DRECK

J.L. MOULTRIE

SANCTUARY

            The girl in your garden strode with bare feet into tall grass - blade tips up to her bare
knees. It had been months since you’d interacted with anyone. The mounting, one-way attention
felt intrusive. Still, you watched her, for a long time, from your bedroom window.
         She begin to prune your long-neglected flowers. Her movements were relaxed and her posture refined. Your chest became a circus at full tilt.
            Her shadow was cast across the rose bushes until she prostrated before them. When you reached the back door of your cottage, the brass doorknob was cold against your damp palm.
You stood ten paces behind her until she stood and faced you. Her eyes were green.
            “It’s felt like days. I came here like a zealot; barefaced, close to purity. For once, I wanted
to be held. Regarded. I was golden, but you’ve been wrong about me before,” she said.
            It felt absurd to say anything in response.
            For hours, any attempt to be at ease with her presence proved futile. Minutes after sunset,
you gave her a blanket, pillow and one of your old dresses. You then placed several candles
around the garden and lit them.
            “Do you name your roses? They're in desperate need of food. Also, please water them at
their bases regularly, so the soil retains moisture,” she said.


CENTURION

            This consciousness is no longer mine, Michael thought, while standing in line for
medications. Suddenly, and without cease, the anchor of his perceptions came ajar and awash
with lucid morbidity.
            He placed tablets of cymbalta, buspar and lorazepam into his mouth and chased it with
water before displaying his tongue to the night nurse.
            Before admitting himself to the hospital, his older sister entered his room, recoiled then
remarked: “I think you’re depressed,” upon seeing Deathconsciousness as his PlayStation
wallpaper.
            His ward mate was a tall, slender man who spoke little and was twice Michael’s age.
He’d a buzz cut and, bronze-colored eyes that expressed, incomprehensibly, euphoria and gloom
as wide, diagonal columns of sunlight poured into their room. Most nights, the man murmured
and tossed under the blankets of his cot or, if he was awake, traced the outlines of his tattoos with
his index fingers.
            The mirror in the hospital’s bathroom reflected brown ochre skin, a high forehead, bushy
brows and a square chin. His thoughts, like bath water refusing departure, resisted his will, and,
seemingly, every phenomenal law.
            He sensed being pulled, inexorably, into a series of events, and, from his vantage, a sequence of
impressions that, in all respects, recalled an agitated wasp nest.
            The catalyst of Michael’s imagination vividly, and, at times, painfully, countered the
slight and mercurial methods by which his sense of freedom related to, and often, to his dismay,
relied upon, individuals in his immediate surroundings, and, terrifyingly, those unseen ciphers of
influence that operated unchecked.
            The lone desire that remained with him, like a single, honed cinder, was the touch of
beleaguered skin.

J.L. Moultrie is a Detroiter and multi-genre writer. He hasn't been the same since encountering William Faulkner, Sylvia Plath and Hart Crane. He considers himself a contemporary, abstract imagist.