Between Two Lungs: a fictional interpretation of a song by Florence + the Machine

Welcome to another Music Monday experience! Today, we’re diving in with a flash fiction interpretation of a song by Florence + the Machine! This particular story is a revision of an earlier post from several years ago, and though it isn’t currently a part of the world of novels I tend to write in, I’m sure it will eventually turn into one.

For now, though, enjoy reading while you listen and then let me know your thoughts in the comments below!







It’s a calming experience to run where everything changes.

My favorite was always the beach. When the tide is low, I could kick off my running shoes and run along the wet sand, my footprints slapping an imprint that would fade with the next kiss of the wave.

I used to like that no wave is ever the same; a dune can be blown away in a night; the remains of a sea life can be washed to shore and pulled back to the depths of the ocean within a matter of seconds.

The beach is a reminder that everything can change in an instant and nothing will ever be the same.

But then I met him.

He was the beach personified. He had eyes the same shade of blue ships set sail in and hair the color of sand.

We met last summer. He was a tourist, and I was the lucky tour guide he had booked as a joke.

“Who actually needs a tour guide for the beach?” he had asked.

“Old people mostly,” I had answered.

“What do you talk about? The tides?”

“Yes,” I had said. “And the local sea life, the most likely findings, the best places and times to collect… and sometimes the weather.”

“That sounds boring.”

“Some people prefer boring to silence.”

He didn’t respond, so he could prove his point. And I remember marveling at how I’d never met anyone as stubborn as the sea before he came along.

Later, I would learn he lived his life on the ocean, atop a sailboat his family had spontaneously docked at the only home I’d ever known. He referred to his parents as “The Nomads” because of their inability to stay in one place longer than six weeks. His life was an endless tide of coming and going.

“Who knows how long we’ll stay this time,” he’d said with a wistful glint in his eyes.

I would always find him at sunrise on the beach as I went for my morning runs. He claimed he couldn’t sleep until he watched the sun rise over the ocean.

“What do you do at night if you can’t sleep?” I asked him eventually.

“Think of you, mostly,” he said with a charming grin, and I blushed. “And sometimes I swim.”

“In the dark? Aren’t you scared?”

“What’s there to be afraid of?”

I knew he could never be mine to keep, but I waded into the uncharted waters he brought to my shoreline anyway.

On the Fourth of July, I found myself waist deep in the water with him, fireworks bursting in the night sky as we kissed for the first time.

My hair that night was soaked and sticking to my cheeks, but even caked in sand and sea, I’d never felt more beautiful and alive.

As the fireworks popped above my head and between my lungs, I knew he was going to change my life forever–even though I also knew our time together would never last.

One day, I knew, he would return to the sea and I would have to watch him leave from the shoreline.

But I never expected I wouldn’t get the chance to say goodbye.

THE GASP

 

For those of you who have been on this blogging journey with me from the beginning, you might recognize the opening lines of this story from In the Middle, one of the novels I was working on and posting here back in 2019. I’ve since finished that novel, renamed it, and rewritten it at least a half dozen times. As I’m currently working on formatting it for formal self-publication and planning to release it by the beginning of April, I wanted to share this flash fiction spin-off of it that I wrote for my creative writing class last semester (the class that finally made me realize I needed to stop writing the same story over and over and just let enough be enough already).

Today is my high school graduation and I haven’t spoken for a year. Not a word. It’s been quite an expensive silence too since my parents have been dragging me to the same, pricy therapist once a week to help me “cope with my grief” but I don’t feel sad. Not really. I just feel empty. Like no matter how many breaths I take, there won’t be enough air in my lungs to speak.

“It’s been one year since Brad’s death,” my therapist, Sheila, reminds me. As if I could forget. “How are you feeling, Sarah?”

Like I don’t want to be here, I think. But she only sees the same shrug of my shoulders I always give her when she asks me something I can’t answer with a shake or nod of my head–my only source of communication these days.

I know I’m not being entirely fair to Sheila, though. I can tell she’s done her best to make her office a welcoming and comforting place to be. The couch I’m sitting on is so comfortable, in fact, that it’s as if it has conformed to fit the specific shape of me, holding me in place just so. And considering how often I’ve found myself here this past year, it’s quite possible that’s the case.

There’s a candle burning somewhere in this room too, coating the atmosphere in the aromatic embrace of a sugar-cookie-scented haze. The walls are even painted an equally cheery and contemplative robin’s-egg blue, and on the wall in front of me, there’s a large painting of a shoreline at sunset, the sky a pink, lavender and orange swirl above the dark ocean blue broken by the occasional frothy white wave tips. Written in the sky with a glittering gold is the inspiration to Choose Peace.

Like it’s a choice.

“Do you still miss him?” Sheila asks.

Do I have any other choice? I think as I give her my standard nod. I watch her scribble something down on the notepad in her lap and imagine the words one year later, still no progress appearing in her neat, looping handwriting.

“Would you say your grief has gotten less intense than it was a year ago?”

This time there’s a slight pause before my shrug. She smiles kindly as she scribbles something else down in her notebook. Perhaps one year later, still no slight progress. Only I know it isn’t progress that gave me pause, but the struggle to silently explain how my grief has simply become a part of me now, like a second vital organ that has taken root in my chest, sitting heavy beneath my throat.

Brad was supposed to be the love of my life. 

Loving him had been easy–as automatic as breathing.

Of course, he was just a cootie-ridden boy a year older than me when we had first met. But as the only children within walking distance of each other in the most rural part of our small Texas town, we quickly bonded over tree fort building and games of make-believe.

I was thirteen when he became my first kiss. I remember I’d just had my braces put on and was feeling entirely self-conscious when I showed up for Brad’s weekly family movie night I’d been attending for years. Normally, I sat next to Brad on the couch so we could share a bowl of popcorn, but that night I made sure his mom sat between us, avoiding the chance of catching kernels in my teeth as well as any casual conversation that would showcase the intruding metal in my mouth.

When the movie ended, though, Brad insisted on walking me home. I hoped to get away with a simple goodbye at my front door, but he grabbed my hand before I could.

“Sarah,” Brad had said, “what’s wrong? You’ve been really quiet all night.”

I looked at the ground as I said, “I hate these stupid braces.”

His fingers grazed my chin, gently titling my face to meet his gaze. “I still think you’re perfect, you know.”

Later, we would argue over who initiated the first sweetly timid kiss that came next. He would swear it was me while I would be just as certain it was him. All we would be able to agree on was that it marked the beginning of our inevitable love story, a story neither of us could have imagined would end in tragedy.

Now, I stare at the painting on the wall above Sheila’s head until the words Choose Peace start to melt into the sky they’re written on.

“Well, Sarah,” Sheila says with a warm smile, “it looks like that’s all the time we have today. Maybe next week you’ll feel up to telling me how your graduation ceremony goes tonight. Congratulations, by the way.”

I scoff silently, knowing congratulations are far from necessary. Graduation is supposed to be an acknowledgement of all the hard work done in the past and a celebratory push into the promise of the future ahead. But all the promises of my future were broken into a pile of shattered glass, blood, and bone–later replaced by a single wooden cross on the side of the road.

As I drive home from the appointment, I stare at the bright golden light of the sunlight streaking across the sky. I can almost make out the glittering gold letters written within it.

Choose Peace. Choose Peace. Choose Peace.

 

The Light, a short story by Kayla L. Mathys

He didn’t intend for it to end this way.

When the sheer brightness of the headlights had appeared in front of him, he’d found himself drifting toward the light as instinctually as a moth’s wings and by the time he realized what he’d done, it was too late.

He’d seen the lights through the watery blur of a path cleared by his windshield wipers and thought of her.

Forgive me, Sarah.

And as the blinding lights consumed him, his mind sparked with memories.

He first remembered how, as a child, he would arise each day to the good-morning glow of sunrise streaking through his bedroom window blinds and the sound of Sarah’s tentative knock upon his window.

Come play with me, Brad, she’d say with an adventurous grin, summoning him outdoors.

They spent their days as pirates in search of rare treasures; as super-spies on a secret mission to save the world; as the princess and the knight tasked with saving her from peril. 

They fought with water guns filled with blue and yellow paint, their clothes stained green; built castles out of old sheets hung from tree limbs; and captured rogue tadpoles in the creek that separated her house from his. 

The sun was always bright above their heads, their cheeks flushed from the warmth.

He then thought of how their childhood friendship had flared into something more during a summer camping trip years later.

They were teenagers then, sitting around the warmth of the campfire, melting the stiff edges of chocolate bars with the heat of gooey, blackened marshmallows pressed into graham crackers. She’d laughed at something he said, and he’d felt the sound as it burned and bursted in his chest.

I’m in love with her, he’d thought.

Then he leaned in and kissed her sticky-sweet lips as she was still smiling.

They spent the rest of the night snuggled in a single sleeping bag underneath the light of a thousand twinkling stars perfectly visible.

The night his dad left, he remembered searching for her face in the crowd of people in the stands, the stadium lights beaming down on him from the field. It had been an important night for him. A game that would determine his future. 

He hadn’t known then how much his future was about to change.

His dad–the conqueror of the boogeyman under his bed, the one who taught him how to ride a bike with no hands, the fixer of broken toys and skinned knees–had gone from family to stranger in a single night when he abandoned his family without saying goodbye.

Brad had felt helpless as the question that burned his mind why would he leave me behind? Quickly turned into what if I’m just not enough?

The answer was always one bottle of 100 proof away.

The answer was always one bottle of 100 proof away.

He knew it wasn’t fair to Sarah, but in the darkest corners of his mind he worried he wouldn’t be enough for her either. He would see the glimmer of light in the deep blue ocean of her eyes and would press the bottle to his lips to drown out the sight, certain it was only a matter of time before she realized the truth and abandoned him too.

Tonight, when his worry had finally been confirmed–the light spilling from the hallway when he opened the bedroom door, shining a spotlight on her betrayal–he knew it was his own fault. 

She hadn’t wanted to go to the party, but they’d gone anyway–at his insistence.

Then, he’d broken the promise he’d made to her, the only thing she had asked of him that night.

It had been his choice, his fault, his mistake. He knew that.

But the image of her in the arms of his best friend had still unleashed the liquid fury burning through his veins and though the anger was at himself, he’d turned it toward her instead.

Now, it was too late to take it back.

Now it was too late to take it back.

His blood-stained hands were on the steering wheel, rain pouring in sheets all around him.

Forgive me, Sarah, he thought.

And in front of him, there was only light.

 

Welcome to Music Monday!

Snow is falling in a flurry when she arrives on the shoreline.