Rowland fancied himself doughnuts yet he was still so far into his own head that he was already out the door as he sat on the dusty wood paneled floors, and once he focused on food, he couldn't even recall what he was thinking of before it. He was just sitting and watching paint dry as he tried to remember.Standing up in front of his large canvas with the further, pong, clink and ting of empty aerosol cans among large paint spluges on the floor and on cans and broke away from his thoughts as he quietly looked around for a T-shirt, somewhere...He then put on his sneakers, grabbed his keys and a jacket and started thinking about waffles and ice-cream.Settling in his car, he fixed the popped collar of Nick's dark denim jacket that which was accompanied by a jingle of familiar and now often used keys; Nick's jacket of course, still held the scent of burning roses. Now, it wasn't so much the fact that it was Nick's scent but more the fact that the smell alone was, soothing to Rowland mu
The same went for Nick.Rowland felt that He didn't want to see him like this but he couldn't help it...Rowland could already see Nick walking away, silly him for caring.So he made it Fucking easier for the both of them.Rowland saw red, so angry that he went silent for a moment as he clenched his fists not having anything nice to say, until he caught his breath;"Pardon me, for the implosion. Y'know,...maybe you're fucking right.", he stated with a stiff sniff before looking down and sarcastically smirking spitefully; and with that he walked towards the entrance, turning away from Nick who abruptly swiveled and stopped Rowland with a rough left hand which pulled him back by the shoulder;"Don't fucking walk away-""Why!? What the fuck do you want from me!?", when Rowland turned around with unknown energy, he shoved Nick off once again and let His back hit the wall; Nick then pushed himself off the wall again and shoved back with force that made Rowland double back at attention;"Ho
A nervous wreck when he was alone, even so on how nervous he was when he first arrived here alone having not learned the language, at first the only real word he needed to use was "gratzi" as a black car drove him to Nick's supposedly casual location as they talked on the phone about his arrival whilst he subconsciously bit the skin off his own lip. But whenever Nick left and Rowland couldn't ignore the silence he would decide to stop looking out the window in otherwise comfortable hiding and actually explore with his new smart phone camera almost absent mindedly to his own linguistic plight and stress in general; that when faced with others, he would haphazardly mix the words that which he knew in Italian with Latin; earning looks from locals as if he was a loon, and that was just this one time for a chocolate chip chocolate gelato in the hopes that he wasn't the only one who could see the problem with this instance. Awkwardly sticking to English like the well dressed and lonely tour
SuperHydraulicInstantaneousTransporter, he recalled recently having heard it somewhere. Apart from being the most convenient mode of escaping, all it could really do was help him to escape his current situation as he waited. It posed as if it was Rowland's equivalent of Sugar Honey Iced Tea. As if saying it was as convenient as an instant transmission of some kind...Funny guy even when the joke's on him, this all in fact actually reminded him of a joke he had heard somewhere; a man walks into the doctor's office, says he can't stop feeling sad no matter what he does. The doctor then tells him that it's probably just a blue day, and says there's a clown in town named, let's say,...Bucky o'chuclkes, wait no, how about, Boohoo. The man broke down and cried with his head in his hands before he looks up and says, "But doctor, I am Boohoo."Everyone huffs something of a laugh, unless of course they've heard this one. Besides, who really laughs these days unless they need to.But with al
Detective Saint-Jermaine then continued with a calculated yet grim tone; "Are you aware, that Miss. Jackson-Wyte has been missing, found dead as one of the victims of the fifteen skeleton murders, just last week?", she then unclipped and tossed an autopsy report as well as a few pictures of dried up flowers in on dried up white zombies Rowland could only hope to delete from his memories, all neatly numbered and taken from analytical close ups in some frames which did him the favour of helping him spot the wilting deep dark red spider lily about the hollow cackling face of a chipped and crooked toothed skelington in the left eye socket; a screen saver worthy picture no less and pointing straight at the camera...Mocking his every effort of evasive action...The second buzzing florescent light flicked back on...Rowland still couldn't quite process what detective Saint-Jermaine had just said as he furrowed his brow in confusion... He couldn't compute, he didn't want to, system glitch, h
And once that was done, it gave him no other choice but an opportunity to try and understand what was actually fucking going on. Detective Saint-Jermaine said all evidence lead to Oliver, the Moon flower, the hydrochloric acid, the book...; Oliver fucking Mooney... Was the paralytic flower his calling card? How much evidence did that book hold?Paralysing his victims before he, tore them apart like some arachnid...Jesus, Charlotte...no.Rowland only knew that chipped tooth grin behind quiet green eyes. What the fuck did he miss? What the fuck was he missing?Oliver didn't seem..., it didn't make sense, it couldn't really be to Rowland. That short and thin red head didn't look or act like the type who would hide dead bodies for fucking fun, not that he pictured a mustache twirling idiot in his place but he was far from the picture Rowland had painted of a scratchy highway stranger that could've hidden in the back seat of his car the day after Halloween, stuck on the memory of how emot
{Goya no. 34}When Rowland was a child, he heard voices.When he was younger and from what he could remember, he would always wake up to the sound of voices like a far off television amongst the natural white-noise static. His mind was elsewhere as he sat on the floor in half lotus to stop his boney left ankle from painfully scraping and jabbing the floor while he put his head in his hands and spaced out on how he would simply tune out of sleep and the voices would continue until he reached a rather random destination of wherever the voices would be coming from in the echoing darkness, before they would suddenly stop. Always in the living spaces and always in the middle of the night and waking up for no reason in a fuzzy static motion pitch black or cold velvet dark royal blue morning skies darkened by closed curtains, from whispers like someone turned the volume down of the television on a small café scene; and being a child then he would always walk through the darkness like a tired
Corporate didn't say anything about it when they discussed this with he and Abibsa but Rowland knew he was simply a name drop, a strange compliment that which he had to get used to yet he knew that there where unspoken agreements that are to be appropriated from the opposite party; he honestly felt dim sometimes following them for there was so much he wanted to do on those canvases, but where to fucking begin.Anguish sells better than sex, but he knew he couldn't put monsters in a children's hospital.Rowland's neck twitched.As the world slowly turned away from the sun and subtly brightened the adjacent wall of canvases with a warm yet dying glow, sitting with his knees apart and one hand dangling to the floor that which his fingers moon walked on as he slumped onto his low risen cane daybed-make-shift-bed-frame thinking, that sometimes the feeling or lack thereof to him wasn't always such a bad thing, sometimes. At times so much so and much like this that he couldn't in fact move a
His stomach churned as the door knob turned and creaked with sinisism he thought he could feel in the air, but what he saw, who he saw once the door was open...he almost dropped the gun. And as he put his arm by his side, he was tempted to hide it. The door was open and Nick came eye to eye with Rowland as the door creaked wide over the sound of the radio;"Row...", the way he said his name was a whisper with that voice of molasses that still gave Rowland chills, but this time it was more like the chills you get when you feel or see something supernatural. He might as well have said 'no', for Rowland didn't believe it either...What does a ghost say to another ghost? The fucking thought made him feel like his life was just some fucking joke and that pissed him off, but before he could react with anger, Nick marched toward him and then did the strangest thing - he kissed him. It was full of impatient passion but all Rowland could justify was the taste of bitter-sweet cherry cola on hi
Ever meet someone that just screams chaos, but you go for it anyways...If you answered yes, then I know you're lying. Because you never see it coming until they carve the fucking words into your forehead with a piece of your own fucking rib...****Bitter Truths " That ain't nothing but the Devil!""...Sometimes horrific events come into our lives. We get fired from our jobs. We get ill. A loved one dies one. Scrolling through the news we are overwhelmed with murder and natural disasters, as Mother Nature and our fellow humans seem to be in race to see who can kill us off first. Hate surrounds us.It is only human to look at these thinhs and wonder "why." Why do they hate us? Why do we hate them? Why does so much horror have to happen in this world?The "why" is the origin of fear. The "why" is the unkown, and people fear the unknown. This fear of the unknown, of things that lurk in the dark, that threaten our existence...It is where horror is born.Some people will look at the hor
{Yesterdays todays and tomorrows} -Flashback- When in Rome.Nick lay face up upon it with his Clearwater eyes in sunlight as his mind was lost in the ceiling; he couldn't remember what they were talking about but he knew it was something about angels and demons, and the beginning and end of the world.he had read somewhere, that there are no archangels... But merely they are the brothers and sisters of mankind... And to this day he just can't put my finger on it... And told Rowland once he came back from the bathroom, Nick chimed in the silence with a baritone of concern. "Well...maybe, the brothers and sisters of mankind are too the archangels we know,... instead of contradicting the belief it's the chicken and the egg. Both exist as both one and separate, I mean a chicken can't come from thin air and neither can the egg, right? I mean I probably didn't first come in the same guise as the egg we've come to know, that's how we know that evolution is possible. But I th
CaliforniaThe next few days, weeks, months felt sort of normal to Rowland, he hadn't the joys of finding out the side effects of antidepressants just yet. But it was like if a cheery whistle and song played in the back of his mind like a cheesey theme song from a musical, singing in the rain after a storm he felt was still right behind him but to him for the time being he felt that things could get sunnier - would get sunnier and damn well should.And yet such a polarisation didn't scare him, he finally felt the better side of nothing...He had visited home every so often to keep his mother sane, checked that off his list like a chore out of love - incidentally promising that he would come back for his birthday, but otherwise things felt better. He even painted freely in between brakes of editing Olivia and his' work making the executive decision including her help create a punk/goth culturale magazine starting with the Rainbowradioactive kids; the thing was, that he noticed everythi
RainbowradioactiveIf salt were a physical feeling it would taste of a wound, he split his lip on a smile a while ago. Licking the gash as he waited...He had a few days off, so he figured that when he got home he would do that thing he really didn't want to do.So he found himself in the waiting room of a private psychiatrist's office next to a ficus plant just as stiff and stoic as he was in that moment, as he realized he'd admitted defeat to Elizabeth he tuned into the receptionist's radio in the background to the ambiance that which all hospitals and clinic had, though to Rowland it was more like a dentist's office... He could just hear her now, under the thought of whatever questions he could be drilled with.He tensed his jaw as he waited. He actually got a card from Elizabeth after she called a psychologist to refer him to a psychiatrist, little did he know there was a difference...The difference being that a psychiatrist is a medical grade pusher, to put it simply. Where as a
Working for three days straight on Hong Kong Island and usually he would find Monday was followed by Thursday or you can't believe it's Friday when just yesterday it was Tuesday but now he felt all three - counting every second light lighting fixtures and their positions, tours of causeway bay and placement of the painting while preparing a speech, all he could think about was what he said the day he decided to leave Shellville with Nick as he smoked out his window and watched the sun set change the sky and sea. Rowland thought he found another installation to Dantés nine circles of hell - deliberate ignorance chains you to a writing desk to think you're entire fucking life over. And for some reason he imagined a raven screaming and pecking at you for the Fucking sake of some sick irony.The devine comedy being that humans have no one else to blame but themselves for their damnation... But this made him think of something else as he looked out the window of his hotel room, crushing th
Seeing all of this didn't make it any less unreal for Rowland... In fact, it might of just convinced him that he was seeing dead people. Like it wasn't just in his dreams anymore as he kept repeating a head count of the recently deceased like sheep from sleep he couldn't get in a head that felt full of wool yet never in a warm way. And, forgive him for being cheesey but something he was getting use to was that this fucked up feeling which felt like something else bad and wasn't going away - adding the quiver in the mutton's throat from either anxious fear or the memory of how stupidly choked up he got in front of the Pastor at Charlotte's funeral towards the end of their reverend chat.Her death wasn't the end.He was this feeling's "to let"*...Always having imagined that by using emojis as symbolic to describe specific sounds of a word it would be as much a language as Egyptian or Kanji or any language for that matter - for a letter is simply a symbol of indication... An icon to sim
{Cry me sunshine, Cupcake}***"My feet fell on the floor...", When Rowland thought about that typo from an inner conversation that which he couldn't remember, it made him dizzy as he morbidly imagined a body suspended from nowhere ragdoll to the floor...Mind bending when he thought about what that could mean as an actual sentence and that made him fear he'd gone full circle.An idle mind is the devil's playground as "They" say.He watched his paints run dry in a dusty corner infront of a blank canvas, his mind was splayed across the dusty floor boards in piles of loose papers amidst origami trinkets...Hong Kong, Berlin, Stockholm... he still needed to clean up and get a few things done while still somehow giving way to hating himself for not packing a little earlier for his trip to start in China and sitting around in silence despite the work ideas he had and wanted to pen down in his black journal having discussed this in a boardroom meeting, but...no.Just not right then at least
It was like he fucking woke up from death, so tempted to fall off the edge of the bed and sink off the face of the Earth as he held his head in one hand with his elbows on his knees - Death was welcomed. Too tired to show the fucking confusion this all added to his life behind high-nerfing cigarette smoke, spacing out on the smoke streams as he watched ash fall to the Raj patterned carpet over wooden varnished floor as he then heard a soft good morning from behind him as the sheets on Yoko's side of the bed started to twist with movement but she didn't get up and he felt the silence until he went so deep in thought that he stiffened once he felt slightly familiar hands touch his back before a soft kiss was planted at the back of his neck as Yoko got off the bed wearing nothing but his round rimmed spectacles, his undershirt with black thigh high socks, tracing her hand to Rowland's bright blond head of hair and roughly rubbed his head down playfully as she made her way while lazily st