Garden Door
Author
Bryce Stoskopf
Author Bio
I am an artist/writer/musician from the northern California area. I have been writing stories and poems ever since I was able to put sentences together in my early years of school. And I have been drawing ever since I could hold a crayon in my tiny hands as a very young child. At a young age I was highly intrigued and influenced by the vision of Tim Burton and the amazing story telling of the late night t.v. show “Tales From the Crypt”. As I got older my drive and ambition for creating art kept growing and growing, as it continues to do today and most likely will never cease to stop. My writing of short stories and poetry has been compared to Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Bukowski, and even the legendary t.v. series, “The Twilight Zone”.
Description
A story of a tortured soul locked into his own personal hell created by his inability to accept the one thing he’s always longed for; the mysterious warm emotion of love. Now in this story of love and tragedy, a dead soul trapped in his self-made hellish abyss, will have to face his most intimate demon, himself.
Book excerpt
Garden Door
By: Bryce B. Stoskopf
As she makes her way across the stage it’s as if her dress is floating, like a ghost levitating with the grace of a ballet dancer for an audience to watch. To the likes of a young diva singing in the bathroom without knowing anyone is listening, she is open, allowing everything to be set free; the listeners and watchers are invisible to her.
She is beautiful, so beautiful that she shouldn’t be classified as one of us humans, she is more. Looking at her from a far is like falling from a skyscraper hundreds of stories above earth except, I have no fear of hitting the bottom. Seeing her waltz before my very eyes is more than enough to make my existence complete. She walks as if the pavement is water, graceful, carefully placing each toe with each step. Her eyes have the colors of a forest set on fire. Dark amber engulfed by delicate warm hues, the kind of warmth a fireplace would offer. Skin so fare it almost seems invisible, fragile in the most elegant way. Often I lay in bed in the hours of the a.m. staring at the moonlight through my bedroom window imagining what it would be like to hold her, to speak to her in a romantic way, to kiss, to touch. I know that day will never approach me, but I just wish to tell her how I long for it. I just want such words to fall my tongue and lips like some emotional waterfall, loud and clear, but gentle to the ears.
I found myself awoken in bed surrounded by the blackness that engulfed my icy cold room. It appeared that I have been lost in what seemed to be the most beautiful dream I have come upon in some time for nearly six hours. The glowing red digital numbers flashed on and off giving my room a dismal source of lighting, it read 2:22 a.m. Lying in my tomb of a room I began to reflect on the woman in my dream, her tone of speech was soft but rough with the voice box of a smoker, her skin was pure, not tainted by modern day tanning beds or any other means of abuse. Her hair was just the way I pictured my dream girl to wear it as, short, but not too short, coming to an end just below her jaw line. Then I suddenly realized this was a spitting admiration of a girl I once loved but lost at the will of my own self-indulgence, the one girl I truly loved and cared about.
Memories of years long since passed attacked my heart like some kind of emotional dagger tearing and ripping my insides until I was completely hollow, just like a young boy scooping out the insides of a pumpkin in preparation for carving just before Halloween night. It genuinely hurt too much to even look at a picture of her, to look into those eyes, to remember how her voice sounded as she so effortlessly said, “I love you”. During the course of our final days as a “couple” she scolded me saying I will end up in hell for the way I have betrayed our relationship, our love, and our passion. She swore I would be dammed to live a life of hopelessness and loneliness to an unthinkable extent at which I cannot even begin to fathom.
She was more than certain at her premonition, for I have never cried so hard and for so long for the loss of anyone or anything during my pathetic time spent in this life. Every day without her is a day in hell.
We all have a past, whether it be one filled with warmth and contentment or one of just sheer bad luck and hopelessness; I find myself in a state of constant remembrance of my past days. I was a drinker with the heart of a wretched fiend that was spawned by some deep infatuation with darkness. Days spent amongst everyday society I wore a mask that would camouflage myself from the deep seeded black hole of a soul that carried about my persona. How a beautiful girl like Madeline could have ever loved me is beyond any translation of words or rational thought that I am capable of. She was exposed to my darkness but was somehow attracted to it, at first.
Cemeteries always intrigued me, and this was a common interest me and Madeline shared. We would often have picnics at a remote cemetery called, “Gardens”; however me and Madeline gave it our own secret nickname which affectionately came to be the “Door”. It was a place where we would meet if home life with our parents was far too potent to bare. We would always meet underneath an oddly shaped tree that had the resemblance of a tall, lanky giant of a man. Beneath this tree were few graves, mostly married couples that deceased during the late 1930’s and 1940’s. We picked that tree because it was rooted just at the end of the cemetery grounds; we thought it was interesting because the tree itself illustrated the line between the world of the living and the dead.
Three years have passed since Madeline and I parted into our separate ways, and I can still smell her, the shampoo she used in her hair, the smell of her perfume as it radiated off her dress, the fragrance of her breathe that smelled of cherries from drinking a slushy with a flavoring of that particular fruit. Now, I pay visits to Gardens on my own, walking about the graves with my head anchored to the ground that my feet drag upon. Sometimes I spend all days here at Gardens waiting for Madeline, for without her I am not human, nor do I deserve to be with a life form of a godsend as her.
I once said that I was a fiend upon living, and in a desperate attempt to apologize and make up for my indiscretions for my beloved Madeline, I plummeted off the bridge that was lined with train tracks overlooking a murky, shallow river. This bridge was located across the highway that Gardens Cemetery was formed. Now I walk amongst myself, underneath the tall lanky figure of a tree, waiting for my love to return for an evening picnic. We all create our own forms of hell, and she was accurate when cursing me with what eventually became my doom, a doom crafted by my own willingness. An eternity without her overlooking my own grave in the garden of doors. Every day without her is a day in hell.
The End
Author Website
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00MWGAWLW