Liquid Metaphor

A Heteroliteral Story
Mike Keith, 2005

 

 

This short story follows the "heteroliteral" constraint: each pair of adjacent words is not allowed to have any letters in common.  It was written in response to a challenge on confiction.org to write a story using this constraint.

 

The two words of the title can also be considered part of the block of text and the constraint will still be satisfied.

 

Liquid Metaphor

I was flying towards hell - or, put a different way, the adjoining suburb and the asylum which lay within. My car moved with grace, with uncommon speed, with bold assurance, with profound excess, through a mysterious and completely dark night peppered with lovely stars.

"Why go there?", I wondered.  I had no idea.  Smoothly I sped along the road, thinking of my fate.  I felt a cry of unhappiness grow in me and so quickly overpowered it.  No tears now, especially not while on the road!

Then I saw it: an odd little drama just off the road by a foot, maybe two.  My headlights on it produced an eerie cast indeed, though in a second I had gone by.  What I saw echoed a dozen awful things from the unforgiving past, eleven of them gloriously bad.

For that one frightful second I saw there a huge bird of prey, of size forty inches from wing to wing.  Just below its rugged talons jerked a poor animal, spurts of gray liquid from its body leaking forth like sap from a young tree.  As I sped by, within a mere inch of the grim scene, I glanced to my right and there saw the bird casually dining away, unmoving as my tires calmly sped by.

Then I came to her building, saw her, did what I had to, quickly.

Now I just bide my own time and sleeplessly think over things.  Every night (well, about every night), as I try again to sleep, I reflect on the drama I saw on that foul night, muse on the vivid metaphors.  I usually think: am I the bird?  The animal?  The black tires?

No, I say, no.  I am the blood.