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    The Suicide Garden and Other Stories
    The Suicide Garden and Other Stories
    The Suicide Garden and Other Stories
    Ebook82 pages58 minutes

    The Suicide Garden and Other Stories

    By Shvaugn Craig

    ()

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    THE SUICIDE GARDEN AND OTHER STORIES
    (Notes from a Life in Progress)

    If this was a story, maybe she could feel shock, anger, or disbelief. A stranger in the dark, pulling you off the streets into the bushes. An urban legend, a myth.

    She’s not the girl found murdered in her hotel from a one-night stand. She’s not the pretty little thing with a stressed boyfriend who sometimes loses his temper and beats his girl.

    She’s the slacker who’s been with a drug addict for the past three years. She’s the tramp who lets her guy cheat and sleep with other women. She’s the whore who still sleeps with him, even as he beats her to a bloody pulp while kissing her lips.

    She’s the fool who’s in love with the devil.

    * * *

    In her first short-fiction collection, Shvaugn Craig weaves stories of love and breakdown, longing and remembrance, and all the turbulent emotional landscape in between. Painting pictures of the world through a young woman’s eyes and as rendered by “notes on a life in progress,” THE SUICIDE GARDEN AND OTHER STORIES introduces a fresh fictional voice whose insight and promise ring loud and clear.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherInsane Angel Studios
    Release dateJun 20, 2012
    ISBN9781476405810
    The Suicide Garden and Other Stories

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      Book preview

      The Suicide Garden and Other Stories - Shvaugn Craig

      The Suicide Garden

      and Other Stories

      (Notes from a Life in Progress)

      by

      Shvaugn Craig

      Copyright 2011

      Smashwords Edition

      Dedication

      For my parents, Scott and Colleen,

      who armed me with a library card

      and sent me out into the world.

      Foreword

      The stories in this collection were written between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, from Lotus in 2009 through to Being Yours in spring 2011. Some stories are linked by themes and characters or are parts of a larger idea. Some are brief moments generated from writing prompts or pictures, scribbled down in notebooks and on scrap paper.

      Though they’ve been edited, I’ve let these pieces hold onto the rough edges that were an important part of the process of how and why they were written, as a record of a life in progress.

      — Shvaugn Craig

      December, 2011

      Table of Contents

      Dedication

      Foreword

      The Suicide Garden

      Arabela

      Waking Up

      You’re a Movie

      The Birds of Paradise

      Tempest

      Carry Your Wings

      Lover

      Lotus

      Regional Library

      The Egg

      Madonna

      An Alcoholic’s Ballade

      Ice Cubes

      The Republic of Heaven

      The Crack

      Combust

      Double-Edged Tongue

      Red River Rising

      Being Yours

      Copyright

      The Suicide Garden

      It’s not like there’s much of a reason. An intuition perhaps. A desperation for something that couldn’t reach the light, slowly unwound and cut apart. Snip, snip, snip, scissors cut through any form of serpent. She can feel herself becoming unwound as she slides open and allows her dark secrets to flow across the pavement and into traffic.

      She leans back against the hood of the truck and fumbles with her lighter. Ashes flare up as the smoke curls past her lips and wafts through her hair. She is wreathed in a halo of smoke and ashes, glowing white against the pale blueness of the sky.

      The truck is dead. She needs booster cables, a hero now that hers is gone. There needs to be something or someone to save her, allow her to move forward at the speed of freedom while she tears down the streets of the city and plunges into the back roads.

      What are you doing? Where are you going? What are you bleeding and why?

      She is bleeding in a painful internal manner as her red desire spreads out across the snow, sinking deep into the earth and coagulating.

      She throws herself back into the snow bank.

      She knows she is going to die and that he will find her. It is simple to accept. The question is when?

      Part I: Nirvana

      It’s a jungle, thick with the scent of the tropics in a pot. The vines curl upward and around the cheap knockoffs of Monet hanging loosely on the walls in second hand picture frames. The door clicks shut behind her, and her shoes hit the tiled floor of the foyer with two distinct thumps.

      I’m home, she calls, balancing her purse, coat and the mail in her arms as she weaves her way through the obstacle course that is their apartment in her goal to reach the kitchen. It’s like a third-generation art café exploded as the coffee drips across the kitchen floor and into the garden that is the living room.

      The books trail off into the distance and she follows them down the hallway, knowing who will be at the end of the journey. She finds him unconscious across the bed, face down in the pillows, littered with the stubs of cigarettes long gone and the remains of a garden. Poppies and leaves bloom along the sheets, remnants of a dying summer. Opium and marijuana.

      She loosens her hands and today’s mail falls loose, landing hard on top of him.

      Wake up, she whispers. He won’t though. He’ll be out for another hour at least.

      She plucks the poppies from the sheets and walks back to the kitchen, cradling them in her arms. The rush of running water in the sink, the sound of nature against metal echoes through the room until she shoves the bowl beneath the stream. She places the poppies within the water and watches them float there, sustained in animation as she curls up on the overstuffed sofa, a sad replacement for a lover.

      She breathes deeply and leans back, her hands surfing along the gentle curves of her body while the buttons snap open, falling away to the floor.

      It’s Tuesday, and she should be at work.

      She’s at home though. Making love to a man who can’t participate and probably never will.

      Part II: Poison

      There’s no substitute for pain. She can hear the laughter in the bedroom, can see the shoes perched upon the carpet like weapons of war. That’s what stilettos are in her opinion. She sees no other sensible reason to wear them unless marching into battle. How easy

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