ISSUE FOUR: March, 2020

CARVING DIAMONDS

by VANESSA WALTERS

What’s more dramatic than a drama?

Oh Love, how you sting.

I’m carving diamonds with a sharp-edged blade. (Read this as a metaphor for ‘becoming dangerous’, ‘dazzling’, combing dark stories with a fine tooth, making my weapons. Solitude in terror.)

(Lesson 1)

Me or a vulnerable soul: I was dramatizing ‘zero gravity’.

When I threw him away a figure ahead cut off my wings.

He handed him back. I sharpened my knives.

Big wide grin, cut me open.

He go, he go-t inside.

I threw him so hard hoping for a crack and a mess

But not a drop of blood.

Curtains close.

(Lesson 2)

It can happen in a blink.

The scene freezes, everyone statued. A range of expressions. All sorts of positions. I thought about hinges and bends and diamond ends. I start to rise (it’s that zero gravity effect) and Big Grin is down there doing that Cheshire cat thing and being a little pain and a big temptation. I asked him to join me up in Paradiso. Big grin's response was wide, dazzling, and I liked it.

(Lesson 3: Payton and I are sitting close together and giving off positive body language.)

Payton thought the date went really well but he was wrong. We drank wine for seven hours in a pub equidistant from both our houses. He got lost on the way home and texted me to say how great it’d been.

I felt like I'd done good at something. Good at listening? Good at making Payton feel interesting? I wasn’t sure why Payton liked me so much that day. I didn’t know what I was getting into. I kept chatting and drinking and making good impressions. I didn’t realise I was digging a hole.

(Lesson 4)

She realised that now her parents were dead, she could be a much better artist. Provocative.

(Lesson 5: Payton dreams)

As we were saying good-bye, I noticed on the front of his coat there was a perfect circular fag burn. I started to pull out a string of down feathers from the tiny hole (so many holes, Payton!) and they came out really easily like a daisy chain or that magic trick with hankies. I amused myself with my little coat game, but Payton smiled. He must have thought I was being ‘endearing’. He must’ve skipped home in the darkness of the night.

(Lesson 6)

She learnt that the best thing that can happen to you when you’re so caught up in your own traumas is to enter the world of someone else’s.

(A hospital bed, large windows for distraction, a group of people who love each other dearly and a sad, sorry air.)

Connie lay in her death bed for six months before she left. The right people gathered, Connie’s beloved son threw an impromptu tea party at her bedside from the m&s café downstairs. He chose a range of cakes to satisfy our breadth of tastes. We sat around the bed so that Connie had someone she loved looking at her from every angle. Kelly didn’t realise it was the last supper, Connie did, she had run out of things to say. She closed her eyes, put on her white powdered face, and wheeled herself off to h where e the a good v girls e go n . . .

Kelly killed himself several weeks later with a toxic cocktail of refusal and disbelief. I went to visit him. I touched his hand and he was warm, freshly dead. We enjoyed each other’s company, I told him he looked alive, he told me he was peacefully out of it, done, as he clutched tighter to the bouquet. I closed the door behind me and focused on tomorrow, eyes on the prize, never looking back. I tried for the rest of my life to stop thinking about his wide-open dead mouth, open like a fly trap waiting for the flies.

(A diamond threatens, yields, indestructible: Lesson 7: Some words just sit uncomfortably on the tongue.)

A sour taste entered the room and my tongue and I would never kiss Caraway again. He was sat on the edge of the bed to prove that it was the finale. We made love with bodies, no lips, and it was the first time I heard the tiny word fall out of his mouth and I realised that that was all it was.

(I keep this one on a chain around my neck. It protects my heart.)

Then Caraway fell in love with a tropical girl. I thought this must be a fetish, and my friend confirmed that “there’s something alluring in what you’ll never understand”.

Then it was obvious, I remembered that night in the restaurant, our first night of loving, when we held hands under the dinner table sharing English reservation, and thinking it was a dream.

Caraway had landed on something new (potentially dangerous?) (I could feel the heat).

But I was still there in the centre of your party

with the driest eyes,

Diamond daggers,

always pointing at you.

You shined your beams at me but I told you to stop –

because it’s dangerous playing with fire. 

Carrymeaway, baby

I miss those days on your island bed

and climbing in from the window on the street like Romeo.

(Set in a bedroom, no frills, dimly lit.)

This is the story of a wilting flower, how it dropped down to death by a cut in the throat, bowed down to its mother and pleaded sorry, sorry, sorry. I heard it perform a monologue from the grave. I heard it often in the night.

Man chops off his own head with a rope he constructs using bits of the house. The head changes to a blue colour and then to a white, so it’s sort of bluey white. His soul runs out of the body shell which was, until the flower drooped, preventing him from happiness. The clothes hang forever in the man shape he left. Off the soul flies, out to all the places he’d wanted to go. The man was better off dead.  

(…)

I run up to the bathroom, a safe place. I twist the handle jolt to the right push open the door swings to the left. I step inside and the shower curtain is drawn across but no water is running. I draw back the shower curtain with a dramatic sweep fearless hoping to catch the man who follows me up the stairs at night hung dead in the bath tub.

(Love is)

Kelly and Connie are sat in each of their thrones; Kelly across the room, asleep, but armed with newspapers and kittens on the alert on his lap.

Connie had her own kitten and it purred at Kelly and the rival cat gang.

Two teams.

A contest at their feet.

Connie frisbees her newspaper onto Kelly’s newspaper heap.

Cats play chase,

and lovers play crossword.

(Don’t ask me who wins

cause love is a game that never ends.)

And Connie always told me that the best things take you by surprise.

( )

In the night, I watch the people become their ultimate sexy ego.

It must be the soft lights, defining our jaws. No face better than without its own shadow cast over it, dramatic and lashed across the cheeks.

And my diamonds, sharp and dangerous, pointed at the tips. They are scattered across my bed

as though they are rose petals

and my lover is coming home.

Sometimes a friend draws a deep line into my skin with their sharp, dangerous diamond (and a sweet dash of beer).

I tend to keep the good stories for rainy days.

But sometimes the dig is too low.

Sometimes a friend doesn’t want to be a friend. Maybe they got cut worse than you. Maybe they regret cutting you. Or maybe they smell the blood and it’s simply too delicious and you neck is a mouth-watering temptation.

If I was a vampire, I would find the most delicious tasting blood and then stick with that victim until the end.

I put on a costume and became a beast

And the eyes land at my face.

VANESSA WALTERS (born Malta, 1994) is an artist and writer. She grew up in Oxford and currently lives in London, where she completed a BA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts in 2016. Her other work can be seen at www.vanessawalters.xyz.