kaine snowspire /d10

If you're reading this, you're not meant to be.

But it's fine I think. Even if I signed my name, I doubt you'd believe it was actually me who wrote it because the people who know me, don't. No one really does and that's pretty much how I like it.

Still, I'll treat this like a bit of an introduction, because you're a new book and everyone loves a good summary.

We have always lived in the castle and we never leave. Odd, I know, but that's just how things are. I don't remember a time before this, I couldn't even tell you what the world past the gates looks like. All we have is the snatches of imagery we see on the muted television from the hallway outside of the teacher's lounge. It's not much to go off of and I have been told enough times through the notes in the margins of my homework assignments that I tend to have an overactive imagination, but I'm beginning to think that there's not even anything past the school grounds.

The world is probably just empty, a void or a wasteland, doesn't matter. All this work, this honing of our talents that we do, it's just to keep us occupied enough so that we don't lose our fucking minds.

That's just one theory though, I've got a few more.

Snowspire looks like a cool place to grow up on paper but anything can seem good depending on what words you use to tell your story. It's easy to flip bias, I know, because even though you don't know who I am, though you may have some guesses, I can guarantee that you're already warming up to me.

And that's hilarious.

I've been told that my talent is storytelling, which is sort of funny in it's own right if you've met me. If anyone can take the prize for worst public speaker in the school, it'd be me by default every time. I can't move a string of words, let alone a sentence out of my mouth without it taking eons.

Even before I got my stutter, I was never good at other people. Grant swears he can remember a time when I spoke as well as anyone but everyone also says Grant got kicked in the head by a horse when we were kids and I can believe that. A lot of things happened to us when we were little and that's not even the most ridiculous rumour, but I digress.

Munroe says I've been like this always, happiest on my own in the corner of the playground even when I was small. It's just natural that I never found anywhere to fit in because of it, when I should have been laying foundations for friendship with everyone else, I was telling myself stories about the monsters in the woods. I wrote and illustrated my first book when I was five and it was quickly confiscated. I couldn't tell you what it was about but after that it was labelled my talent, I was a writer.

They handed me six bound pocketbooks, a marker on each to indicate poetry, journal, short stories, essays, concepts and novel. I was told to fill them in a year and then each year since I've been gifted six more at Christmas. That's what I am now, the writer, for the longest time it's the only thing I've ever been.

If you didn't know me at the start of this, you probably do now.

And If you have any kindness in your heart for me at all, you'll put this book down back where you found it and stop reading. As you might have noticed, this particular one is embossed with the word, 'Journal'. I am putting great faith in your reading comprehension but seeing as you've already made it this far, perhaps you have none.

To put it in layman's terms, this book is private, kindly fuck off.

- Kaine.

I wonder sometimes if my mother loved me or if it was easy to leave me here.

Maybe I think about it too much but I have a lot of free time on my hands, it’s hard not to.

It’s just, I don’t want things between us to have been like in some stories. Sometimes I worry that I was made from a culmination of bad things and she couldn’t stand the sight of me. Like I was just this awful reminder of something she’d been through and that’s why I live here now and I never got to know her.

You read about that sometimes, especially in the tragedies found at the back of the library.

In the oldest stories, It’s gods tricking women and hurting them to get what they want from them. They take the form of someone they trust or sometimes an animal (still don’t get that?) and trick them into sex. Then the children, cursed from birth to have a terrible destiny, come as a consequence of all of it.

And they suffer.

Often enough the stories are far more realisic and set in strange cities or towns in a world that doesn’t exist anymore. Sometimes it’s an old story tucked away near the back of the stacks and there’s nothing fantastical about it all, just a horrible thing and the aftermath of it. Or sometimes it’s not even anything that happened, it’s just two people being together that shouldn’t be.

And the aftermath is often a baby in a basket on a stranger’s step.

I don’t want to have been born of a bad thing.

But in some ways I think it’d be worse if my mother loved me.

I don’t want to be one of those stories either, the fairytale ones, where I was so desperately loved once but my mother had to leave me. It’s often this sad, circumstantial thing where knew she couldn’t care for me like I deserved so she dropped me here, at the castle on the mountain with the promise to come back for me one day.

That kind of story just always reads like bullshit.

People don’t come back.

Of course, my story could be neither of those things, could be a third thing entirely. She might just be dead and that’s it. Simple, boring, easy to tell, I think I’d almost like that better than anything. I don’t want my abandonment to have been a choice she made out of hatred or love for me.

More than anything I don’t want to have been a consequence.

Sometimes it feels like that’s what I’m for, to suffer I mean. Cursed with a fucking speech impediment and a kid who can’t stand me, it’d at least give my plot line justification.

Or there’s just no reason for any of it, and the black bruise near covering my shoulder is simply random chaos that I’m always somehow in the right spot to receive.

And if the woman who birthed me, loved me and still chose this for me despite that, I’d rather have had her indifference above anything else.

Head hurts today and I don't think I can write. Gave my teachers an old excuse, walked into my door again while reading and I don't think it even registered before they started nodding their acceptance of my story. I've either become a good liar or the dried blood flaking out of my hair wasn't noticeable.

I shut my eyes in science class, head in my hands and worksheet filled in front of me only because I read a textbook about Bingham's slides last week.

I hate everything most when Ignis takes writing from me it aches, like a muscle, taught. I want to stretch it but it hurts to try.

Days like this, it feels like all these things we do aren’t actually all that important, the world down the mountain can’t work like this. I don’t want it to, I don’t think I want to be Kaine anymore, the boy with a neat little label on his file that says ’writer’.

I know I'm more than that.

I tried to tell this to Munroe once and all she did was tell me that I’ve trained myself to overthink things. She says that the way we are, what we do now, will drive our future and so we have to try our best at everything we do. It’s an unspoken thing but I know she’s telling me that if I don’t give up my novel to be read soon, I’ll never get adopted.

And I think I’d prefer that actually.

I’m tired of the disappointment that comes with pretty much every single interaction I have. Whether it’s in their eyes or mine, it’s become exhausting.

Other people are chores.

Actually Sartre put it better, Hell is other people.

I feel like no one here knows that better than me and I have no interest in being passed from these ungentle hands into someone else’s callused palms. I’ll finish my novel, I’ll refine my poems for weaker eyes. I’ll eat my words as sustenance and make my name the only one in the country when it comes to writing and then I’ll live alone.

Get a home at the edge of the fields in Ten, miles away from anyone else.

And I won't let it haunt me.

There’s a lake at the edge of campus.

I know without seeing that there are bigger ones out there, I’ve read about bodies of water where you stand on the shore and can’t even see the other side. We don’t have that problem here, ours is small enough to swim across in the summer and its pillowed on two sides by sudden steep incline, a small valley carved out as an afterthought.

For most of the year, it’s frozen over by a layer of ice and snow so thick that it just looks like a large clearing in the trees. Until Charlie takes the time to plough it for skating, people don’t tend to hang out at it in the winter. It’s just too cold most of the time.

Lately, I feel like there’s nowhere I can go for some space though and in math class I saw the lake out of the corner of my eye and remembered it was there. In my head I was already walking across it.

So I skipped my last class of the day in favour of the cold.

It was freezing out there on the ice, so bad that I realized pretty much right away that I wasn’t dressed warm enough. As I walked, my breath spilled out in front of me and the wind played at the buttons of my coat, trying to tease me into taking it off. I know better than to listen to its gentle voice though.

Exposure is a common way to die and there are rumours passed down from year to year about a kid who went out one night and never came back. They found his body in the spring melt, frozen solid, clothes folded neatly still beside him.

Cold is a trickster, whispers pretty promises and begs for you to join it and then proceeds to kill you slowly as soon as you do. It’s better to be warm, I know that, at least I do in theory.

But I stood there at the centre of the lake for longer than I probably should have. The moon started rising by the time I turned back towards Snowspire. Looking at it from my place on the lake, its cold, austere buildings almost looked warm. The windows shone in the dark, lit by a halo of silken gold light, there was smoke rising from the chimneys.

It’s strange to look at your home from a distance and pick it apart like that. I knew one of he windows was mine. but before I came along, it was someone else’s and when I’m gone, another body will move into it. Every trace of me by this time next year will be erased.

But through that window, behind the pane, my desk was in there with all my notebooks. Every single thing I’ve written for my whole life locked away in the bottom drawer.

Frightening that it’s all of me, everything I am, it’s all in that drawer. The kid standing on the lake, anything could happen to him and it wouldn’t matter because there’s not much record of him. The notebooks though, they would still be there, all the poems and stories I’ve ever written left behind for whoever ends up packing away my things.

Painful that the loss of those books would be a sadder thing than my body, curled up with the cold under a snowdrift.

I forget why I write sometimes and what made me want to start. I know there was a desperation behind it once, but these days when I sit down to write it only feels like obligation.

I want to know, when did I start living with the cold so easily?

I stood there watching every single light go out in Snowspire until the castle was dark and the moon was in the centre of the sky. The night was clear, and there were thousands of stars above my head in the darkness. I used to look up at them and feel so small that it was comforting.

Tonight I just felt trapped beneath its vastness.

civilizations crumble
in the time it takes to
say your name.

they rebuild them all again
as I misfire /

false start,
fragments of story
fall shrapnel from my lips.
freeing teeth, tongue–

a palm pushes out of my mouth
slides past my bottom lip
folds over my chin
fingers anchored under jaw
second hand scrapes
my top row of teeth
nails hook into flesh
of my cheek, my nose
dig in, pushing hard
tearing in a way
I wasn't made for

; bloomed by force.

our house is haunted
walters says that it’s just old,
the creaking is aged joinings,
muffled moaning is the wind.

he doesn’t see the ghost/
he looks the other way.

one day it appears at breakfast
stood in the middle of the room
plate face down on the floor

i get egg on my shoe

fire spreads out on the bench
smile so wide it sharpens itself
on pointed devil teeth

the ghost just looks down at the mess
then gets on its knees,
cleans it up

no one else sees.
they’re watching the flame
burning through the tablecloth

but i watch the ghost.

it drops the plate in the dish bin,
then leaves to change
before first bell but it doesn’t

come time for homeroom
i look for it in the halls but
find it in the library tearing up

books off the stacks
one by one, spines splitting,
threads pulling, breaking
pages folding, ripping
hurting everything
all it has, it has
to feed

the ache

1.

motor in my mouth
pops like gunfire on my tongue
cutting up my gums

2.

fire in your mouth
burns you, hollowing you out
forests need fires

3.

poem in your mouth
you never seem to notice
softening my gaze

4.

sorrow in your mouth
slams hard into boundaries
fractures from your touch

5.

flurries in the night
filling the places in the yard
where you dug my grave

6.

empty in your mouth
matching the words from your tongue
cutting up my heart

i question the sound
of my own voice
still a stranger
like a glove only worn
every now and then

i gather sunlight
at the end of fall,
fill myself with it
to prepare my heart
for the sudden exit
of daylight hours

in the dark i can’t remember
what summer feels like,
i’ve forgotten flowers

after too many strikes
the night swallows all memory
haunting my psych
there’s nowhere left to hide
from it, fear finds me, a spike
of adrenaline courses, footsteps,
enter always, my personal shrike

i grit my teeth, feigning strong
hold close faded dreams of summer
and those endless days that run long
the feeling of sun heated stone
melodius, like the lyrics to a song
so warm beneath my healing skin
reverberating through me like a gong
i cling to the memory, desperate

and winter lays down
heavy on my chest
inevitable in its attempt
to bury us alive

moonlight through the rafters
on uneven flooring, painting
a square of light around your boots
sitting hollow, toes against the wall
waiting for you to slip into them and
start your day together.

because you can’t imagine
the pain of being without them,
worn through and threadbare at
the heal but necessary
for your day

every day

i find myself jealous
of a pair of shoes

I could wait there too,
against the wall
in that patch of moon
hoping for you to
slip into me as easy as
you do into those boots

but we both know
how easy it is
without me

i have this dream that our house is on fire.

it starts in the early hours of the morning
when no one is up yet, not even Manny.
it catches in the entrance hall,
cold fingers of flame greedily
devouring old paintings

fire eats through the carpet
lain over the tile to hide
years of scuff marks,
burning quickly now, frantic almost.
curtains are next, then
the fire goes up to the next floor
eating through the wood hand railings
polished by years of use

it’s the shouting that rouses me first,
pulls me out of my head to focus on the
terror lacing each muffled word.
in the dream, the warning cries,
they always come too late.

all the feelings i should have
watching my home burn alive,
are not where they should be.

misplaced rage
swallows snowspire,
everyone with
in a matter of seconds,
there’s only
the heat
and the crackle of fire
hardly sated, reaching
for the woods next

and i’m there too
standing in the snow,

empty gas can at my slippered feet.