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<source src="MourningNights.mp4" type="video/mp4">
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</video>|Green as Moonlight and Money]]
Even though Corbin was the one who called me, she always seemed nervous when she moved into the alley, clinging to the oyster colored bricks of the building where I live. I watch her briskly walking down the sidewalk from my [[room,|Dim-lit Sidewalk]]
[[<video autoplay width="100%" height="auto">
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</video>|Into Sight]]materializing again beneath their pale, yellow miens. When she gets close enough, I go outside and wait there in the dark.
I could tell that Corbin hadn't slept in days by the way she pulled her shoulders up around her neck, crossed her arms like she might shiver. Her hair fell around her face in tense, gauzy strands. Her eyes are either closed or looking down at her arms as they [[blue below the moon|Point of Contact]].
"It's warm tonight, isn't it?" she asks.
<img id="split" src="IMG_1201.jpg">
[[<img id="always" src="IMG_1203.png">|Like Every Time]]
[[<img id="crumpled" src="IMG_1202.png">|A Dollar Short]]
And like every other time before, she payed and left in a different direction from where she'd come, rejecting any light that tries to fall over her.
Corbin never called before midnight. She waits until the sun is at its deepest, then my phone rings, and she never says how much she wants. I just have to assume. She always pays the same, but sometimes when the evening-green [[grows|Silent Snowfall]] deeper in her eyes I see that she needs more, as if something in her emptied out.
She slipped across the street as quiet as the snow that used to fall when she was younger, to an unlit park where beneath the moonlight [[dying grass|Watching From Above]] looks green again.
Corbin opened up the paper bag and felt the smaller plastic one inside. Pressing it between her thumb and finger, she felt the subtle grains displace, she feels the sound of mild sand compressed beneath her feet like at the beach. Only trees to watch her [[melt away and sleep|Blackbird]].
It's dark by now, and moonlight drapes lethargically from opaque and starless skies. Corbin comes. She calls, like always, just behind the last remaining tic of night. She moved through hours like they're some viscous liquid, drags her feet behind her on [[collapsing pavement|Uprooted]].[[<video autoplay width="100%" height="auto">
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</video>|Double-Taps]]I've never quite been sure of it, but I think I hear her toe-shoed feet in double-taps across the pavement, floors and floors below, blocks and blocks away erasing all the time between us like a late September evening.
This time I couldn't watch as Corbin walks through bleeding edges of the light when she comes close enough to see. I felt her like a feather-touch, the flutter of a wing behind my ear beating with increasing heat, concrete slates struck beneath her like piano keys making silent melodies of midnight. But I know what she's coming for, the poisoned thirst she needed me to slake.
I stand and wait between the building where I live and the one across the alley where at night the window glass reflects a view of my apartment so I [[cut the lights|A Corner Turned]] and close the [[blinds|Point of Contact]] most evenings.She takes the bag I hand her and I put her money in my pocket without counting. I knew it was all there. I always know that even if she shorts me I won't mind.
Corbin walks away, blends into the slander of a night without a shadow. I heard her steps again, clock-tics on the concrete piercing like the [[stings|Tangled Vines]] that feed and starve us both.
[[<video autoplay width="100%" height="auto">
<source src="slips.mp4" type="video/mp4">|A Dollar Short]]
Green was Corbin's color. Green was mine. Green is [[moons and grass and money|Darker Deal]], [[gorgeous eyes and guilt|First Deal]] and pools of salty water left behind when gravity effects the sea's retreat. From my window I watch the canopy of windblown trees crowding green over park blocks where Corbin sometimes slept on wilted grass. Clouds part momentarily and send a shaft of rusty luminescence through the rain.
I wonder what she dreams tonight, if she flew away to some place where the trees are dry and calm, if she'll land outside my window on the iron rail where rain accumulates like tears. I think of Corbin lost in signal fires, chasing light that used to be a day. I thought I heard her feet outside the doorway where the carpet pattern loses out to muddy footprints. I think she leans in for a kiss and nothing but the stale air touches my lips, the money scented memories of Corbin every evening calling for my help.
[[<video autoplay width="100%" height="auto">
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</video>|Betrayed]]She rides the pain of longing like a crane above a river. Slowly. Graceful as she slipped through moonlight to the tangled vines where she can hide from open windows making [[constellations of the cityscape|Vanished]].
Something in the way that Corbin disappeared, a little shrug before she vanishes, not quite imperceptible, a hesitation just before she's lost behind the trunks of trees. I wonder if she knows my window, if she knows it's me that stopped her for a moment, the faintest silhouette collapsing on the grass behind her from my single window, [[too high|Blackbird]] up call her name.
[[<video autoplay width="100%" height="auto">
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</video>|Missing Her-1]]Something in these city raindrops wipes away the guilt each night, washes all the blots and errors down into the soil and filters them through grass and trees so that [[the earth exhales a disinfected breath|Sins and Love]] at dawn that we'll pollute again.
Corbin buys her dreams from me in little bags of powder every night. Every night we trade our dimly lit affection for a dollar or an hour of sleep, and every day the [[songbirds|Missing Her-2]] sing, but neither of us hears.
It's morning now, and somewhere underneath rain-beaten trees a blackbird sleeps. She'll wake up tired and hungry, and she'll wander until evening on the breeze that blew her from the night before.
It's evening now, and Corbin tries to [[weather the obsession|Missing Her]], and maybe it's not just for sake of money that I hold out hope she can't. [[<img src="blind.jpg">|Buying Dreams]]
[[<video autoplay width="100%" height="auto">
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</video>|Apparition]]It's 4:15am, and as I closed the door behind me swells of wind push rain against the hallway windows, making echoes and erratic pulses. I wonder if I'm panicking too soon, if an hour wasn't long enough to wait. Pearls of sweat begin to sting my eyes, and I wonder how it feels to cry.
As I walked, [[I dial the police|Withered Grass]], but hang up before the phone began to ring. If I called them they would take me in. Then they'd look for Corbin, and maybe they could help her. Maybe both of us were past that point.
A sunrise lay somewhere deep beneath the horizon. Its light would breach, its heat evaporate the fog and calm the violence of this rain. But daylight exposes things we hide in evening, and I can't be sure I'll like finding what I look for.
Beneath the trees the rain comes sparsely but in bigger drops. A little pile of empty plastic bags and apple cores was pushed against a larger trunk and next to that a flattened spot of grass [[still warm|Lost]] from where she sat.
How hard would it have been to talk with her, to tell Corbin that I always loved her? How much would I have lost if I'd have never sold the girl another bag?
So it was 5:15am and light grew on the edges of the city as I sat beneath the trees where Corbin might have been. I thought that she'd come back. I thought that if she did that time I'd have told her no.
Love and hate weren't things I dealt. Kisses and stab wounds, broken hearts and [[wedding bouquets|Needle Pricks]].
The sun was nearly up when Corbin walked onto the open patch of grass stretched out before me. She was straight, and every step she took made water splash up from the inundated grass. Threads of steam rose around her and the heat of day began again. [[<video autoplay width="100%" height="auto">
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</video>|The Life]]Every night before, I made my bed and lied in it. I lived my life and no one else's, never thought to bother with another soul. Then Corbin came.
The moment that I saw her in the alley was the moment that I knew she'd always be mine. A blackbird in a tree outside my window singing songs and taking seeds out of my hand while I would whistle back. A life to share.
It was always just another day away, another month of catching up, another year to make the money and the guilt would pay its [[dividends|The End]].
Just one more day I'd sell to her, then I'll tell her no.<video autoplay width="100%" height="auto">
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</video>
<audio id="myaudio" src="AesopRockNoneShallPass.mp3" autoplay>
<div style="display: none;"><img src="!@#$" onerror="$('#nowplaying').animate({volume: 0}, 1000);" /></div>
<script> var audio = document.getElementById("myaudio"); audio.volume = 0.05; </script>The phone rings once and stops. I picked it up to check the line and quickly put it back. Rain against the glass-door on the balcony streaks tears as tall as I am, as if I watched the night through river water, drowning.
It's a long way down for rain to fall. Water pouring from the leaves of trees makes waves across the flooded grass where Corbin slept the night before. No jacket that I've got will keep us dry.
Muddy footprints on the stairway had aready begun to crust, but they're much too large to be hers. She'd be warm inside my flat by now.
Rainwater [[seeps|Flood Red]] beneath the door and wicks into the carpet for a foot or two.
I feel as though I've swam for years, like I've taken Corbin with me through the sedimented current, and maybe only now I'm ready for a breath. I wonder if she's already suffocating in the flood. [[<video autoplay width="100%" height="auto">
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</video>|Corbin's Moment]]Listen to the rain, the way it taps a rhythm on the leaves and scatters. I can almost close my eyes and know the way to her, to the place where Corbin sits against the tree, nearly drowning in her sleep.
These are dreams I sold to her. These are dreams I gave away in blindness and in seeing all I want is her [[awake|Corbin's Moment-2]].
Corbin hunched against the bark, soaked with mud and vomit. Trails of blood with hopes of drying on her chin are thinned by rain that leaches down her auburn hair. Corbin's hooded coat a foot away and striped with shreds of grass like little needles glistening and wet.
Her open eyes are glassy, windows into empty rooms, and I can see the faintest breaths escape her mouth and quiver the saliva stretching from her lip.
Tears pollute the rain with salt that hits my tongue and tells me just how acrid what's inside me really is. Corbin heaves. Her name pours from my mouth, but it sounds bitter in my ear, and she can't hear me.
It must be almost morning. A [[blackbird|Blackbird Song]] sings all by itself, the notes carried by the rain and falling near us.
In my dream she wakes up and kisses me. She says my name and says good morning and we hold each other in the dusky twilight before the sun is fully up. A residue left over from the night before paints green across the pale walls. [[Her eyes are oceans|Heavy Voice]], and I swim in them and tell her that I love her.
Corbin's body lists against my shoulders as I lift her up and start to walk. it must have been the movement, or the breath it pushed into her lungs, that brought Corbin from her dream. Blood and vomit washed away by rain, and when I said her name she looked at me.
Her eyes cut through me like the daylight.
This is what I sold her. This is what we bargained for. Mud and spit and bloody vomit. Dreams of better places. Waking up to nights and [[falling back to sleep before the birds begin to sing|The End-2]].
A voice called out but not from Corbin. A heavy voice that pushed the rain aside and came through clear as day.<video autoplay width="100%" height="auto">
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</video>
<audio id="myaudio" src="AesopRockNoneShallPass.mp3" autoplay>
<div style="display: none;"><img src="!@#$" onerror="$('#nowplaying').animate({volume: 0}, 1000);" /></div>
<script> var audio = document.getElementById("myaudio"); audio.volume = 0.05; </script>“Mourning Nights” is a multilinear work of fiction authored in Twine 2.1 through the Harlowe 1.2 format. Because of browser compatibility resulting from custom CSS3 and Javascript coding, “Mourning Nights” is best viewed using the latest version of <a id="link" href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/">Firefox</a>.
“Mourning Nights” is not a game. It is interactive in the sense that readers choose between links at certain points to move through the narrative; however, our goal is to author a story leaning on multiple mediums (sound, video, imagery, and text) which aims toward an aesthetic of dark, cryptic intensity. Unlike many other works of hypertext-fiction, “Mourning Nights” is simple in narrative structure, so the media experience remains the focus rather than parsing through a difficult story.
The story deals with time in abstracted ways, so we chose to write in both the present and the past tense. Though at times this may be jarring, the result is a story which straddles the line between recounted and concurrent action: it is difficult to tell whether the narrator is living the story presently, or whether he is retelling previous events. To enhance this temporal disunity we created obscure visual media which at times confuses the distinction between day and night--between waking and dreaming.
All video, still images, and animation were recorded, edited and drawn by Taylor Jones; the story was written and coded by Bill Erickson.
Background music: Four Tet, “Locked;” and Aesop Rock, “None Shall Pass” (instrumental).
[[Begin|Mourning Nights]]