White Room
A white room is empty but for you, a card table and a chair.
You wear a straw hat with a wide brim over a white scarf. Your sunglasses are television screens. In the lenses reflection is periodically interrupted by the rolling of vertical hold.
You are seated. Your hands are folded on the table. Each is crowned with a ring of straw.
I say: To reach you I navigated interminable rivers of glare.
My two reversed images flutter across black waves surrounded by snow.
I speak to you but I've forgotten why.
Apart from my voice, the sound is a soft tangle of voltage and recurrent zones of static.
It is no longer you I speak to in any event.
Each hand is crowned with a ring of straw.
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Author's Note
The sort of thing that happens in your head when you drive 2000 miles in four days
Other stories by stephen hastings-king
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the kind of story that makes me reach for the "fav" button instinctively before i even know what or if i will have anything to say about it. this put me into an instant trance of the sort you hint at in your note. very effective, i thought. "i speak to you but i've forgotten why" reverberates with me on many levels.
there is a bigger story here that I want to see. i will "fav" it as a vote that you'll write more to this one day for us to see.
Wow. I have absolutely no idea what it's about, yet I couldn't help the feeling of having been sucked into this work like the chubby kid in Willy Wonka that gets sucked up into the chocolate mixer. Except THIS chocolate is somehow DISTURBING. I liked it very much, but will probably live the rest of my life fearing rings of straw. Thanks for the good read!
There is something eerily calm about this piece, a clamness out of place. Wonderful.
thanks for the reads and comments.
Like this mysterious installation and white interrogation-like room. It's unsettling and beautiful at the same time.
When we're talking about Ballard, this feels a little like Ballard, only an octave higher.
Love the line about tangle of voltage and the rings of straw. I think I know what that looks like.