ds_flashfiction | Bullet Challenge: Faster than Sound, by Salieri

troyswann.livejournal.com posting in

Author: Salieri (aka

troyswann)
Title: Faster than Sound
Pairing/Characters: gen, RayV, Fraser, Bob
Episode: Letting Go
Length: 454 w
Summary: Not letting go.

You and I
Are suddenly what the trees try
To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.
Some Trees, John Ashbery

Number one with a bullet.

He's been plucked by the bony finger of mortality. The "bony finger of mortality?" His father snorts. A bit purple, that, don't you think? You could do better.

Along the strings inside his spine, vibration. Diminuendo. Once, he watched a guitar player stroke the strings on the frets with a hollow steel tube held over his middle finger. It made the notes stretch, dip and rise, turn sideways so that the edges gleamed. Then, it made him think of the way water travels down a windshield before the wipers take it, or the way a kingfisher aborts a dive and races its own shadow across the surface of the lake and up into the trees on the other side. Now, he imagines the bullet pressed against his spine and thinks diminuendo. Against all evidence, his father says. Sounds loud enough to me, if you can hear it over all that brooding. The kingfisher aborts its dive, races, rises.

This pain is not gunshot pain. It's elsewhereness. This pain is the strings inside his spine stretching, taut, like the tracks of a train drawn across the prairie toward the vanishing point. It begins in his body but disappears someplace beyond the horizon, a sideways gleaming stroked by a steel-coloured wind, the twisted ends clasped in Victoria's hand.

Backward, his father says. Pain is hereness. You're not doing it right. Snap out of it, man.

Diminuendo.

Pain is here, his father says. It's inthebody. In the cold, trapped by an avalanche for three days, a broken leg, I'd've died there before Buck could find me except for the pain, a reminder of what I am. A man, not an idea. Here, not someplace else. Well, that was then, of course. Nowadays, it's different. But the principle is what I'm saying, that's the same. Pain is here. What are you looking at?

Fortitude Pass.

Well, you're looking in the wrong direction. See? Here. Look here.

Two magazines beside him on the hospital bed, spilled green and blue on the white knit blanket: Field and Stream and Canadian Geographic. "Ray Vecchio" on the subscription stickers. In the chair by the window, Ray Vecchio himself, slouched like a Klimt figure asleep in geometric shadows, still wearing yesterday's clothes.

The tracks of the train drawn across the prairie. Fraser could follow them to the vanishing point.

He would have gone, diminuendo, except the bullet plucked at him, made him ring, hums now against bone.

Love is iron, son. It travels faster than sound.

Page 1 of 2 << [1] [2] >>

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

mrs-laugh-track.livejournal.com

Sal you did the thing with the words again. The thing where you are really really incredibly awesome at them. Seriously, with the pretty and the wow. And this, Field and Stream and Canadian Geographic. "Ray Vecchio" on the subscription stickers. is exactly what love looks like

From:

Bullet Challenge: Faster than Sound, by Salieri

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags