off set by the pungent fumes of whiskey trailing out the engine of his humid mouth. It's no longer a matter of recoiling, of refusing, but a matter of proving that her anatomy is deceptive; each burst of bruising, or drop of blood, is now avenged with a wild streak of limbs being thrown like instruments of war.

And this man turned beast is no longer interested in a game of keep away; he doesn't understand the word no and it begins to fester drunken confusion across his older features. He's used to being the maestro to scenarios that end with his dick wet because of who he is and what he brings to the table. Literally. Some kind of man-made king that rules a portion of the asphalt that has no understanding of why a bonafide lady-bird like this has no enthusiasm in servicing him with things that are not in the rule book but he makes the rules. And right now, in this instance of sleaze, she is not playing by them.

There's a white knight in black cotton who doesn't know that he is going to be hero. He doesn't see the cinema for what it is off the bat because he's nursing the numbing vibration of cracking down her front door. He's absolving himself by trying to piece the puzzle of violence together, unaware that the watery and mascara slick eyes are not asking for him to help but pleading with him to understand. And the echo of her name is still haunting the hallway, rolling forward after the first split of wood and flesh, to come full circle when the sluggish President is turning a caught off guard look to this would-be vigilante.

She doesn't even flinch when the trigger is pulled.

The wet ruby of blood matches her lips.

City lights never slept during the darkest hours but lit up the entire nation of this urban jungle in a spectacle of modern day brilliance where lamps were not needed, replaced by halogenic bulbs that radiated swan songs for any moths that chose to live a dangerous, short lived life in the grasp of skyscrapers and constant moving cars. Calling out all the nightlife to exchange numbers on corners warmed by giraffe necked posts, flickering when their age was showing from beneath thin glass, illuminating an entire population of troubled hearts who she could have related to had she opened the slow to heal tendons of her memory.

As a princess in her ivory tower might (the ivory was fading, chinks in the wallpaper or loose hard word flooring) she was kept hostage by the ghosts that followed her thousands of miles from the epic howls of the Windy City to hibernate in this makeshift castle in the sky even though Ariel belonged in the metaphorical sea of youth and beauty with shells in the blood red kelp of her hair. What rode in this direction was what kept her preparing minimal tasks of adulthood by white knuckling cash from the cult of Eden and dividing up the wrinkled faces of dead presidents in order of bills before reciting the same verse, over and over:

Jesus Christ, Elijah, I miss you.

Her body is folded unceremoniously against a wall window that puts everything at her back rather than in the blunt forward focus of her wine drunk eyes, lazy in the glossy film that ruptures around a hazel color wheel once a few glasses of Cambria pinot noir dissolves in the wires of her toxic circuitry. She keeps this moon phase of her self-pitying private behind closed and double locked doors where she can openly lament over scattered snapshots that show a face of a man that would be foreign here with ominous eyes and a devil-may-care grin; these things of the dark arts seemed to brighten in her presence, even melt a little with the spark of Odysseus and Penelope love that followed the literature of spoken sacrifice with blood and a promise to never let go. Images splayed in a half halo that had been torn from an old shoe box kept her company a long with a crawling sliver of smoke from a barely touched cigarette.

Mid-sip into her fourth over poured chalice comes a fluid chirp that sounds off as loud as any gun shot when she had been asphyxiated in silence for so long but it's the name that shudders on the home screen, Charlie (Work), that is sharp enough to knife past the thickness of her somber trip down memory lane and get her to pick up the phone.

Text: np. could use the extra cash. bring me a souvenir. not a trashy airport one either. jk

"I -- have to get ready, Eli. Sorry to put you back into the box. You know how it is." Down playing the expressive detail of her mouth when speaking to a specter caught in the flash-bang of a camera long ago that littered her floor like a private memorial dedicated to a troubling attachment she couldn't amputate from her soul.

Eden awaited the apple of an extinct devils eye.

Mistakes could be easy to make if you were looking to be reckless and endanger yourself in the foolish plight that all the pious angels like her could make. Fallen spectacles with too many stars in their eyes and not enough space to keep them from overlapping; she stripped out from her biblical recital of a modern Mary Magdalene to replace her rotten halo, her concealing costume of flared denim and Bolivia knit poncho the color of the snow that had recently ceased fire from the sky, all to escape into the rowdy nightlife.

Her catwalk down the streets was the type of slow prowl to remind sinners why they sinned in an attempt to lick the red off that iconic apple. It came with no teasing purpose; she was unaware that the sly verses of her body language brought the wolves to her doorstep. Low murmured smoke of onlookers didn't turn her head or redirect her navigation to a lonely payphone. A relic of the techno-savvy world that was engraved with the initials of runaway lovers, of gang related warning signs, numbers that would get you a coked out call girl on the other end.

Each piece of silver she fed into the antiquated machine clinked loud as gunshots in her ears, over the fast paced veins of the roads that pumped out cars and buses even at this witching hour.

Ring. Ring. Ring.

The line was silent well into the beep that prompted her to speak. To bark like a dog. To make a noise and clue the listener in to who lay beyond the veil of an unknown number.

"I know I'm not supposed to call, not supposed to text, not supposed to write. I'm cut off from that life. Jackson and you, you both told me the rules. Eve, don't do this. Eve, don't do that. All for my sake, right? Right -- Right, I know and I have your voice in the back of my head telling me this is wrong. I can even hear that stupid grunt you do when you're really annoyed with me, or anyone for that matter. Specifically me. I was never easy to deal with and you were nice enough not to snap your teeth at me. Don't know if that is because of Eli or -- Or whatever. I just --"

Fingers roamed the wire of the ancient phone like a lover tip-toeing over a spine, curling it across her knuckles till it was tight enough to leave white lines through her already milky skin.

"-- I guess I just sometimes miss seeing familiar faces, even if you were never that pretty to look at, or that happy to see me. Things are different now and this city, where I'm at, is constantly busy. It helps to drown out my thoughts but sometimes I wish you were barging your nose into my fucking business like you used to. Jackson doesn't hold a candle to your shit, Gunner. He doesn't clean up after himself like you, either."

It was such an easy escape to babble like a slow tongued dream when facing no consequences of what would be spoken in response to this kind of salted wound opening up in the middle of a busy district.

"Anyways, don't be too pissed about me calling. You'll delete this as soon as you get it. Keep safe out there, Gunner."

The hunger to sate curiosity is a vile thing that begins at the finger tips, bleeds into the shoulders before knocking over common sense through the wall of the skull. It'll rotate until the cogs are rusted, the well oiled machine now just a tunnel vision to the prime suspect that can cure the nagging concern. And it doesn't stop till the teeth are frothing with a variety of questions, the tongue shifting from the sands of silence to recite unimpressive chants of why, why, why --

Each piece of her zealous ghost is kept in frames with Polaroid pictures of love-drunk smiles or beneath the tomb of her bed in a sacred box marked fragile while her current phantom leaves bits of trash to remind her that while lonely she is never alone. Crumpled cigarette packs with smudged fingerprints across wrinkled cellophane or a drained long neck bottle that was closer to a serene escort than the roadside devil had been intimate with in a long time. Every clue to a helter-kelter gambler that threw the dice towards the heavens to watch them fall lucky in hell was strewn in her humdrum apartment. Left to pick up the jigsaw pieces of Jackson's mess after a weekly routine checkup that left him satisfied and her cornered to cater with bittersweet small talk.

And it's in this ceremony of passing time in slivered tributes of house work that starts the swerving of her fox sly concern. Her cloying purity turns into a profane treasure hunt at the find of a maturing wallet, with the leather bending easily against fingers from how long it had ridden in the back pocket of just-as-old jeans.

"Hey, it's me, Evelyn --", she says, like he will not know the coquettish timbre that conceals a city witch bravado. "-- You left your wallet here at my place. I'm thinking you don't have any cash in it since you haven't stormed my castle in a quest to get it back, so I won't bother going through it. Just thought you should know that it's here, safe and sound, a long with the things you never bother throwing away when you come knocking on my door. Clean up after yourself or else I'm going to change the locks and see how you do when trying to break it down, big bad wolf style."

She painted a pretty picture of white lies when fibbing into the receiver; her fingers had scouted the crevices of that wallet and found something worth more than every bit of currency: A single photograph with a pair of knucklehead grins on crime lord faces via Jackson Cross and -- Elijah Mercer.

May 25th, 2015

Her image in the mercury poisoning of the mirror tells the story of a long lost lamb that found her own way back to the flock, if the flock is sans Icarus feathers and painstakingly bizarre on stilted legs with their mouths a gaudy blue-black, as if they hadn't been bruised enough from their fall from the spine of a pole to the glossy surface of a stage. The vanity is rounded out with dim lit bulbs which give off the softest cream light across an already milky surface of skin that she has worn for years; she's an opposite attraction to the bayou baby with downy dark hair that has the barest touch of an olive complexion but has the clouds of sunny skies locked away behind bistre eyes.

"Jesus Christ, girl, I am so sorry about taking so long to get back to you. I obviously missed the best night of my life given that you were leaving Chasing Amy out of that line up though I do have a confession; I found Joey Lauren Adams to be the epitome of my type of lesbian. Possible change of heart after watching her ruin poor Ben." She coated every utterance in the cool element of diamond dust left too long in the snow but Lia knew that beneath the glacial timbre was an earthy soul. Behind the issuance of her apathetic rambling was the heart of Eden, that kingdom of come downs and burlesque beauties all flaunting as birds of paradise to the tempo of Sail by AWOLNATION.

"Fuck, I hate this song." Admission through the low murmur when her matte maroon lips conceal themselves into the crooked pose of the phone, kept between ear and an exposed shoulder; costumes here ranged from licentious faux pas to a collection of Bo Beep frills and the choice for Eve, while assuming the role of binding thick lashes to semi-thin ones and drawing on the sloe tails of eyeliner, was a petal thin robe lined in silk that dripped too far over the sculpt of her collar bones.

"Oh, says the mysterious girl from mysterious lands about a possible boy that is keeping in company late at night -- You know I won't judge --", but there was always the possibility with the grounded, but divine in her deception, runaway may pass a sliver of a quick verdict to the man in shrouded question. "-- so just spill it, at my place, over a bottle of cheap red wine because you know I refuse to drink white, and we'll put The Goonies on in the background so we can both quietly appreciate just how dreamy Josh Brolin was, and still is."

There is a pregnant pause that bloats itself into a few drawn out seconds with her fingers switching lanes across the valley of her naive features that exhibited a coyness that tepid toffee eyes abolished.

"Bring the book, too. You can definitely stash all your goodies at my place for as long as you need on the condition that you at least tell me every little sordid detail of whatever you've been getting yourself into. And don't think you can hide this mystery man from me for long, Lia. Don't make me snoop because you know I will and won't rest until I am basically at his door. In a non-stalkerish way, of course. Fuck, okay, I need to go before I accidentally stab myself in the eye so call me tonight? Or just come by. Love you, miss you."

The phone clicked off just as the wanna-be Nancy Sinatra could be heard humming a low brow theme of her heart fluttering song.

Rondo in C Minor.

Grey skies paint a somber picture as the day strikes a two o'clock recital in the massive hall where a piano is constantly being dusted off. Windows here are wide like that of a child's eyes that pick up every twinkle of chandelier light, power off but the crystals hanging as a grand sparkling beard send a ricochet of color to every corner. Agar heartwood polished until it glistens in a ruddy complexion sets off just how the rest of the room resembles snowy drifts carved into outlandish designs of vortex knots and curved lines that bleed into a soft explosion at the base. A fire sets the socialite tone as it speaks in soft crackles during its dinner of logs, exhaling smoke into the throat of the chimney where it's dispelled to join the ranks of the ashen season outside.

Sitting at the piano with her scarlet hair securely braided by a mothers patient and meticulous fingers is a sublime young girl with eyes like melted toffee that has been dragged through fresh mint. She is absorbed into sliding her fingers across each key that speaks of a grace that has not just been bred but has been taught by hours of lecturing and practice that is the lifeblood of her talents. Her father circles as she plays with a dispassionate look that boldly speaks to how little he admires his daughters capacity for emulating Chopin. He listens with no emotion during the rise of the volume that is manually done by fragile looking hands belonging to his soul heir.

He is waiting for her to screw up.

Polonaise Brillante in C Major.

Her hair is no longer kept hostage in a braid but is in rolling coifs of red that accentuate virginal features of a soon to be teenager with a dove white bow to act as a counter weight to just how viral the cherry color is. The room is still of the same immaculate texture with no evidence of change save for the blossoming girl at the piano. Keys shift with the speed of the tempo she knows by heart with her fingers there to guide them in their sliding scale and she watches nothing but the fierceness that radiates from her knuckles as she does so. There is no fire to keep her warm so she is acutely aware of the cold rolling off her circling father who seems to get closer each time he steps. She adventures into her own imagination to run away from the chill eating up her spine and through her shoulders; sandy beaches where the gulls cackle from above like they are in on some inside joke that the girls who are running barefoot down by the shore cannot understand but they laugh with them, with each other, during their hunt for tender sea shells that goes to show that they have yet to completely grow weary of childish endeavors.

He is waiting for her to screw up and she does, just barely, so minutely that the only one who would notice aside from her is the looming monster who sneers as he rips her away from the piano to scold her for her flaws.

Twelve Etudes Number Four in C Sharp Minor.

At first the girl who has grown into a beautiful Erinyes complies but as she flexes the fire woven tendons amid the shape of her thin bones she feels compelled to react as a true agent of repressed vengeance. The white walls seem to reflect every bit of emotional chaos as their bodies puppet their shadows across the bleached surfaces in the face of a growing fire. Windows that once were vast in drinking everything in become dim during the transaction where the girl no longer plays because she is told to but does scream until her throat is raw. She curses her father for laying hands on angelical skin where his grip had erupted bright bruises of mulberry that looked as if wine had been spilled across chalk outlines. He insists that she is too feral for her own good and proposes the truth: He knows of the man who rides a metal horse like a lost king of the apocalypse, the man who has kidnapped the sweetness from her lips, the man who wouldn't save her but damn her in his eyes if she walked out that door at the ripe age of seventeen.

He yells that she is no daughter of his if she leaves but all she can think of as she rushes past the door into the dark is: Thank the gods.