This is something really short that I wrote the other night called "Glory." I'm probably going to submit it to my school's literary magazine next semester, as they love publishing short "flash fiction" like this. Anyway, just wanted to stick it up somewhere where other people could read it.
Glory is in the night.
Glory is the roaring outside my windows, driving back from your house at four in the morning, where the clunk of the shifter and screeching of the tires are the only music that plays. It hangs in the edges of the silhouetted mountains, indistinguishable but unique, that lay somewhere off in the darkness. It’s the red glow of the tachometer, contained by the cheap plastic cowl on my dashboard, with needles that bounce widly as I carve into the corners.
Glory was in your smell. You laughed about how you hadn’t showered in a day or two, and I laughed about how I couldn’t tell. Your hair was a little greasy, sure, but you tied it back and it didn’t matter very much. You were still flowers and softness and warmth, the feeling of sleeping in the backseat of a car as a child while your parents drive you home on some long highway.
Glory was in your dress. Perhaps it had been shorter than you intended, and when you leaned over to kiss me, it might have gotten a bit shorter. I didn’t mind, and neither did you. You almost buried my head in the couch cushion, and I thought we were sure to suffocate together in the friction and the sweat. My jaw ached and your lips were a little chapped, but I didn’t mind, and neither did you.
Glory was how you could talk about him between kisses. So freely, so openly, like he was dead, and you were remembering. There had been so much trouble and despair, and for you, floating was so much harder than walking. I didn’t mind listening. I loved it, even if it meant that maybe I was a memorial rather than a monument. But not all requiems are sad, and I’d rather be a song than a paragraph in the newspaper that no one ever read.
Glory was in the way I felt. I was swept up, exhausted and weary-eyed but begging for more hours in the night, for the next day to never come, for sleep to be an option rather than the outcome.
Glory was in being a little upset, yeah. Glory was in hating that we had to collide at this moment rather than another moment. Glory was knowing that I couldn’t really have you, that you still belonged to him. Glory was in missing you a little more than I wanted to when I backed out of the driveway and saw the lights in your house go out. But glory was also in remembering the feel of your bare legs against my jeans, of hearing your brother walk around upstairs, of repeatedly telling myself “Just a few more minutes.â€
Those nights were filled with wonder and overflowed with joy. But the greatest glory was in knowing that even though you weren’t mine, I could still love you all the same.
