Ephemera

 

Shaded and secluded in the heart of mountains one could watch silken petals drift from the rough, like tributes of soft purple lavishing the earth. They always fell in slow serenade and tilted each way in silence, in diminished sunshine.

            I was sitting on the bed when she leaned forward, inches from my nose, and whispered softly to me. And I could almost see her face but the petals were falling like a waterfall. ‘Please,’ she asked me and grabbed my hand to pull me to her, ‘please...’

            And so I was lurched to the side and there was very little light until we got into the glow that spilled in from the hallway where the bedroom door was cracked. She pulled hard for a girl, such a small girl who’s head only rose to my chest. The swirls of white purple descended around the nape of her neck, the pale freckle skin.

 In the mountains the year before I stopped on the trail in what appeared to be an overgrown orchard. There were blossoms on the trees that fell off like snow. I stayed until very late. I see it everywhere. Now this girl was holding my hand and needed me or any other guy to want her or she became dead. She cried into me and night about being dead, not using tears but waves and her whole cheeks were wet. She had big blue eyes and I guessed that’s how all that wet got out at once. To keep herself alive, to be anything to keep alive, she needed men like she needed more of a father or less of an uncle. We sat on her bed and she hugged me very tightly and I watched the nighttime shine into her hair, said nothing and she called me a good person for that. She also took my hand and put it on the back of her thigh, underneath her skirt. Every blossom, I supposed, fell differently.

            “I’ve felt all there is,” she whispered as she cried. “Please tell me you understand…”

            And I said no and got up and left, which wasn’t easy because she clung hard.

            The next time I cared enough to softly brush some petals to the side so that I might satisfy a curiosity,  I was looking at a television screen. Disney characters moved around it, maybe Cinderella. “Watch,” said someone on the couch next to me, “you can see the f word in the clouds.”

            “For God’s sake, it’s a children’s movie, man.”

            But it wasn’t. It was a punch that took fifteen years to land. That made it quite a haymaker. It landed when you realized that what they’d fed you is saccharine sweet and sickening and when you realized you couldn’t be all those things that the ‘children’s movies’ told you were good. When you realized at times in your life you were the villain of your own story. Then, if you were really smart or lucky or unlucky, you might  realize that there’s not even a you or a story, just pretty petals falling as they may. That last bit doesn’t hurt at all, but before you got to that you had to do your time crying on the bed and telling someone you’d felt everything there is to feel.

            Cinderella is an adult movie.

            ‘I had opened up a newspaper one day and read a small aside in an article. It told me that a guy I had known since the first grade had died in his bed. Drug overdose. I nearly had to close the paper in disbelief but didn’t and realized, by reading the article further, it’d happened nearly two years prior. I hadn’t yet gone to the orchard in the mountains and so I remember thinking a little too deeply about it. From ape to human to footnote,’ I had said to someone, sometime, when they had given me an opportunity to talk. No longer did those opportunities interest me.

“… Pretty nice.” He whistled and waved a hand infront of my face, “Raymond. Come back.”

I swept my fingers over my forehead and through my hair. The office, silent except for the ticking of an unseen clock and a bird chirping outside, was crowded with boxes of books. It felt coarse. It felt like somebody had been erasing vigorously in there.

“Hey space-case. I see you have characters, imagery… but where’s the plot?”

Dancing images of purple and white and did somebody say something... “Hmm?”

“For the life of me I cannot find any sensible plot to your story,” the professor repeated while ruffling the papers about in futile search.

“Well it must be in there somewhere,” I answered while leaning over the desk as if to peak. He scanned the first page again through his wiry glasses.

“Raymond, there is no plot.”

“Oh.”

The two of us sat there looking at each other for a long moment.

“Do you understand what I’m saying? About how stories have a plot?”

“… Uh…”

“Ok, Ray. A plot is a series of events that lead up to the one big event, uh, of the story called the climax.”

“Oh,” I answered. I looked away toward the dingy window, to where the bird was singing. A little bird underneath a bush underneath a spiderweb. When it started to become glaringly obvious that the professor wasn’t satisfied I started paying attention and obliged him. “Who came up with that?”

That response drew a smile and a small laugh, “Life, my friend. Plot is everywhere. Plot is all around you. Plot is life.”

“Oh. So life is moving toward some big event?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“There. You’re doing it again, Raymond. You eyes are glazing over. Where do you go when that happens?”

I never went anywhere. I just watch the petals fall.

300 Word Story (Actually, A Bit Under)

"The father and son went to buy coffee, cocoa for the boy. I watched the father hand money away and say in pedagogy,"It's good to use it well." Spilt hot coffee all over my lap but it didn't seem appropriate to leap from the wooden park bench and make a fool of myself. Stayed still and let the morning ice over the wetness. It took a long time. I never realized what my left hand was doing.

I went to the library, mostly to escape December, which is a motherfucker. Soft chairs made me more conscious of stiffness in my back, and I tried to use Bekker numbers well but stopped reading halfway through 1094a- deadened eyes started turning everything blurry in equal measure. Falling asleep, nothing doing, wrenched awake after I glimpsed my hand behaving erratically. By the time I had pulled it away from the table, it had worn the index fingernail down to a bloody nub and etched in the letter 'F.'



It was night and my body was tense. I was walking the streets between skyscrapers, passing men in business suits, men whi stayed late at the office, men a couple cups of coffee ago. Found the subway and I descended. The first step downward was sudden and seized my stomach. Alone, I hopped the ticker. Light flickered the walls "urine-stain" yellow, not much of which was visible beneath layered graffiti. When I came upon a mostly unused space, I took a can of aerosol paint from my coat. Nine cents fell out and then my pockets were empty. I sprayed the word "Fuck" in large sprawling blackness."

AUTHOR'S NOTES:

This, to me, is the epitome of crappy writing. It suffers from a fatal flaw- while any reader can tell that there's more at play than a linear plot, everything else is highly esoteric and too obscure to convey a real message. I mean, did you honestly know Bekker numbers are the integrated system for navigating the corpus of Aristotle's works? Or how about the distinct point I made by referring to Bekker number 1094a, which is a book written by Aristotle called Nicomachean Ethics? Furthermore, did you know that Nicomachean Ethics was written for Aristotle's son (actually, it was lectured and then written). Do you get how that refers to the father and son at the beginning of my story? Or the real question...

Do you still care?

This is doomed. I had to write this piece. At the time I wrote this my philosophy on writing and my perspective on life were both on tilt. I was able to grow for it; most of the things written before it were tripe and one last thing after it was complete crap. But it might have birthed something, I think; for the first time ever it feels that I have within my fingers and my mind a force to be reckoned with.

It's About Self Loathing, Becoming Everything You Feared You Would

John, the banker, married father of two and proud owner of a brand new Lexus, pulled into his driveway after work where the pastey grinding of rubber agrainst concrete whetted his apetite for relaxation. Though he hated to depart from heavenly leather interior and a shiny black paint job, his waning gaze pierced through the window, the reflection, and onto the front yard of his charming villa estate. Someone or something had left the sprinklers on and the flooding purged the earth. John, the wet banker, marired father of two and proud owner of a brand new Lexus, squished toward the ornate front door that, besides a porch and an entryway, was the only thing that separated him from putting his feet up.

Tucked away underneath the awning was a half-worn loveseat that tempted a pleasant night, but he soon found himself distracted. As he approached, he realized that there was a letter tucked in between the door and the fram and came to the conclusion that someone had missed the opportunity to sign for a piece of certified mail. He checked the sender's address. John, the soggy bandker and married father of two, tucked the slip into his back pocket with all the indifference he could muster.

His hand reached for his side and he felt his keys as knives. He wranged them free of his slacks and shortly afterward heard a fatal thump against good wood. Near his feet and on the porch lay a ring of keys that had dropped, that did not belong to his hous, keys he knew he hadn't used that day.

"Shit."

John, the moist, married father of two, bent over and retrieved the damn things and then opened the door. When he entered, he unphasedly crossed the living room to the kitchen where he threw the keys down on the counter. Something was vibrating intensely. Near the stove rested a forgotten and forgiving cell-phone that, much like a needy pet or his horny wife, demanded to be touched. Three new messages.

"Three new messages?"

Ok asshole I'm taking the kids and you better believe I'm getting my half pre-nup or no custody and the house welcome to California baby and I'm staying at my sister's so you know where to drop off my stuff but Carl's here so don't try anything stupid ok, at least it's not another man Hey there Maddog it's Jimbo and are we still doing poker on Friday I hate to be a dick about it but could really use the cash you owe me from last time I know you're good for it shit, I forgot bye.

Maddog, the unmarried father of two, immediately reached for his checkbook and wrote out a check for Jimmy Wilson for approximately half of what was left in his checking account. One more message though, he nearly forgot.

By the way I'm fucking another man you know a real man a real role model for your children you pathetic bastard.

Maddog, the destitute bachelor, shrugged as he hung up. He could bear no more and so he marched himself down a long, empty hallway to his master bedroom where he could do nothing but sit on the bed and cradle his head in his hand. Mostly he missed his wife. He missed the smell of her, his understanding of her. Thrown against the mirror that hung against the walk-in closet was a nighty he bought her but she couldn't stand to wear because the seam bothered her crotch. That didn't make sense to him becacuse there was no crotch per se, but he picked it up and sniffed it anyways. It still smelled of her, and anyhting to be nearer to her...

Maddog, the financially unsound, cross-dressing bachelor, laid back on the bed and exhaled deeply. His right arm flooped over and onto the nightstand. His journal. Well, his journal now. It had stated off as his daughter's 'Hello Kitty Heart' diary, but he had usurped it when the pressure had become just too much and he needed to vent. That's right, he was writing in a little girl's pink 'Hello Kitty Heart' diary. Maddog, the financialy unsound, femininely dressing single person, opened the diary, lamented his existence and read the following:

"I didn't take out the garbage today. Fuck it."

And I didn't take it out the day before either, I scorned as I closed the diary and reached for the television remote. I flipped on the history channel. It was the ususal garbage about Nazi's, Hitler and morbid hearsay. It was hard to think that the Holocause was really so bad in my present condition.

I am Maddog, the financially unsound, femininely-dressing, neo-Nazi sympathizer; I am single and ready to mingle.