You Dropped Your Pocket!

Ephemera

2010-03-12T16:05:00.001-08:00

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)

2009-12-19T22:02:00.000-08:00

"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

2009-12-12T01:21:00.000-08:00

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.

Ghost Story

2009-12-10T22:22:00.000-08:00

She was allowed to know that she was not real- not, at least, in the traditional sense. But having been invented, she was allowed to think, having been invented did not allow her to feel any less real at all. And so she found herself in safe white place, a well cared for place where she was permitted to examine, at her leisure, old leather bound photo albums, memories of herself before some catalyst. In that way there two of her and the fainter one lingered in tangerine horror. Neither were permitted to understand anything more than once haunted.

(Note: Wrote this for a class. It got panned pretty hard and I only got half credit. I felt it was kind of harsh... what do you think?)

Impulse to Life (Part III)

2009-12-01T23:47:00.000-08:00

Part I | Part II

3. Now Again but Later

It was hard to watch the road while I watched her. I liked the street lights, seedy emanating tint passing over her in thick stripes. The dirty lighting and the pretty girl. Helena had decided that she wanted to gaze out upon the stars from the passenger window but not move apart from me. She was stretched out amongst the front seat so that she might touch me and touch upon the night sky simultaneously. My fingers stroked her smooth shin where her jeans had risen up, then back and forth- my fingers, I wished my fingers to be whatever it is that makes a life flourish. Her ankle rested in my lap and against my erection, which strained against my pants uncomfortably. And that's the essence of touch, a word that means many things but only invokes the thought of one. The night sky- sometimes she would write poems about things like moons beaming or specks of light in the darkness. They were terrible. Girl couldn't write poetry worth a shit. Her prose, however, was good. In prose she followed the strongest, most beautiful impulses.

Rain would soon fall.

"Henri, do you ever dream about the stars?"

"Yeah, sometimes I dream about nailing Jenifer Aniston."

"I don't understand what your expression is saying. What is nailing?"

I smiled. Everything was symptomatic, I wanted to tell her. Helena got distracted and reached down to retrieve an object that had fallen somewhere underneath the seat. First she shook it and after I heard the sound I knew what it was. "What is this?"

I smiled. "Dog collar."

The Flower Fields (Part II)

2009-11-30T01:53:00.000-08:00

(Note: Presented here is part two, the second half of the Flower Fields which was fragmented this way purely for the convenience of the reader, though why anyone would want to read something I wrote in high school is beyond my fathoming. Unless you're driven by morbid curiosity, I would encourage you to read a more recent and better piece from the column on the right hand side of the page. - JM)

“Stoppit.”

Toshiba was driving either paw in and out of my arm, unintentionally clawing me. We had been walking for sometime now, having abandoned the road. Although Toshiba was clearly an intellectual in his own right, he was still physically a kitten and accordingly not prone to long bouts of exercise- and so I had obliged, much to his polite protest, to carry him.

“Sorry,” he answered sincerely, looking me full in the face with an expression that pleaded for forgiveness.

As we clambered over the slope of even another hill, both of us looked to Nobody, who was still narrowing his gaze in every which direction. He still held the flower in his right hand, and it was beginning to crumple.

A bird flew into view once we reached the crest, and proceeded to work its beak with a tuft of grass. Nobody, once again, didn’t seem to notice, but I said to Toshiba, “Well, it worked with you…” I cleared my throat, “Excuse me, hello?”

Nobody looked over at what was about to unfold. The bird replied, “What do you want?” He wanted to make it clear that he had no time for us and he used the tone of his voice to do so..

“Have you seen any flower fields around here?”

“The hell do I care about flower fields? Asshole.” He went back to pecking the earth.

Toshiba attempted to spring from my arms and unleash a wrath upon the creature, but unsuccessfully, as I dove forward and caught the kitten mid-jump. The bird flew off and I received a face full of ground.

Toshiba cleared his throat, “Well, this is a slightly humbling experience for me…” He began gently shifting his hind legs, trying to slip free.

The front of my face hurt as I spoke into the grass, “The worst part is that all he does is stare off into space.” I was making mention of course to Nobody and his lack of action in any other capacity than what he had already established as his favorite pass time.

I lifted my chin. Between the blades of grass I caught sight of something most peculiar. A cow, upon who’s neck was some décor or another. “Well, I’ll be damned…”

It was a wreath of flowers.

I got up, scrambling at first to all fours and then to both two’s, ripping up greenery in the process. Toshiba thanked me for releasing him, but I was pressed to approach the cow and heard little of it. “Well, hello there… am I interrupting?”

The cow looked at me dully, as if I were stupid in the most defining way. I was tired of all this. The bird had put me in a bad mood, I was lost, confused and slightly scratched up on the forearm. “Hey listen, fat-ass,” I said, approaching with menace, “you’re going to tell me what you know about those flowers and you’re going to be real quick about it. I’m tired of you pricks. I’m getting answers.” I looked the animal in its defiant eye the entire time- a truly determined and threatening glare.

Came the reply, “Moooooooooooooooooooooooooooo………..”

**

Three figures were making their way across grassland at night. Even though the lights on the field behind them were switching off, and they were enveloped in darkness, from left to right they were numbers thirty three, twelve and four. Each of them carried a helmet in one of their hands.

“And I trucked the guy,” says number 4, “I mean I didn’t really truck him, but I knocked him around real good.” Number 33 answered, and the familiar cycle of brotherhood proceeded back and forth as if nothing was over and there were more battles to be fought in the coming days. Number 12 stayed quiet until he felt ready to speak.

“I guess if it didn’t hurt a little it wouldn’t be worth much.”

***

Nobody and Toshiba were laughing at me. Toshiba had switched carriers and I was now wearing a wreath of flowers. They smelled like lavender.

“Enough already, how was I supposed to know?”

They were truly enjoying it.

“Fine,” I said, “but we’re still no closer to the flower fields since we left Tri-tip over there twenty minutes ago.”

“That may be so,” said Toshiba coyly, “but this is definitely becoming an experience.”

“Oh, I agree.” Nobody returned to gazing off into the distance.

I sat down, overcome with frustration. “We’re lost. There’s nothing out here. We’re going to be out here forever, and even if that weren’t the case, we’re still screwed because all we know about where we came from is that its that way.” I pointed over my shoulder, back toward the road, which was now long out of sight. “I want to go home, but I don’t know where home is. But do you know what’s really killing me right now? The irony! Here’s a microcosmic indictment of where I stand; a bird just gave me the bird!”

“Really,”pleaded Toshiba, “You don’t know that. It could have been a talon spasm. He did take off rather rapidly, and the acceleration upward would have acted with such a force on his nervous system to…”

“Shut up and think,” said Nobody, stopping to kneel down. He sliced Toshiba’s tangent in half.

“Yes,” continued Toshiba, begging our pardon for getting sidetracked, “that was quite a mundane cow. It couldn’t have wreathed itself.”

I rolled my eyes. “You’re a talking cat and you’re pretending like logic is a factor here.”

He grinned impishly, “Well, not your logic.”

A giggle erupted from behind one of the rolling green hills.

“Ever get the feeling you were being strung along?”

**

“This is the remix to ignition, its hot and fresh out the kitchen, mama rollin’ that body got every man in he wishin’ (awishinnow)!”

He says, “Ready, ready! Clap it up!” And they do.

It is chilly, the night is dark, and the bus stinks of boys who have played hard. And lavender.

**

“Damn, she’s so little.”

I looked at the little blonde flower girl with an eyebrow raised. It was she who had giggled.

“What’s she doing to that turtle?” asked Nobody, who found his eyebrow elevated as well..

The little blue eyed flower girl was putting a wreath of flowers around its head, “There ya go Speedy!”

“Thank ya,” answered Speedy, true to his name.

“That’s it,” I interjected, “I’m done. I’ve lost my mind. I quit.”

Toshiba swatted at something on the breeze from where he rested in Nobody’s arms, “Come now. You haven’t lost your mind, we see her too. You do suffer from mild egomania, though.”

Nobody sat Toshiba down and approached the child, who was now spinning circles. Speedy, beneath his large brown shell, watched contentedly.

“Little girl,” said Nobody delicately, “where did you get those flowers?”

She had an armful of flower wreaths and they, too, were turning circles.

“What?” I said in mild astonishment (which was rapidly losing magnitude), “How about ‘where are your parents?’”

Nobody glared at me, “When are you going to stop asking questions and start asking questions?”

She giggled at the two of us. “Smile and have a jelly bean!”

Nobody was about to press the matter, but I beat him to the punch. She stopped spinning to look at me.

“Now listen carefully,” I said, “we need to know where you got those flowers…” I eyed Nobody, “So I can get the hell out of here.”

Nobody nodded. Toshiba watched from a prone position with lukewarm interest.

She skipped over to me, raised her hand up, and presented a black jelly bean.

“No, no thank you, “ I pardoned, “I hate the taste of the black ones…”

“Nuh-uh. You wanna taste this one!”

Uncertainly, I looked to my two companions. Both of them shrugged simultaneously, and I popped the jelly bean in my mouth.

Before I knew what had happened, the world had melted away.

**

“Who was she?” Asked his friend.

“Who was who?” He replied offhandedly. His mind was elsewhere. His mind was still with her. Time had faltered again, and there was still a battle to be fought and lost.

“The girl! The girl you were just talking to! With the-“

“I make it look so easy, don’t I?” He said it, hoping a little masculine machismo would get his compatriot off the subject.

“C’mon J-Mo, “ he pushed, not buying it. It was just too out of character.

“Hey, shaddup. Mind your own business.” He gave his friend a playful wink. He wanted him to back off and he expressed it as harmlessly as he could.

Finally, when he was alone he looked down at the number scribbled on his hand, not entirely sure whether or not he had won the battle, or what had brought the aroma of lavender back into the air on that warm, sunny day when all the earth prospered.

He sat his items down in an empty classroom, and went to lunch with the rest of his peers. And his brothers.

**

It was night, all consuming and mind sheathing.

The door was creaked open, and daring not the wilderness behind me, I entered the cabin, which was advanced in age and grey in color where it was once red and youthful.

I looked down… I was wearing something that didn’t belong to me. A white jersey.

The old man, in his rocking chair, in his dark, dark cabin all alone. He tried to get up, to reach for me. It was terrible- his eyes were hollow, his chin pointed and his beard white. He appeared to my eyes as a skeleton in the flesh. His hands were coming now, coming to take something away from me, something entirely for himself. I felt the cold sweat pour down, the fear within seize me and I smelt the fragrance of lavender like never before, as if for one final time…

“YOU! ITS ON YOU!”

“What the devil…” Toshiba said while batting at my face with a paw.

Nobody had pinned my legs to the earth. I realized I was laying prone.

“What exactly happened here?” Nobody asked me.

Breathing heavily, I answered, “I don’t know… a vision or something…”

I sat up and frantically looked around. That damn turtle and his damn wreath had moved all of two feet. The flower girl was nowhere to be found.

“Wha- what? Where’s the girl? What happened?”

“What happened? You swallowed that jelly bean, fell over and were out cold for five minutes.”

“We thought she killed you,” Nobody added.

“And then,” Toshiba concluded, “she disappeared.”

“What about the flowers?” I spewed, “Any hints? Anything at all?”

Nobody looked at me bemusedly, “Well, we were going to question him,” he pointed to Speedy, “but he’s making a get-away.”

“We have nothing,” Toshiba reiterated, “We were hoping you had something from that strange experience.”

“I don’t know what it was,” I said tiredly, laying my head back down on the grass, “but that face looked familiar.”

He wondered if there was any kind of significance to events transpiring around him or if he was merely looking for meaning where there was none. It was night again, and the moon shone bright through that crystallizing cold air. He sat on the edge of the fountain, and tossed a coin in.

To his right, a resteraunt that read “Daphne’s Greek Caf&#;. He knew his place was inside, and he’d have to come inside sooner or later. The innards of the building were brightly lit and tangerine in color, with sterile tile flooring and orange-peel walls. He pulled open the door and took a seat with his friends.

“Gotta keep those ho’s in line, right Jeff?” said one of them.

His friends. His brothers. And then, of course, the friends that had become his friends through them. All told, there were about eight people occupying those tables- they had all spent the day together, starting with breakfast, following through to a movie and now dinner, followed by a show. In his mind, there was not a group of people who he would rather be with.

“Yeah,” he said, setting a box of Rolaids infront of a much bigger brother in arms.

Gratitude was paid and the crew was off to a battle in which the warriors could not participate.

His sheep dog nature made him wait while two of his friends parked their car. He walked with them, more alert than usual to the world around him. Every corner of darkness was pierced by his watchful gaze- he knew there was nothing to fear, but it was in his nature to be sure of it.

But he left the battle early. It was too hard to watch the battle and not partake, and it made his soul cry out from within, knowing that his sun had already risen, and just as soon as it had come, proceeded to set.

I gave Speedy a tap with my foot. It resounded off of his hard, brown shell.

“Come out, Speedy,” I pleaded with utmost sincerity, “we just want to talk to you.”

“I dunno nothin’,” he said with frightfulness, “not supposed to talk ta people I dunno.”

I saw a half grin on the black feline face of Toshiba as he said, “Does this fall under the category of the ironical things that are killing you?”

I shot him knives with my eyes, “Not helping, Toshiba. I’m a little at a loss for words with Flash Gordon here.”

“More like Charlie Gordon.”

I gave him another dirty look, from which he recoiled and waved a paw with remorsefulness. I turned to Nobody, at my wits end, and said, “Why don’t you try?”

He turned around and absorbed the scene in full. I knew he had been watching the horizon again, for some indication of where to move next.

“Speedy,” he said darkly, “where can we find more flowers like the ones you’re wearing? Where did the little girl get them?”

“And where did she go?” I tossed in at the last second.

“He’s mentally challenged, for heaven’s sake, give him time to react,” Toshiba said to me. I couldn’t even discern my own voice from the chaos that ensued.

Speedy started sobbing loudly from in his shell. We all grew very quiet and choked on the guilt that had suddenly settled in the air.

“Hey,” said Nobody with surprising tenderness, “hey Speedy. Everyone here likes you. No one is angry at you.”

This did not bring silence as he intended. The tortoise wept bitterly and unrestrainedly.

“He’s having a bad day,” sighed Toshiba in all earnestness.

“Well,” I followed, “I guess we just sit here until he feels like talking to us.”

It didn’t seem like he had any intention of stopping soon.

He saw himself inside his mind’s eye. Dark eyes, dark hair, and a look of tranquility resting on his features. Beneath him passed the sun, moon, stars, earth. There was no speaking, there was communication; the breakdown of all logic within oneself where there is no form, only function. Visually, he saw a slow, confident, tilt of the head.

A roar of laughter and the line, “I never do things like that because I know I’ll forget…”

“Hey Clarion,” he said, snapping his consciousness back to reality, “does it bother you that you don’t trust yourself?”

The class begin to laugh. They all appreciated the break from Sir Isaac Newton’s laws and number crunching on their overly complex calculators.

“Moyers, I’m going to tell you something. It doesn’t just apply to school, but it’s a life thing.”

The class was laughing, even before the punch line hit. Exchanges between this particular teacher and this student were infamous in their own right.

“Ok,” he said, ready to put up a fight, “let me get out a pen, I’ll write this down.”

Never one to back down, he took out his pen and proceeded to write his teacher’s words down.

“Happiness is knowing who you are.”

The entire class erupt into laughter. Good joke.

But after he had written it, he had made a realization. What had just been said was something profound, something that had inherent meaning.

As they laughed, he sat in his desk wide eyed and mouth agape. Nobody noticed.

Speedy was laughing.

“Can I go wit ya to da flowers?” Big tortoise eyes demanded for the answer to be yes.

“Sure you can,” I said, getting back to my feet. I dusted the grass of my backside, “But we need to get there quick, Speedy, and-“

“I’ll go fas’, I promise!”

I look at Nobody, who was simply waiting with his arms folded. He desperately wanted to resume the search. “Well I like you so much, I’ll carry you, Speedy. But listen…” I let a moment pass so he could subside his excitement. It was incredible, seeing a tortoise so happy. He was eager to please, though, and he soon gave me full attention. “Speedy, where did the little girl get the flowers?”

He shut his eyes as he truly tried to think.

“No, no,” he said fretfully, “Just not smart enough…”

“Come on, Speedy,” I said in desperation, “you have to think…”

He mumbled, “But, if I was smarter…”

He was giving it his all.

Nobody watched with intensity. He could tell the rest of his search was dependent on the information obtained here. He felt his dreams slipping out of his hands- I could see it in his face, his demeanor- and there was nothing he could do about it. He rolled his solitary flower, the one taken from Toshiba so long ago now, in his right hand. In a moment, it would all be over. All would be for naught and heaven knows what we would be left with.

Save for the intervention of a kitten.

I didn’t see it, but I can imagine the switch flipping on in Toshiba’s mind. I can see his eyes lighting up as he realizes what it is he has to do. It all stems from cleverness, a kind that can’t be measured by tests, books or professors.

It can only be said that’s just the way it goes

In the blink of an eye, he jumped up from his position between my feet and Speedy’s closed eyes, darted through the air and took a swipe at Nobody’s hand, giving a light scratch with his claws. Nobody opened his palm and shook, saying a swear word in confusion. Another flash of black, and Toshiba had returned to the gap between me and the tortoise.

“Mmm aboo nu?” Toshiba said.

“What did you say?” I said with mild irritation, upset that Toshiba would be distracting Speedy at such a pertinent time. I knew Speedy was losing the battle in his mind, but there was hope as long he could focus, a sliver of hope like a strand of glass among sand.

I furrowed my eyebrows and looked down at Toshiba. In his mouth, he was holding Nobody’s flower.

“I… uh… wait, what’s that?” The small, pale green eyelids fluttered as new information was processed

“I know!” He hollered in delight, “I know where they are! I know where they are! Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”

I watched him inch forward as best he could.

He started laughing as he realized his own lack of velocity. We laughed with him.

He was driving home in his 2005 silver Mustang GT. He thoroughly enjoyed the manual transmission, because it gave him something to do besides think. As one of his closest friends who refused to get out of the end zone put it, “The fact that you over think is both your greatest virtue and your biggest flaw.”

Today, there would be no salvation in it. Out of the corner of his eye, number twelve, Jeff Moyers, saw something in the passenger seat.

It was number twelve, Jeff Moyers.

“Holy shit!”

He quickly regained control of the vehicle, “What the fuck?!”

The second Jeff looked at him patiently, waiting for him to regain composure.

“What the fuck! Am I ok to drive?”

“Just pay attention to the road.”

“What the fuc- “

“…is going on here?”

“That’s it,” the driver said, “I’m pulling over. I’m not ok.”

“Not now, you aren’t.”

He pulled the car alongside a vacant curb, pulled the emergency brake, and turned off the engine.

“So… am I hallucinating?” asked the driver.

“You’re asking the wrong questions,” the passenger replied, rolling down the window slightly to allow for fresh air.

“Ok,” the driver said, “So you’re me. Right?”

“Both of us are you.”

“Stop it. Stop it right there. You’re making me think I’m crazy.”

And then silence.

“Ok, what are you doing here?” the driver asked.

“I think you know. Are you going to ask me? Because you’ve been waiting to ask someone.”

The driver finally understood, “Am I… is there something wrong with me? Something I don’t see?”

The passenger shrugged. “Probably. But listen, either way, there’s not much you can do about it, so why are you stressing on it? Just lay down your ground work and go from there.”

“Ground work?”

“Let me rephrase. The character devices you must find in your soul in order to call yourself the man you want to be.”

“I didn’t think she would shut me out.”

“Doesn’t matter. You acted respectably- your friends told you that- and you stepped up with the information that you had.”

“Was I not good enough?”

“Are you not good enough?”

“For her? At what? Huh?”

He looked at the driver like he was playing dumb and he had seen through it. They both knew the driver knew the answer.

“Yeah,” I said, “you’re right.”

“You,” said the passenger, “remember those westerns your grandfather and father watched. You still admire those good cowboys, and you hold them as role models. They preached things like justice, integrity, honor, courage and loyalty. These are very real things for you.”

“Stop it,” the driver said, “that’s corny.”

“We both know it. If you have to say it to anybody, then its not your’s to begin with.”

“You said it to me, and you are me, so therefore I don’t own it. To myself.”

The passenger sighed, “You always were a smart ass. Its how you cope. Quit thinking about guys.”

The driver frowned, shaking his head, “I knew there’d be a gay joke. Tough shit, buddy, I just struck out with a girl. You were there, weren’t you?”

“I was, and that’s why I’m here now. Anytime you question the man you’re becoming, I want you to think about this…”

And suddenly he was no longer in that silver Mustang, but football pads. He was in the stadium, in the middle of the golden bowl that they called the valley. The hillsides were dotted with the tops of dark trees and houses on the crests. He was surrounded by bleachers and goal posts.

He was breathing hard. It was conditioning, and they were jogging around the field itself. He was in the lead.

The setting sun shined on them as they ran, breathing with all their might after a hard day of practice. He pushed himself- he heard the coach call out that they had ninety seconds to reach the other side of the field by means of sprinting around. It was unrealistic- but the player wearing number twelve’s practice jersey felt his body snap into another gear.

“Find another gear, Jeff!” echoed the words of his coach, from oh-so-long ago during off season conditioning. Even now, sweat poured down his face.

As he raced, he felt his body simultaneously reaching new peaks and pushing itself to new lows. He heaved like a steam engine, pushing forward with everything he had, emptying the tank as the coaches liked to call it.

And he made it.

The fatigue got the better of him and he felt his elbows fall upon his knees. His teammates began to finish- except one.

A larger player was having trouble with the conditioning and still had more than halfway to go.

Number twelve couldn’t do it. He didn’t have anything in him. He had emptied the tank. The sun was too hot, the air was too thin, his body was too weak.

So it was definite that the only thing that carried him was heart.

Number twelve ran toward the straggler, his brother, his teammate, screaming himself silly, “Come on baby! Finish now! That a baby! FINISH!”

And he ran with him. And the others, who were milking their rest time, all broke their trance and followed him, an army of support making sure that they looked after their own.

The driver was grateful for both the company and the guidance the passenger provided; it was support he could stand on.

The driver said, “But how will I know- “

Unfortunately, he was alone. He had never even stopped the car.

“Left!” said Speedy with utmost confidence as I delicately carried him under my arm.

Toshiba and Nobody followed us eagerly, Toshiba being carried of course, sensing that Speedy and I were headed in the right direction.

We clambered over hill top as quickly as we could, our pace quickly turning up into a frenzy. They were close. I could sense it.

And sure enough, over the next ridge…

Flowers, as far as the eye could see. The extended in fields until they touched the neverending blue that is sky. Every pastel was unique in itself. They all danced subtley in the beauty of the wind.

With no hesitation, we all poured down that green hillside into them. The feeling of euphoria was incredible. How long did the trip take? It felt ages, but I couldn’t be sure. Toshiba leapt from Nobody’s arms and accelerated into the fields, the sea of color, ahead of all of us. We all dove in.

And then there was screaming.

We all struggled to clamber out.

Nobody screamed in agony, “What the hell is this?!”

I couldn’t feel anything but searing pain. I did not have the fortitude to remove myself from the flowers, and I felt myself slipping…

“Get him out!” screamed Toshiba. I could make out the sounds of Speedy wailing uncontrollably.

And then I felt hands on me. Powerful hands that pulled me from the fields.

Between hazy perceptions, I saw Nobody. His flesh was cut something terrible.

“Oh… oh God,” he said with tears in his dark eyes, pointing them at me now. “… oh God…”

Suddenly there was no blue sky to be found. Just the menacing clouds of a dark thunderstorm.

An underfed, messy little boy with ripped jeans, maybe ten years old, enters the hospital room. In his eyes twinkles ingenuity that only comes from poverty.

“Sir,” says the large, dark haired nurse who followed him in, “she’s obviously sleeping. You’ll have to come back later.”

It is evident in the look he gives her that he is not going anywhere until he’s ready.

“Ok, “ she rephrases compassionately, “a few minutes will be fine. But you better make it quick,” she adds tenderly, “the snow’s coming down pretty hard out there. It might be a white out. You might not be able to drive home tonight.”

He nods silently, and waits for her to leave.

The room is white, sterile and cheaply lit. The TV is on in one corner, but the volume is set so low that all that can be seen is a random order of flashing images.

A random order of flashing images.

He clambers into a seat, next to the figure of his ill mother, her face sickly and her auburn hair matted from laying for so long.

He clears his throat, and begins as if he’s at a presentation at school. Outside, the snow is falling heavily.

“Mama,” he says, “I’m hungry.”

No response.

“Mama,” he repeats, “I need new clothes.”

He motions to his ripped jeans- hand me downs subjected to the worse kind of treatment, a boy playing outside.

“Mama,” he says hopefully, “I love you.”

Again, just silence.

“Mama,” he starts, but he cannot finish. He has nothing left to say, and knows that nothing would be said in return.

“Are you here… because of you?”

“I can’t protect you from yourself.”

He rests his head on the bedside, like a loyal puppy-guard dog. It was entirely familiar; watching and waiting.

But hard as it falls, snow could only physically impede him. His mind would be free. For better or worse, it would be free.

“Mama… where are you?”

He sat against a brown building on that warm day that had nearly run its course. The teacher had told him that he smart. He had never heard of that before- all he had ever heard about was how absurdly terrible his handwriting was. It was a new idea, him being smart, and he relished in it. Smart was all there was, and if a person wasn’t smart, well that just wasn’t good at all.

They told him to attend a program for ‘gifted’ students after school. It all happened in a way he could not understand.

At first he thought he was in trouble. A teacher whom he did not know, elderly with short brown hair, came to his classroom and spoke to the teacher he did know.

After they spoke, the unknown teacher turned around and said, “And this is a fifth grade class?”

“Yes,” answered the kind woman who was in charge, “they are all in the fifth grade. No splits.”

He was nervous when she came over to his desk, probably even shaking. His eyes scanned the paraphenila on the wall-art projects, posters, songs, the pledge of allegiance… he didn’t want to be in his seat.

“J.J…” said his teacher, softly.

He looked up with two cow-like frightened brown eyes.

“Don’t worry,” she explained with a reassuring smile, “you’re not in trouble. I want you to go with this nice lady. She’s going to ask you to take a test. Don’t worry, its just for fun.”

Still unsure but feeling a little better, he does as he is told.

And suddenly, because he took a fun test, he is told to stay after school for a program for gifted students. He has missed the bus. All the other children have been picked up, and the teacher has left- he must have gone overlooked.

But he was gifted. He was most ingenious. He had everything he needed right where he needed it- from where the bottoms of where his beat up basketball shoes met the earth to where the wild brown hair on his head flowed obnoxiously and with great disorder on the top of his head. His mother had forgotten him; he realized that. And now he was going home.

First, he walked a street that he recognized. The bus came that way when it had dropped him off that morning. He remembered the dog barking in the yard of that yellow house- no dog now, of course, but a whole lot of dog poop out front. It had to be the one.

He knew he was heading the direction when he saw a gas station. He hurriedly the rest of the distance, and recognized main street. After all, gas stations were all on the mainstreet because that’s where the most cars could see them. He pictured his mother on the telephone, talking incessantly, “We live on the other side of main street now.” But how could he be sure which side was the ‘other side’?

The gas station. From his old house, he would ride his bike to it to buy candy or soda pop. He never had to cross the big street to do it.

After careful calculations, he decided to cross. He looked both ways first, being extra thorough in doing the thing.

And now he had nothing. He was somewhere he had never been before, or at least remembered. He continued to walk while he engaged his mind, the snowy blue mountains onlooking in the distance.

When he reached the end of the street, it attatched in a perpendicular fashion to another. He could either go left or right, and he had no idea which. In the depths of his mind, he heard the darkest, softest whispers of panic.

Until he saw the river.

He had fished from that river with his brother throughout the summer. He knew that he lived on the other side of it, except…except…

The other side of it was nothing but a jungle of reeds, all of them standing taller than he was. Intrigued, and somewhat wary, he knew it was his best shot. He walked down the bank and rolled up his pant legs as best he could- though it did little good, because he was in waist deep- and crossed.

He left the cool water and climbed up the opposing river bank. He was in the thick of it now.

The first thing he did was start making trail markers by breaking the reeds, just as his grandfather had taught him so long ago. As he made his way deeper into the maze, he began to lose direction. He began to run, looking for a sign, everything.

The struggle continues for what seems to be ages, and he continues to leave trail markers every so often. Despair began to rear its ugly head. It took hold.

He fell to his knees in the cold, nearly frozen mud and began to cry bitterly.

“Don’t lay down and die.”

“Wh-what?” I said in a very out of focus manner.

I felt myself being lifted off the ground.

“Shhh. No one said anything… Toshiba…”

“I’ve figured it out, Nobody. I know we’re close.”

I shut my eyes again.

“Did you figure out what happened?”

“No, but its very obvious that this isn’t right. I don’t smell lavender anywhere… but look, I have an idea. We have to wake Speedy up.”

“He’ll start crying again, I guarantee it,” I heard Nobody say.

“We have to calm him.” I felt a paw on my arm, “He doesn’t have much time…”

Nobody shook me, “Open your eyes…”

I did. The sky was covered with a storm and we were still right next to that flower field. I had lost sense of time, direction and myself. Nobody and Toshiba were covered in wounds, cuts over every portion of their body. Once again, all I felt was intense pain.

“Let’s move before it starts raining again.”

We were all soaking wet. I wanted to ask what had happened, but all my body could muster was a groan.

“Be quiet,” Nobody answered. He was dragging me along and supporting me upward. I couldn’t feel anything… just pain, indescribably paralyzing amounts of it.

I shut my eyes again. I could hear Speedy crying somewhere far away. I wanted to tell him not to, that Toshiba needed him to do something.

However it happened, he grew quiet, and I heard Toshiba speaking.

“Now Speedy, I need you to breathe deeply… can you do that for me?”

He said between low sobs, “I… I can try…”

“Good, breathe deep now…”

I heard Speedy drawing in air.

“Good. Now, Speedy,” he repeated carefully, “this is very important. What do you smell?”

He answered with rapidity that was entirely out of character, “I smell,” he sobbed lowly, “the little girl…”

I heard restrained excitement in Toshiba’s voice, “Only one more thing, Speedy… which way is she?”

“Over there, behind them hills.”

I felt myself accelerating, my eyes still shut.

“Hang on, bud,” Nobody whispered to me, “just hang on.”

I felt my limp feet drag over thick grass and upward over hills. It seemed like forever, in the darkness of myself, that we ran blindly like none had run before, chasing something that existed as far as we knew only in our minds.

I felt myself slipping…

I heard more speaking, but it was now indecipherable. I had slipped just too far, and I was still losing footing.

And then I caught the scent of lavender. I opened my eyes and was greeted with downpour of heavens tears from an unforgiving dark sky. I was laying on the ground; I was laying in the scent; I was laying in the flower fields.

“I…made…it….” I groaned.

Nobody and Toshiba were next to me, Toshiba on my chest trying his best to keep me warm while Nobody was kneeling and setting Speedy down. The tortoise watched with mournful curiosity and somberness toward an event he could not understand. Nobody smiled at me, eyes shining, and said “Yeah… yeah you did. We did.”

Toshiba looked at me with grief in his expression, “Well, at least there’s no old man here to take anything from you.”

“What?”

That didn’t make sense. I hadn’t told either of them about what I had seen after I had eaten the jelly bean and passed out.

“Toshiba, how did you…”

He nodded sadly, “I couldn’t let you die. I’d rather let you pass than let you die.”

Toshiba glanced to Nobody, who looked puzzle and said, “What?”

“Four of us are here now, and three of us are going away.”

“Toshiba,” Nobody said, imploring him to be sensible and stop with the nonsense, “he’s not going to make it. He’s suffering, for heaven’s sakes.”

“None of this… makes sense,” I said, resting my head on the grass. Again echoed the words, “Don’t lay down and die.”

“Stand me up!” I suddenly screamed.

Toshiba watched as Nobody lifted me to my feet and allowed me to put all of my weight on him. The downpour was simply incredible now. Everything was dark and drenched.

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said to them, looking at Speedy first, “that you have a heightened sense of smell…” I then looked at Toshiba, “Or that you can talk or read and translate ancient chinese military text.” Toshiba gave me a fond nod and a look of admiration and Speedy retracted into his hard, brown shell. And then they were both gone.

I watched in disbelief, “But… but…” I turned to Nobody, “I don’t understand.”

He smiled sadly, “I think I do.”

“So you’re all just made up.”

He grew increasingly quiet and watched me with a saddened gaze.

“Ok, it doesn’t make sense that you…”

He shook his head, stopping me short.

“But… huh? Why would Toshiba say that only one of us would be left?”

He bowed his head solemnly. My wounds no longer troubled me and I walked a distance by myself. I turned and I took a long glance at him, standing alone in that field. I understood perfectly.

A small amount of time passed in a somber fashion.

“What will you do,” I asked slowly, “now that you’ve reached the fields?”

“I’m sure I’ll get lost sooner or later and have to find my way back. “ He looked up from the ground, and I could see weariness in him, “Just because the mind forgets doesn’t mean the heart does. I knew I belonged here from the very start.” He waited a moment, and gave me an encouraging nod,” You remember, right?”

I smiled my agreement, “Yes, I do.”

“But, hey,” he said, “before you go, do you mind returning that?” He pointed at me.

I raised a brow, a little confused by what he could possibly want. When I looked down, I realized I was wearing a white jersey, with blue streaks and a large print number twelve in the middle.

“Wow… You know, I didn’t realize I was wearing this until I passed out, and even then I assumed I dreamed it up.”

We laughed together, and then he said, “Its been one hell of an adventure.”

I stopped to think about that. “It has. Look,” I offered, “I don’t know what’s going to happen to me but I promise to take care of Toshiba and Speedy.”

I took off his jersey and handed it to him.

“I have the feeling that you three are going to be just fine.”

I breathed in one last taste of lavender. I knew I would miss it terribly. I then raised one hand in farewell and caught the last mental snapshot of Nobody. He was standing alone in the field of flowers, the sun beating down boldly upon his shoulders. He kneeled down and plucked one, much like the one Toshiba had presented to us at the beginning of the journey. Slowly, a hand brought the tiny speck of pastel to his face, and he inhaled gracefully and with all of his earthly might. Lavender, sweet lavender.

Impulse to Life (Part II)

2009-11-30T01:37:00.000-08:00

Part I | Part III

2. Before

A mirage-like swelter rose off of the road and pressed upward against the sweat beaded against my forehead, stopped it from moving. Nothing could move, the harshness of he heat fastened everything into place like a punishing glue. Nothing was anything but oranges and reds and dull browns and dull skies. Nothing could swallow...

Half a plastic bottle's worth of warm water. My grip, sweat, sweaty grip. It was slowly evaporating out from underneath my fingers...

Mitch slapped my shoulder and thrust his arm forward, "The fuck is that?"

"Don't know," I said while trying to squint harder, "maybe a baby cow lying in the middle of the road."

"Bullshit it is," he answered with needless defiance. "Maybe it's dead."

"Looks like a giant oreo." I raised my shoulders slightly and continued my stubborn stagger against the pavement. Half a minute passed.

"Dude, we gotta take a break," Mitch said.

"Shut up," step after step after step.

"Dude, Henry... come on."

"Shut up. You make me sick, I'll kill you," I said while wandering onward along the two-lane road and chafing like a motherfucker.

"I can't fucking walk anymore!" came Mitch's straining voice, "I need to fuckin' sit , right now! I fuckin' mean it!"

My slow lurch forward would not cease. Could not cease. Might not start again.

"Fucking stop!"

"Look," I said while measuring my pace to nearly no pace at all, "it's hot as a motherfucker out here. If you sit out here, you're going to die." I peered ahead into the distance. "Up there. Next to that fucking cow thing is a tree. I'll drag your ass there if you want but no stoppin' here. Can't sit in this kinda sun, I'm tellin' you. Fuck! These shorts are sawing me in half!"

I reached down into my pants, into a mess of moisture, pubic hair and what I imagined to be blood at that point. I had to pick the fabric away from my tender flesh. I think it made everything hurt worse. All Mitch had to do was adjust his red ballcap and shift his greasy brown hair around. He spat on the ground wastefully and watched me make faces and noises.

We kept walking.

Eventually nearness and familiarity colored the details of the black and white spot laying ahead of us on the road, head in one lane, hind quarters in the other. Somberness struck us somewhere that hadn't been dried up yet.

"Is it alive?"

I didn't know. "I don't know."

"Fuckin' a'..."

Holy shit, I thought as I saw movement. "It's moving. It's... breathing..."

First I broadened my steps to a bounce to a run to a sprint and I was then towering over the labored form of the pup. I kneeled down, but when the road burnt my kneecaps through my pants, I opted instead to squat upon my ankles like Tom Joad or Pa or the other men as they drew their plan westward. "Hey little guy," soothed my whisper, "... easy, little guy..."

I sat the water bottle down next to his head. My fingers, I wished my fingers to be ice cubes as they stroked the fur on his neck. The little body whimpered and offered an enervated lick to my hand.

"How... how are ya sure it's not a girl?" Mitch panted as he caught up.
My hand then gently lifted a hind leg which exposed the testicles. "You think a bitch would have had the good sense to make a run for the tree shade?"
"Not the ones you run around with, man-whore."

"Helluva way to talk about your own mother."

He didn't like that. I put the leg back, "It's just a pup. no collar. Why aren't you wearing a collar, boy? Do we need to get you a collar? What is he, a border collie?"

Mitch nodded, "Yeah... what do we do here? Do we... have to kill it?"

I shook my head, "I'm not killing him."

"Henry, you gotta do what's humane here..."

"Yeah," I continued, "he must have been going for that shade over there." I took the water bottle and poured a bit of the remaining drops into my hand. I offered it to the pup's mouth, who could barely lap any up before it had dispersed completely.

"What the fuck Henry! What the fuck! We need that! What the fuck are you doing, dude!"

"Shut up!" I said. "You can have the rest. That was my half. Here."

I handed Mitch the water bottle and then I carefully scooped the pup away from the earth.

"What the fuck are you going to do, Henry? Lug around thirty pounds of dying dog while you're dying yourself? Put 'em down over here and get outta the sun already. He's gonna die anyways." Mitch took a swig of the water and turned toward the promising branches.

"Catch!" I called as I threw the truck keys over his head and at the trunk of the tree. "In case a car comes by, get 'er towed someplace nice."

"Asshole," I heard him mumble.

I started walking away.

"Hey... hey, where the fuck are you goin'?"

I pointed to the shape of a dot on the horizon.

"Stubborn fuck! You'll drop dead!"

I didn't answer.

"The dog ain't gonna fuckin' make it, he'll be dead in ten minutes tops! So fucking quit already!"

Mitch couldn't hear it but every time my feet pressed against hard earth there was a wavelike deafening of virile roar and I grew stronger.

"... Henry... don't fuckin' leave me man... Don't fucking leave me here, man!"

I called without looking backward, "Quit being a whiney bitch! Drink that water real slow while you wait... water is life, my friend. Like grandpa always said, get pecker deep in the wetness my son! Not sure whether he was talking about poon tang or booze though..."

I think I heard a whimper.

"Get there man!" I could hear tears in Mitch's voice. "I need you to fucking get there! I don't wanna fuckin' die, man... don't fuckin' leave me out here..."
The warmth and the weight of the pup made it feel as though the front of my shirt was made with wool. Eventually everything got dizzy. I began to wonder whether or not my feet were really moving.

Impulse to Life (Part I)

2009-11-16T19:40:00.000-08:00

Part II | Part III

1. Now

Helena had a nice ass but there was always the stipulation that the Great Used Car Salesman in the Sky would never let me take it off the lot without buying it. She was climbing through the driver’s side door where a shower of moonlight began to spill across the dashboard and the back of her jeans. I pinched her.

“Ow!” she squeaked while trying to leap away. Then she turned to me and said, “Don’t pinch my ass!”

“Ok,” I agreed while imagining the low low-mileage at my fingertips, “no ass peenching.”

“Don’t make fun of my English!”

I pinched her ass again.

“And don’t pinch my ass!” her accent resonated into the middle of me, the shitty parts, and made them light and beautiful and magically tense.

Silly girl knew the way, took her time crawling along to the passenger side and let her tiny butt thrust itself a bit higher than before, a bit more outward and vulnerable. I decided to leave it alone because I liked it that way, but my eyes drifted down the seat, and laying there, almost insidiously, was a black pair of thong underwear. Helena had crawled over it and didn’t seem to notice until her gaze traced mine. I could smell heat and sweaty pussy just by looking at it, which suddenly seemed to fume against every corner of the cab. Hopefully it would waft away. I slid behind the steering wheel, threw the underwear outside and closed the door. She looked at me expectantly.

“… What was that?”

“Clearly you’ve never seen eco-friendly dental floss before,” I said and absently flicked my middle finger at the pine-tree air freshener dangling from the rear-view mirror.

She started laughing, “Victoria‘s Secret does not sell dental floss!”

“That depends on what you floss with.” Or what you cut your teeth on.

Helena leaned forward and covered her mouth as if trying to hold the laughter in. “You think you can keep out of trouble by making me laugh?”

I started mouthing a one liner, stopped and finally just shrugged. We sat in the dark and on the bench seat and stared through the windshield for awhile.

“It’s going to be wet soon,” she said while gazing out the window.

“Pervert. Help, rape.” I began to call out.

She rolled her eyes but couldn’t suppress a smile entirely. I rolled my eyes too.

“If I was thirsty,” she started to say, “I would go out in a storm and drink up all the water.”

“I’d just drink from the tap,” I admitted.

“You will never die of thirst, at least.”

There was a residential wall out there. It had the makings of rain out there. I eyeballed her, tucked away against the passenger side door. The window pressed against her hair and was chilled where moisture longed to seep in- that sort of thing would just not be denied. Another moment passed and I looked at the empty middle seat between us. I looked at Helena again. I looked at the empty middle seat.

“You are like Prince Charming in your big white truck you know. It is like your big white horse,” she said while falling into a huge smile.

Like hell. I squinted, frowned, and pat my hand against the empty middle seat.

Helena watched, scrunched a thought in-between her eyebrows and then her lips drew tense. She had brown hair. She had olive skin. She had freckles on her nose and only her nose and they were like sprinkles of dark cinnamon. Eased into a smile again as though she had come to a conclusion, Helena wagged her index finger back and forth, “No, no, no. No sex.”

She looked at me. I looked at her. A wave of silence washed over us.

“Get the fuck out, Frenchie,” I demanded.

She tried her best to sharpen her features and give me a stern look but I still found the mirth in her expression. Amusement. When she could bear the tension no longer her laughter erupted into joyful sing-song. Everything began to flow like a wisp of flowery scent, the aroma of flowers that followed her into my truck and permeated the air and lifted my stomach into my throat and made my head dizzy. The scent of her. Her figure with its slenderness and orange-sized breasts made me suspicious or a different kind of drunk.

Helena slid her hip against mine and warmness flushed all over me, seemed to crawl into my spine, the back of my neck. She clicked the seatbelt, “Ok, you win.”

“No hard feelings, kid. I’m having a good season," and then I looked past a window full condensation into the mostly empty and scarcely lit parking lot that surrounded us. It was cold out there. I was suddenly very grateful to be separated from it.

“Henri,” Helena shined as she pulled me back and looked up into my eyes, “we always go out but you are never serious.”

“Henry, dear,” I corrected. “Say it with the ‘h’. In America even our consonants are incredibly violent.”

And she rested her gaze a moment before laughter overtook her. Helena could barely speak as she tried to say, “No! I was saying ornery!”

“It’s good that you can keep yourself entertained, I plan on getting a lot of paperwork done tonight."

Two of her fingers reached up and brushed stray strands of hair from her forehead. “Zut. Yeah right. Where are we going, ornery?”

“That’s a secret,” I said because I had no idea. I was way too horny to want to think about it anyways. I poked her in the ribs and she sprang forward. I quickly slid my arm around her waist and pulled her closer. A faint tremor came over me like a flash of light and was gone as suddenly as it came. I loved it and hated it and wondered if I had learned nothing.

A stare dug into me. I almost second guessed myself. While watching me, she smiled softly and said, “Mmmhmm.”

She continued, “… but you know no sex. Maybe not marriage-”

“-I’m an American, marriage is against my religion, I have rights-”

“-but some commitment is nice!”

“I always get the crazy ones.”

“You think I am crazy, do you?”

"Do you realize how crazy that question sounds?"

“Answer! You think I am crazy?”

“Well you were just talking about being committed."

“No! Tell why I am crazy?”

“You believe in useless things,” I said a little too fucking honestly.

“Is it that you want me to change just for you, Henri?” she asked me without moving away but boy was she prepared to.

“Yes, change completely,” I said as I tried to think of a way to keep her exactly the way she was and still nail her. I already knew it was going to be phenomenal. She wasn’t bat-shit crazy, just a little nuts, and it was nice to play to a different crowd. Also she was smarter than me and I liked the thought of taking her down a notch. Snooty bilingual bitch.

“I think you really like me, Henri.”

“I think we should just be friends,” I answered.

Her eyes grew wide. “Jerk! You do not! You want to get lucky!”

“Everyone wants to get lucky, so what?”

She stopped smiling. Something in French, I think she said ‘douchebag' but I didn't speak the language. Helena remained silent a moment and I tried not to flinch because I knew what was coming next... where the air gets a little thicker and the laughter dies.

She slowly said, "Henry, you are atheist-"

"-I am not."

"What?"

"I don't know. Nevermind."

"Oh yes, ok, ok. Agnostic. Why do you not follow the bible? Not even a little bit, like me? Be serious."

"It's probably not true, you know."

"I know that! It has a good message, Henri! Love, respect, friendship..."

"Cock-blocking..."

She frowned and turned away, "You think anything that is in front of what you want is a joke."

"I think you're too smart for your own good, you little shit," I lamented. Dumb women from here on out, I thought to myself. "I only want what being alive tells me to want."

She jabbed me a good one with a finger to the ribs, better than I could've gotten her, probably. "Answer my question!"

"Fuck! Fine. Following around two things at once seems like a pain in the ass, I guess. I already know what to do without readin' it out of some book about cock-blocking." Then I twisted the ignition to life. When the radio came on, Helena looked away for a long time...

"I don't understand. You are the most alive person I have ever met," she said with sweetness. Then she did her best to sing along to the American pop songs, which she knew by heart somehow. When she came upon a line that she did not know, she seemed to know it's equivalent in French, and so it was sung in French.

In between the lines that I could understand, I thought she sang that a man can value anything he wants. I imagined that I heard her singing wetness is life, that water is life.

Cat of Three Faces

2009-10-01T22:12:00.001-07:00

Cat of Three Faces

“-just the way you left it,” she said to me in the lowlight and from over her shoulder. I thumbed through the newspaper and I saw the caption of a picture that made me cringe.’ “That’s ridiculous,” I sighed in frustration. Mom turned off the sink and faced me while drying the last plate, “Don’t throw it out, I like to save them.”

I laid it down, vulnerable to wandering eyes. Where it fell I could appreciate that the kitchen table hadn’t changed, it remained small and intimate and flimsy like my quieter thoughts. Salt shaker, pepper mill, colorful napkins. My mother at work, I suppose… a pastel yellow tablecloth contrasted strangely with the violet hue of the room, of the window where the cool morning sun washed through. At nine in the morning she stood in front of me like she was ready for a day in a park, in a denim jacket and white patterned skirt in the design of sunflowers. She loved a sunflower, she was a sunflower. I favored her I was always told, with our fine features, auburn hair and almond eyes betraying a relation by blood.

“It’s ridiculous to say I’ve come back to mourn him,” I declared as I ran a hand over my head, “because he died before I even left, and I was there, and I found him. For Christ’s sake.”

His body stiff and rigid in his brown leather recliner, in his tucked away corner of the living room, in his suit, in his tie, in his socks. The image stayed with me- it was as though something in him just got up and left, and left that old body of his behind like unwanted furniture.

“Well, you know newspapers. And you know your father,” a clutch-phrase she used throughout my entire life. “At any rate you’re already a better man than he was. He would be proud.”

“We both know he wouldn’t be anything.”

Whatever the case, I still suspected that the old man remained ahead of me in a very important and mysterious way. Maybe it was only half a step, but it was very pivotal half step of which I could only fathom at the edges. “Why’d you marry that guy, anyways?” I said with the sort of dryness that would forever remain lost to Mom and, while taking a seat across from me, she answered with sincerity, “Well I loved him.” She leaned her elbows onto the table, “Still do, I guess. But hun, look at what they’re saying about you now… Right here on the back page, ‘establishing a remarkable reputation in light of his recently published seminal critique of modern analytic philosophy and meta-ethics...”

She scrunched her forehead, “I don’t understand though… was he Native American or something?” I shook my head and had to smile at my easy and non-threatened understanding of my mother, a calm in the storm of this world’s misunderstandings and unknowables. “No, ma, seminal- it’s a fifty cent word for important.” And of course, she brought her palm to her face and giggled, “I guess that’s why I teach second grade, huh?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, you were the best teacher I ever had.”

“Speaking of which,” she said while folding her hands over each other, a gesture that reminded me of an elegance I could not perceive through sporadic phone calls and thousands of miles between us, “Ms. Kimble wants to see you. In fact, she was supposed to be over here last night for the dinner... Maybe you ought to go next door and check on her sometime today? Well, if you’re not too jet lagged anyways. I kept thinking she was going to show up last night, later and later, but...” she shrugged and paused a moment. “Blossoming flowers need their space.”
“She’s in her late thirties, ma.”

“And I’m older than that, so watch it Charlie,” she said with a playful spark in her eyes. “Plus she hasn’t seen you since before you left for university, and you were always going on about how she inspired you, while forgetting to thank your poor mother.”

I rolled my eyes and conceded the reaction she wanted. “I only said that a handful of times, in high school. At every keynote I give now, every damn dinner I attend… I thank my lovely mother.” Mom giggled and stood up, “Language. Well, you were her favorite student, and she’s still always smiling when she talks about you. I thought it was wonderful that you had that inspirational relationship, even if it was only in high school.”

As her silhouette moved across the kitchen through the varying shades of violet morning and shadow, I entertained the idea that my mother was the form of goodness itself, and damned unknowable because of it. And then, in the back of my consciousness, how I had to understand my mother… how I understood my mother was through my father. He and the interactions he had with her made her graspable, made her of the earth. And I liked that, I thought. I liked that as the best gift my father ever gave me, as an elusive step that gracefully evaded the umbra of my mind.

That afternoon, I stepped over the threshold of the household doorway and into a very quiet small town. The front steps down to the sidewalk… When I was a child I asked the old man why we had to live there, why we couldn’t go back to the penthouse in the city and he said it’s laughable that we should think it makes a difference where we live without questioning the ideas of how we breathe smog or subsist on the minima. It’s an illusion of mind that we should believe to know anything about the existence of any kind of ‘difference’ at all and the limit of what an enlightened man would declare about life starts and ends in the resignation that it’s a funny motherfucker, aesthetically speaking. One of only a handful of occasions I remember actually interacting with him, though I can’t imagine why. I walked the sidewalk to the house next door and I heard wind chimes singing, but from where I couldn’t be sure and the tones refused order. The sun was dull and Midwestern and filled everywhere with a mellow brightness all at once. There was no track housing here, every house was foreign to the next, every house was aged but kept and the lawns were permitted only a healthy degree of overgrowth. Ms. Kimble’s house seemed benign enough, and I approached without hesitation.

It was the last place I pressed my lips against Amy’s, probably because she hit me afterwards and not with an effeminate slap but a righteous fist. It stung and the sting was deep, but her so called justified fury dissipated with great rapidity- Amy shaped herself into the posture of grace in the moments after I spit a little blood over the rail and on to the snow. “What the heck, Charlie?”

I rubbed my jaw and watched her adjust her beanie back over the tops of her ears, blond and blond tumbling every which way around her cheekbones. I knew those cheekbones well, we used to having staring contests in the middle of class. “I just figured… well, I just thought it would be ok. I mean, we already…”

Her blue eyes held sympathy for me and she said patiently, “…I still don’t understand why you would try to do that. Where did that come from? At what point in the conversation did you think that would be appropriate?”

I had to try. I had the bruise to prove it. No matter what my ensuing rationalities would protest, well… Out of reach, I guess, barely real, real at all my mind goes sketch thinking about it so I try not to and stomach knots and stupid girl, the old man would’ve handled her properly.

I’m having women trouble, pops. Adjusts his smoking jacket foolish boy they have an advantage and its unsporting to hate them for it. It’s just a silly little game with silly little rules and should you choose to partake out of boredom or insanity or fire in your loins there is ego to be won and lost and spilled upon the earth in the form of blood which is the game you’re really playing. I ask how I can win. Winning and losing belong to a fool’s distinction; ownership is something cute to chase.

I don’t like to think about it, but when I lay awake at night at the mercy of the malice in my mind, I get to the crux of it. Stray snowflakes, hand brushes strand of shiny hair out of her face, “Don’t call me again, Charlie. Don’t come over here again.” That’s Ms. Kimble’s porch to me anyway, uncovered and exposed.

I tapped my knuckles into the Maplewood door and nothing answered, not even noise. My hand went for the brass handle with an alarming degree of familiarity and entitlement. Rather than turning it, I immediately let go. It might have appeared that it burnt me, but more the opposite- it felt like nothing, nothing at all. With cautious fingertips, I pressed the edge ever so slightly. It sighed itself backwards without noise or friction. An open door, not all the way, just enough for me to enter into at an angle.

It took my eyes a moment to acclimate. Daylight tumbled through the house in a myriad of different shades, but there was something else that was strange to my vision… everything seemed to be more resolved, every line and detail more refined as though my sight had achieved a degree of alacrity unknown to me before. After a moment I was able to make sense of the living room, starting with a brown leather sofa, a coffee table, a small television, a fireplace- pictures on the mantle. A picture on the mantle. There was silence and sound. First there was silence, which was so heavy that it sat like warm cotton in my ears, and then through it sound, a light melody emanating softly from somewhere unseen. I refrained from calling out and quietly pressed the door closed.

A picture on the mantle. I walked across the room and picked it up. Filling the space between the thin silver frame was a very gray image of a beach in northern France. Ms. Kimble, with her soft brown hair and blue eyes, looked much the same as I remembered her; Amy looked about eleven. Ms. Kimble was behind her, holding her in an embrace and smiling at the camera. After the flash, Ms. Kimble puts the camera back in her sweater pocket and they keep walking the beach, gray sands under a gray heaven. Amy is wearing her hood to keep her ears warm. They walk the edges between beach and dark green grass, perpetually smiling and laughing and talking to each other. Occasionally they pass other walkers, local men who know the place, and Ms. Kimble’s gaze lingers on them just half a second longer than half a second while Amy chatters away brightly, without reserve. “Mom, what’s the ocean for, anyways? I mean, why’s it there?”

Ms. Kimble squints her twinkling eyes in playful contemplation and after a moment by god she has it. She leans down to look at Amy more directly, “It’s a big bathtub for you and for me!” She taps her index finger against Amy’s nose and they both start laughing. They flip off their shoes and run down the dunes, intent on getting ankle deep, where the coldness in the waves gives no thought to chilling their feet.
I put the picture back and began to drift my eyes back across the living room but stopped when they fell on the threshold to the kitchen. I went there. A conversation with Ms. Kimble I remembered having some evening a long time ago... I leaned against the tile countertop in the dim light and watched her cook across the way, my entire self tense and aware of the space between us- she faced the other direction and my eyes had free reign to wander over the body that virtually all of her male students lusted after. It seemed so perfect, so unreal to us that any teacher could look so damn good and teach so many damned subjects- everything from Freshman Health to World History to English, so clearly we determined her to be better than us and our school and our other teachers and ourselves, so in disbelief were we when we thought about her choosing to be here among her lessers.

“Charlie, thanks for coming over and helping to set up. I’m so glad we all get to have dinner tonight. And we’re going to talk about your paper, which was incredible. It’s going to be lovely.” She looked over her shoulder and smiled.

“Yeah…” I swallowed nervously. Mom had me help her move in, and I had been over a few times for odds and ends, but the once empty house next door was still strange to me. This new teacher was still strange to me. And so young…mom, who had taught nearly every grade between first and tenth, eventually took her under her wing and showed her the ins and outs of education in our county. They became quite close.
“You know, you’re incredibly bright,” she started. Thanks. “I mean it, Charlie. I think your insightfulness draws people to you.”

Only the grown-ups, a freshly Freshman me thought. I decided to let a quiet moment push her words away and change the subject.

“Ms. Kimble…” I managed my nerves long enough to slowly say, “… Did you read my story for English?”

“Mmmhmmm,” she drew out while stirring a sauce. “It was very nice, Charlie, but you went over the word limit. It was still very well done though.”

It wasn’t the same tone of voice she used to describe my essays. It was a tentative voice, a kid-glove voice. I never wrote her another story, I never had to. She didn’t like them anyways, I can’t think of anyone that ever did. First year of college it wasn’t uncommon to see various liner notes that read something like, “Indulgent. Get to the point. Do not follow. Is this necessary? See me.”

Or, as one professor put it years later, “It’s not that you’re bad at writing fiction, Charles, it’s just that you’re saving some of the genius for the rest of us. You can’t expect to be immediately good at everything.”

“Almost ready. Charlie, would you mind setting the table?” Ms. Kimble bent down to reach into a drawer full of utensils. I quickly tracked the curves of her sweater and the form of her jeans and I swear to god she saw me. She stopped bending, returned from the drawer with nothing and tended to the stove without a word.
The redness flushed from my memory and back into my cheeks. All four years of high school. More classes than I can easily remember. She was the first to sing “Genius,” and like any one hit wonder, everyone else knew the words and wanted to join in.
The kitchen was quiet now. No salt shakers, no pepper mills, no colorful napkins. Just clean countertops, that stove of course, and an open window from whence daytime and a breeze rolled in, both of which caressed the thin curtains with timidity. And then that melody- it was still playing somewhere. I followed it toward the hall, where clean tile met handsome carpeting beneath various pictures of Ms. Kimble, Amy, extended family and even one of me and mom. I paid them little more than a passing glance. Though at first I hesitated, the music compelled me up the stairs. I slid my hand along the polished banister and felt the slow stream of smoothness. When I reached the top, I stopped and looked down the empty hallway. Light shown through the other end and came to rest on the whitened walls. My eyes shifted sideways. The first door on the right was Ms. Kimble’s bedroom.

It took awhile but I eventually drew near that door. I turned my ear toward it and listened- there was nothing. The music was coming from further down the hall. I stood up straight and twisted the handle. A gentle push. When I looked inside I saw Allison naked with all fours spread atop the bed and me taking her from behind. My hands were trying to touch every part of her body at once though they clearly favored her breasts as a focal point. Her moans resonated in the throes of passion but the act for me was borne of consumption and that’s what I’d always remembered. In the darkness, as she slept against me softly and I felt the gentle breath in her chest rising and falling… I was sated. I had crafted a human being out of an angel.
It didn’t seem long after that I boarded a plane and flew east and stopped mentioning her at media outlets. I closed the bedroom door gently, but then, having not bothered to enter, it was never entirely open. The hallway now felt much cooler by comparison. Intrigued again, I continued further down with the melody guiding me to Amy’s door, which was only slightly ajar but all the invitation I needed.

Inside it was like a mausoleum and as though nothing had been touched since she left for school. Saving a bed, a bit of furniture and few posters or photographs, it was mostly empty and in order. On the dresser were various pictures, an old diary- locked- and a music box, a standard pink affair with Mother Goose, bonnet and all, spinning with her chicks in the middle. With gradual steps I approached the dresser and closed the thing midway through the melody, leaving the empty spaces in want of resolution, and then I sat down on the edge of the bed where the shadow of the blinds fell upon my back. It was there, as I lay there underneath those blankets, I remembered watching her stand and up pull her pink lace panties up around her shapely legs. “Amy, where are you going?”

She laughed and gave my hand a pat, “Charlie, I love being with you but I’ve got things I want to do today.”

I wanted more, though. “Come back here,” I lured, “and I’ll send you on your way in style.”

Amy smirked, “Well, with a line like that, all you need is a tacky moustache… but seriously, Charlie, I’ve got to get going here… We’ll do this later.”

But when later did come, it was never enough. Her phantasm returned to the fringes of my thoughts and I ran my hand over the space next to me on the bed. I couldn’t imagine leaving there, all I imagined was waiting there for her to return, and this prompted me to wonder what was laid to rest between those walls in the first place and whether or not one might reach up to grasp the hem of a seraphim’s garment, and irk it with enough force that the ethereal might be flung toward the realm of the earth and I might be flung into the heavens.

The Flower Fields (Part I)

2009-06-10T02:25:00.001-07:00

(Written in high school, published in on-campus magazine.)

I saw him standing on the beaten road alone, a solitary silhouette outlined against an ominous blue sky.

Birds of a darker variety darted systematically toward the corners of the world, exhaling bittersweet melodies in a most atmospheric salutation to my presence.

He was tall, broad, with wild short hair and dark eyes. Not that I could see them. He wasn’t pointing them at me.

“Hey,” I said pleadingly as I rapidly approached, a bit frantic in demeanor, “hey, where am I?”

He turned around and looked at me as if his mind were somewhere else altogether. A moment passed and his features took on a look of clarity.

“Excuse me,” I repeated impatiently, “can you help me?”

He waited a moment, and then replied tiredly, “What do you want?” His attention left me immediately after he spoke, and his eyes began to wander, searching for some phantom haunting the threshold where the road met the sky.

“I don’t know where I am. I’m lost.”

“Look around.” He said it very curtly.

I weighted my eyebrows toward him, but he offered no response. The words he spoke echoed in my mind with meaningful resonance. At my leisure, I accepted his suggestion.

I was standing on the same lonely road as he. The sky overhead was all encompassing and entirely blue, quilting the emerald world underneath. Either side of the road, to every horizon, were lush green hills, rolling lazily into one another under a gentle sun. Redundantly, the birds of a darker variety were singing.

“This is incredible,” I said wide eyed and my voice infused with awe.

He did not acknowledge my declaration whatsoever.

“Hey,” I said with a bit of flare and after I had composed myself, “are you gonna help me or wh-“

He suddenly grew very irritable, as if I were standing between him and something he desperately desired. “Look.” He turned to face me, his brown hair gently lifted by a light, passing breeze, perhaps the finger of the phantom he was searching for. He shut his eyes and inhaled deeply, as if catching a scent. He then spoke,“I don’t have any of the answers you’re looking for. Now you can come with me or stay here by yourself.”

I was about to rebuttle but he left no time; he began to walk. I opted to accompany him.

“Fine. Who are you and what exactly are you looking for?”

“The flower fields.”

“The flower fields? What the fuck are you talking about?” My patience had reached the breaking point and I was truly frustrated. Nothing made sense. My own existence didn’t make sense. I couldn’t remember anything before seeing his outline on the road.

But something seemed to be right about the situation. I couldn’t place it, but it was if I was supposed to be on that road at precisely that moment, as if fate had conspired toward it. I resigned to submit myself to the experience, at least for the time being.

He started walking, and he motioned for me to follow. So I did. Side by side we walked and he continued to trace the looming distance with his gaze.

After a few minutes of silence, save for our footfalls on hard earth, I said tentatively, “So… flower fields? Any ideas? What do we know?”

Speaking quelled the feeling of tension in my stomach.

I felt his disposition grow warmer as he realized his goal had become my own. “I don’t know much,” he said, “except for the fact that I want to be in them. I can’t explain it, but I need to lay down in the flower fields. You’ll understand too, when you get there.”

I nodded, appreciating the difference in reception. It made the air more bearable. “Ok, so how do we go about it?”

He shrugged in reply, smiled mysteriously and proceeded to say, “I guess we’re doing all we can.”

“What?” He was talking circles.

“Well, what more can we do? We’re in the same boat, I don’t know any more than you do about this.”

I felt myself spark a little and I asked, “Hey, what’s your name? Didn’t I ask you who you were?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” was his response, “and I have concluded that I don’t have a name. Or, if I do, I can’t remember it.”

I realized I was in the same dilemma. I couldn’t remember my own name.

“How strange. I can’t remember either. What the hell is going on here?” I echoed, feeling the frenzy working up again.

“Hey,” he said, catching my tone and stopping me before I went hysterical, “relax. How important is a name in the grand scheme of things, anyways?”

“How are you so at ease with any of this? Its important, knowing these things just... is important.”

Important, I wanted to argue, because people were supposed to have names and that was the way it was.

We both stopped walking. I looked around, trying to find some indication of where we were. The surrounding country looked somewhat different. A measure of progress.

“Fine,” I said, looking at the ground and spitting, “I’ll just call you Nobody.”

So Nobody and I began down that dirt road that stretched ahead for as far as the eye could see, surrounded by a sea of rolling green hills, and without a single flower in sight.

Pebbles moved in rhythm with our footfalls.

*****

He raised his head up from his desk. The smell of lavender was sweet, powerful and intoxicating. A slight pool of drool rested tranquilly on his exam, which was still incomplete. It had become hard to focus.

The walls were tan. The windows were sparse. The clock was ticking above the whiteboard.

Outside, he could hear birds chirping. He could see the sun shining.

He took the jersey off his shoulders and set it on the corner of his desk. He hadn’t been wearing it, it had just been returned to him. He gave his most characteristic half smile to the girl who was sitting across the room and tossing her golden brown hair. The jersey was white, with blue traces and a large print number ‘12’ in the middle. It was the source of the aroma in this instance, be he could swear he had detected it a million times before, and those experiences were just out of the reach of his memory, as if they had transpired in a past life in.

He brought his mind into application, greatly resenting the task at hand and the oddly colored orange paper it was presented on, but still he pushed through. Poetry, he imagined, would be more enjoyable if it wasn’t followed by an essay for which he would probably receive low marks. Besides, his mind was preoccupied in a more aesthetic sense.

He double checked all of the pages to be sure they had been properly entitled with their content and his name. In a slightly illegible hand he scribed “J.M.” in every upper right corner.

******

As we walked, dust gently rolled off the road like mist over a cold bay. In the distance, I spotted just the smallest little dot of black moving left to right and back again. Nobody, or I should say my companion, lacked the presence of mind to notice it. He, once again, was staring off someplace elsewhere, straining his eyes to see farther.

Time passed as distance did and the tiny dot grew more descript. It was a kitten, of all things. It was playing on the road, and batting at a speck of purple pastel.

A flower.

“Here, kitty, kitty,” I called with honey in my voice, eyeing the flower as if I had never seen one before.

I understood the fickle nature of cats, and I figured it would have been a long shot even if the thing had known me its entire life. However, to my surprise, after what sounded like a miniscule belch it came trotting toward me.

I kneeled down and outstretched my hand. Nobody had also stopped, and was surveying the surrounding fields. He had not noticed the flower in the kitten’s mouth.

It dropped the thing just out of my reach, and looked up at me with its reflective, clever eyes. I started to inch forward, careful not to startle it…

“What?”

I fell backward.

“Well, what do you want?”

“Holy shit!” I began a back pedal on my elbows, feeling the road wreak havoc on them I as frantically accelerated backward.

Nobody looked over at me on the ground, and then to the kitten, and finally to the flower, which prompted a fire in his eyes. Without tact, he stepped forward.

“That purple flower… where did you get it?” he demanded sternly.

The kitten nimbly set me aside for a moment and looked at Nobody. “What, this?” It batted at the thing with a fuzzy paw, obviously slightly confused, “You can have this.”

“No, no, no,” Nobody answered, “where did you get it?”

I said incredulously and as if I were the only sane creation on this plane of existence, “The fucking thing is talking!”

“Shut up!” they both said in unison. Nobody said fiercely, “Well?”

The kitten sat down, as if it were about to recite a long story. “It came to me on a breeze blowing from…” he pointed to his right, or our left, “…over there.”

Immediately, Nobody seized the flower and looked in the indicated direction. He brought it to his nose and inhaled, and then outstretched it to me. After all, I was still on the ground.

“Doesn’t it smell like…”

“Lavender?”

The kitten nodded in agreement, “That’s precisely what I thought. I wonder where it came from?”

I rounded on Nobody, “How are you ok with this? The thing is talking! Its more articulate than either of us! It’s a fucking cat!”

He narrowed his eyes in reaction, “All I care about is the flower fields. I’m willing to overlook everything else. You need to relax and just let things be.”

The kitten nodded, “He’s right, you know. Master Sun said…”

I shook my head and sighed in disbelief. This was getting ridiculous. I said through a deep breath, “You can read, too.”

He replied affirmatively, “Indeed…”, he then cautiously and quietly added, “and in its original language, what’s more.” Round eyes looked at me apologetically.

“Where did you come from, then? I assume you are a… boy kitten?”

He rolled his eyes and spoke with condensation, just enough to be charming and not offensive. “Yes, I am a ‘boy kitten’.” He glanced over his shoulder, “And I came from that way, in the same sense,” he raised a paw toward us, “that you came from that way.”

“Great, I’m in the middle of nowhere with Nobody and his pet.”

“I have a name, you know,” the kitten interceded. “And I have never seen that man before in my life.”

“Well, that makes one of us,” I answered bitterly to the first statement.

He turned away and began bathing himself disinterestedly.

“Wait,” I sighed, “I’m sorry. What is your name?”

“I am Toshiba.”

“Toshiba…?” I glanced toward Nobody, wondering what he had discerned from the entire transaction.

He was still looking to the direction from which the breeze had carried the flower.

***

Half time in the locker room and number twelve’s heart was beating like a war drum. He could feel it thumping beneath his shoulder pads and white jersey.

But time must have faltered because now he was kneeling on the field, after the battle is hard fought and lost. Two knees were down, and the lights were shining on him. It was cold out, but he couldn’t feel it. He was praying under those lights and on that fifty yard line, in a way truly unique to his character- somber, earnest and rare in occurrence.

He felt a touch and was brought back to earth. Someone was hugging him. “Jeff, you’re fun.” Said lightly and with giggles. A girlfriend of one of the other players. He couldn’t help but notice the sharp contrast in their personalities as it presented itself in that scenario.

“Thanks,” is all he could think to say. The smell of lavender was fading, and fading fast.

In the end zone sat another player. He glanced over at him, situated under the goal post.

“What it is, Mo?”

“Ah wutsup. What it is, Ro?” he answers.

He smiled at his good friend, number four, his brother in arms.

“I ain’t leavin’, man!” said Ro smiling without his usual swagger- there was sadness, a gravity to his expression..

“I… I know,” said Mo. After a moment, he said with clarity all his own “Come on, RJ, its time to go.”

Deeper truth rang like a bell in the air between them, for only a moment.

He pulled his brother up, they hugged and proceeded to walk to the middle of the field.

“J-Mo!” From across the hash mark, another brother called. They met somewhere in the middle. Number thirty three. He had to bend down to hug this one, pads and all.

“I can’t believe this is it,” number thirty three said.

“I know, bro…” is all twelve could think of to say in return. Still water runs deep.

“Night train,” he says to a player, number seven, standing quietly to his right, hugging him as well, “brother, teammate, friend.”

Silence.

He walks to and hugs number six, his wounded brother, injured from a previous battle. The crutches he was standing on had absorbed the cold from the night.. There were no words spoken, simply a bond in itself- echoed the words of Euripedes…

“When a good man is suffering, all who would be called good must suffer with him.”

“Hey man,” is all he could hear as he hugged one of his friends who had made her way from the stands. She was toting a number four jersey and a pair of clever eyes that reflected the gravity of what had just taken place.

He was near tears when he said to her with a stiff upper lip, “Its just the way it goes…” Composure came so easily, and he doubted whether or not anyone had registered him off balance, if only for a passing moment. He had to believe God would take care of his creatures; he had believed it for so long before, anyways, those hot summer practices when he felt his body could go no longer, but somehow it had, often due in part to a well placed breeze passing by. He would not smear his warpaint with his tears.

Finally, the comrades are done. Few words were exchanged enpassant with coaches. The field was empty, the lights were shining and he was alone. He made damn sure he would be the last one off, in the same way he made damn sure he was the last one to call out the post-battle team break. He recognized the significance of the little game called football and how it had moved him, and he knew that, at last, his time had come. He stared at that empty field for what seemed like eternity but for what definitely was not. The lights began to shut off.

“J-Mo!” called number thirty three from behind the chain link fence that separated the stadium from the rest of the school.

Number four, standing next to him, said as well, “Come on Jeff,” while waving him on.

He felt the essence of life was speaking through two of the friends he would consider to be of the closest variety. He would answer their call, and walk with them not only to the locker room, but to the next stage of being a man- life after varsity football. But first, he would turn around and watch for a moment, the haunting image forever burned into the lens of his mind’s eye; the infamous game lights shutting off for him one last time, the haunting silhouette of a stat girl running across the field to the sidelines to retrieve her clipboard, like a wild phantasm drifting through an ethereal plane.

There was only the faintest trace of sweet lavender in the cold air now.

(To be continued...)

Silent John and You

2009-05-15T23:09:00.000-07:00

"You and me are different and then the same. We're not like them- we're outside the worlds of men. In that we are both different, find comfort in you being different with me. Being outside with me. Because here are two sides to the coin- those who have sat because they know fatigue or inability, and those who tumbled over the grassy knoll and down to the river of insight, rested our faces in cool wonder and hid our scrapes with cynicism. As we writhe in the sting, relief is only to be found in grace and composure. Are you afraid? Are you upset to know that the ultimate leap of faith is to be found in being yourself, existing as yourself, not reducing yourself to an easily grasped denominator? Have you the courage to be an anomaly to the minds of the masses and beloved in the heart of the virtuous minority?"

Silent John

2009-05-09T02:37:00.000-07:00

"Ok, it's going to start with Oedipus, none of that pre-fabricated high falutin' essay bullshit- page 138; 'The genuine tragic hero sacrifices himself and everything he has for the universal.. he is revealed..."

In a time that's so remote as to be called history's dream, the king of Thebes paced the city streets as a plague decayed to its innards- smoke burned in the distance and a waning, oppressive redburst sunset draped over the sky, both ominous and hinting at the descent of darkness. Oedipus grasped his hands to his hair when he found his thoughts laden with the inexplicable amount of dread that had come to envelope cognition. Muscles tightened and he leaned against a grayed wall and his features became something sharp and fierce. The porous stone that bore his heroic figure upward in that sense began to understand him- he could express to the wall the amount of weight that constituted the angst of his being.

"Oh, and Abraham raised the knife..."

The rate at which Murphy's slender fingers turned pages was directly proportional to how quickly his chattering teeth assaulted his defeated fingernails, a symphony of nervous tics and a production of comedy. The computer screen was beginning to redden his eyes and tighten the muscles of his neck. In the work, as a guide, his slightly crooked nose slowly traced the lines of faded ink as fast as sunken eyes could read them. The TV blared intrusively from across the dark living room and reflected in menacing angles across the hardwood floor.

"What do I need... we could use that one about the universal- no, just spin bullshit, with half of the essays he has to read, he wouldn't be able to tell the difference.... No, don't bullshit him, its him. Wait, bullshit him, he's a teacher. Besides, they kind of like it, one less paper to take seriously. But is it serious? I need to resist grandiose conclusions to my essays, they're too cliche and I do them a lot. Damn I'm cliche. There's a lot of nudity on TV these days. I wonder if Sabine will call. Or put out. That's- just find a random quote now. And make it good- it would be extremely validating to my ego if it were good. But I don't like that. Siddartha didn't subscribe to ego and he knew stuff. Not like me. I ate too much and I'm going to be overweight by the time I'm 30. Nobody likes a fat ass. It's unethical to have a fat ass. That's not true. Hedonism... a pleasure giving fat ass... Ok, here, this... this is important... page 134..."

Slightly unsure of himself, Murphy's numbly gnawed fingers felt out a line; "He is silent, so ethics condemned him. It says: 'You must acknowledge the universal, and you do that by speaking, and you dare not take pity on the universal.'"

"But Abraham can't explain himself to Sarah, at least not without sounding insane," Professor Johnson loomed into Murphy's imagination, a tall figure with an extended arm which he outstretched for the purpose of hitting his pupils over the head, lest they be out of reach of his yard stick- "The yard stick of knowledge, I assure you," Professor Johnson affirmed with wry warmth and a busy wrist. Metallic sunshine found itself pouring in through the grimy windows, accompanied by a temperate breeze that washed the classroom corners of stagnant body odor. And more memories, mostly of listening, but of the rare occasion of partaking came to mind; "Whoa, easy there Eric. Are these guys saying what you're trying to say, James?"

"No." 'Fuck no!' he thought as he snapped back into reality and swallowed the deeply pathetic nature of trying and coming up short and the futility of every thinking thing everywhere ("No one else breathes my crazy."). As he sat in front of the dim glow of technology, Murphy grasped his brown, spryly locks and leaned against a wall and grew tense and sharpened his features. "What is it to be a tragic hero? I mean, I know what a tragic hero is, he's the guy that appeals to the universal. The hell does that mean again, where's the book? The universal, the demonstrate-able... I can't...I can't fucking write this. I can't. How the fuck does he want this to be answered, how is this an essay? I have to do this. I'm going to do this. I'm going to conquer. Fuck." Murphy turned to page 138.

"I was wondering if you were going to call."

He had to admire Sabine's patience and composure as demonstrated in her voice, "Well, you already know I'm not very happy with you, James. You don't seem to respect me and lack fidelity, to say the least."

"Well I'm really in a mess." Murphy rubbed his index finger back and forth over the surface of the computer desk. "I've practically lifted the entire literary technique behind Kierkegaard's 'Speech in Praise of Abraham.' I don't have any idea what the fuck I'm doing. I need you now and I've always needed you and you know that."
"Goodbye, James Murphy."

"Sabine, I love you."

Silence.

"I knew you were going to say..." Murphy heard a heavy swallow, "I'm going to help you, you know, even though I think you tell lies." As an after thought..."And I love you too, you know."

"Which proves my theory that Swiss women love me."

"Shut up. Now pick up 'Fear and Trembling.'"

Ethics condemned Abraham for not demonstrating the reasons for what he was doing because the very nature of ethics is this very demonstration itself. In essence, there is no rationality, this has been suspended. On page 103 Kierkegaard writes, "The tragic hero renounces himself in order to express the universal; the knight of faith renounces the universal in order to be the particular." By not demonstrating his reasons, Abraham had indeed renounced the universal and established himself as the knight of faith- and in the above quote we see that the tragic hero is not a knight of faith because he can and does express the universal, his reasons to be understood- and in doing so prompts Kierkegaard to write on page 94,"Great indeed it is when the poet presents his tragic hero for popular admiration and dares to say; 'Weep for him, for he deserves it'." Surely there would be no sense of 'deserve' if there were no demonstrated reasons to be deserving. The knight of faith becomes a step beyond the tragic hero, who exists upon an ethical level- the tragic hero resigns himself to rationality and continues to reason further on a demonstrated basis, while the knight of faith recognizes the resignation in himself but irrationally maintains his beliefs.

When the deed was finished, blood ushered to the ground and he lay doubled over within the matter of himself. Oedipus was blind and all of Greece could mourn him in his entirety. Abraham sheathed the knife.

"Ok, Beenie, thanks." Softly spoken into the phone, his eyes half shut.
"Wait," she interjected- he could almost see the hesitance in the way her flaxen hair would flow when her body language spoke interjection. "Before you go. I want to know what you make of all this, James. I mean... I've given you so much, no?"

"You don't have to be so nice to me, you know."

"I know. I like it." Firm demand resounded, "Now answer the question."

"Fine." Murphy could feel the tension radiating from the core of her. Sabine's breath suspended. What she wanted- at exactly that moment, all of the earth could pivot any given direction. "He was onto something but he was wrong."

Sabine pressed eagerly, her lips drew to the receiver," Finally, a straight answer out of you! I've done it. Go on..."

"That's all I got, Sabine. I need to go to bed."

The line went quiet for a moment. Murphy detected feminine finality with a Swiss accent. "... Are you sure?"

"Yes. Goodnight."

He pulled away the receiver and let an empty dial tone resonate into the early morning hours. Murphy imagined what Sabine was doing. Sabine was crying in the darkness, feeling used, cheap, abandoned, neglected, unfulfilled- and trapped. He knew she would come back, but the reasons remained as illuminated as the umbra of a shadow. Alone, Murphy didn't know if there was a God to love either of them or if there was a method to the entire madness of existing... but he had the faintest inkling, a timid suspicion residing within his awareness' blind spot, of something fantastic- that his mode of being or thinking or living or seeing, try as he might to demonstrate them, remained incomprehensible to the rest of the world.

The Grave Keeper Pt. 1

2008-11-07T20:53:00.000-08:00

(Written in high school.)

Mortley Morningside was making the night rounds. It was quite possible to say that night rounds had become the very essence of his life; Mortley had not seen the sun in so long that he had began to doubt it ever existed- a suspicion that aspired its first breath sometime during the last year. Over one shoulder he had rested a shovel, and as he walked his irregular steps resounded in the night, to which a full moon bare witness.
Mortley laughed as a child would, in spite of the quiet, shattering the sleeping silence of the world and staring off past the black-spiked gate into the dreaming fields beyond.
Cryptically, his voice resounded in the gentle winds of darkness, “Haha, moon looks bigger than the world…”
Night rounds (or what he privately called “nice walks”) simply consisted of a stroll around the cemetery to ensure that the dead maintained their good rest in the good earth, a direct stipulation as listed in the job requirements of being the village grave-keeper. Mortley knew better than to buy stock in such silly superstition. He had been a grave-keeper most of his nature life, which was relatively progressed at this point, and the dead had always stayed perpetually inanimate and conversationally reserved.
As he was finishing the rounds, his face slowly tightened to a twisted smile as he, by chance, noticed a smeared reflection of a monster, which was glaring at him in the moonlight. Not daunted in the least, he moved toward it and kneeled down to the cold, green earth. A puddle of filth, nestled behind the bulk of the graves, produced his likeness almost as a silvery, liquid mirror would. His face was as enormously disfigured, as well as his body- parts out of alignment and flesh protruding in bulk at old angles, the entire frame hunched over. Mortley, however, needed no reminder of his stature, and instead he reached past the puddle and into the darkness of a thorny shrub. In his grimey, retreating grip was a crumpled apple, and after making the effort of returning to his feet, he took a bite and proceeded to walk toward his hut, which was situated in the far back corner of the graveyard.
It hadn’t always been that way. At one time, his hut had sat on the outside of the facility. He had entertained the notion that the graveyard was strictly for the dead, and that he’d do well to keep out of it as much as position allowed. This, however, was not to last, as children from the village would often make the few minutes journey at night to ridicule him as he worked, to deface his home and his person. He would ignore them, work around them even, but this only provided for the adverse effect. Suffice to say, when the children burnt the hut down, men from the village rushed to the ashes carrying buckets of water to see if charred lumber would float. They stood conversing, allowing their young to run home, with Mortley watching in wonderous horror, too timid to reprimand even a child.
This one room hut was warm and welcoming- considerably nicer than his last hut. It was unfortunate, to his mind, that the incident had brought attention upon himself. The village had taken pity on him for his loss of home and rebuilt him a new one of the finest quality. He had cared greatly for it, too. Mortley’s hut was the most well kept building in the region. The new hut had pulled him center stage, and village women took pity on him not having a garden and left supper at the cemetery gates almost every night for two weeks. The village blacksmith took pity on him for not having a horse, and left him a small pony, tied to the black rails. Once, only once, Mortley had taken sick and been unable to trim the hedges, and so the mayor took pity on him and left him a sack of money. They posted a sentinel in the distance, in the cover of the darkness, to see if he would concede to their offerings, but all reports were in the negative. It was all to their unreserved horror when, at village meeting one night, tall and lanky Farmer Franson reported that, while coming into town to market his crops, he had witnessed the scene with his very own two eyes. The scent of the offered meals had attracted several wolves, which in turn had feasted upon the pony and had met their demise at the warmer end of Farmer Franson’s noble rifle. He then concluded with the statement that the money was unaccounted for, and that he had given up farming to become an artist.
No further attempts to aid Mortley were made.
The village antics were no concern of Mortley’s, anyhow. His realm was fence to fence to fence to gate. As he entered the enclave of his hut, he breathed easier. The sun would be rising soon, and he could get some rest. Against a wall of the one room building was a desk of sorts. On its top rested a bottle of brandy, a glass, a small portrait, and an itinerary.
He poured himself a helping of brandy and collected the picture and the paperwork. He then hobbled over to the fireplace and claimed a seat in the comfy confines of his warm arm chair, resting his brandy on a well positioned end table.
“Work, work, work,” he chortled, gazing at tomorrow’s schedule.
He sighed when he saw the familiar words ‘evening service’. The thought of “livey’s” in his graveyard brought him no comfort.
“Hassle me,” he groaned with reproach and threat.
His eyes lit up, however, as he proceeded to read the rest of the parchment. Being nearly illiterate, most of its content was lost in translation to the gravekeeper, but, like a small child, he sounded out the following:

“… survived by loving family (so and so and who and who)…
and the dearly beloved Mr. Perry Darlington, to whom she was betrothed…”

“Betrothed!” He said aloud, and with much ecstasy, kicking his booted, misshapen feet in delight.
A smile stretched upon all the palette of his face. He lifted his glass and drank happily.
Mortley enjoyed this part of the job. Lovers put on the best show. The evening services were events he would often ignore, and instead he would wait for the mayor to tap on his hut door when they were concluded. Never the case with lovers. He would watch with a sort of glorified satisfaction as they performed, weeping uncontrollably and doing something insane like jumping into the earth with the coffin. Mortley wanted to tell those kinds of people two things; first, that he had dug the hole himself (he wanted to know if they enjoyed their time in it, wanted to promise to provide them with one just like it when their time came) and second, that the departed had probably already began to decompose and most assuredly would not hear the implorations of the living world ever again, what with the ears having been chewed into gooey stubs by worms.
“Christmas,” he reflected solemnly, quietly and with glee.
He sat the itinerary aside and could not placate the feeling of anticipation within himself. He took another sip of brandy, and looked at the portrait.
A beautiful woman with auburn hair and deep brown eyes stared back at him. She, at one point, was the village beauty, but to him she was just “Mum.” Now she was buried deep in the earth, and to Mortely’s bitter lamentations, he had not been given the honor himself.
Mortley had her brown eyes (not literally), her portrait, and one of her earrings, triangular and made of diamond, likely a gift from a suitor. That was all.
She had nurtured and cared for him like no other. Needless to say, the entire village was surprised when beauty gave birth to the beast, but it did not restrain her love for her child in the slightest capacity. She never called him monster, and made up pleasant fairytales when he asked why he was not allowed to be schooled with the other children.
Then, one unceremonious day while she was on excursion, Mortley received a lovely, decorated letter through the post, garnished with flowers and pastels of all colors, as well as one earring..
The then-mayor took custody of the hideous boy and put him to work in the graveyard.
“… What’s that smell?” he once asked.
“Decomposing human flesh. There’s a good lad, mind your shovel and you’ll be fine.”
Was it thirty or forty years ago? Mortley couldn’t remember. He didn’t really care, for that matter. He’d work the graveyard gladly, and drink himself into a pleasant sleep, to dream of exhuming his mother from her grave and then reburying her in his own graveyard, with his own bare hands.

The Modes

2008-10-22T19:00:00.001-07:00

What about when you’re left empty handed?

To really taste defeat is to lose the lesson, I’m told- but what about those times when you’re left holding nothing but a big bundle of hurt, across which my name is inked in big bold letters? How meaningless, how halfhearted are the maxims that you… that is, that I whisper toward my own ears when the anguish comes like a morning rain?

And I was left standing as I sunk in the chair with my head perched upon my palms, finding no relieve from her brown eyed pair or heavy heart felt songs. “To touch me is to be me,” she said and I’d just as soon get a long to the final fade, but she grabbed my hand to stay.

The other time, when I was looking in the mirror and I wiped away the smoke… finding identity in every angle of me- but something wasn’t there and I might have walked around as nothing but a big black hole. There were other names for me, sometimes, that borrowed much from the word ‘hole’, but if I’d ever thought I had a chance, you wouldn’t have let her go. You are a dirty room and unfolded laundry and you are unprepared for life and class, but she is not, and you cannot have her. You can always have me.

Don’t mistake it for love, it’s not about love. It’s being loved and wondering who could love us and why. Don’t they know I forget to vacuum? Don’t they know that you get so mixed up in my head sometimes and stumble my way through morally dark rooms? Don’t tell her those things and maybe she’ll come back. Tell her I’m you and she’s gone.

I relaxed my lips when she kissed my forehead and pet my hand before she left. Before she left, she melodied into my ear, “Lace undergarments fall apart faster than pages.”

“I love you,” you said, “and I want to be you.”

Quick bit about Fall

2008-10-22T18:38:00.000-07:00

Took maybe 15 minutes to get back into the swing of things and write a bit about Fall, my favorite time of year.

"Whenever I see crinkled leaves floating down toward cold earth my mind immediately moves to evoke other more rampant imagery, such as the red inferno of a wild fire or moonlit nights under sheaths of icy rain because the first thing does nothing for me and the second is as easy as fast food or the ugly twin sister. It's my muse to blame, and she won't listen to my pleas of acknowledgment or pay heed to my acts of insolence.

Granted, I've raised my hand to her several times- I've beaten her and made her ugly when no other words would flow like heaven stream onto cheap reams of poor binder paper, but for the love of god, she won't take to Fall. Clearly bustling with vivid and hurried imagery, Fall is an auspicious hunting ground for the poetic soul and this is a proven fact- unless, of course, the soul in question belongs to me, in which case a lackluster response of blank stare is all that is granted. My muse never did take to Fall.

But I did indulge to seduce myself within swirls of the browns, blacks and oranges, and on a nightly basis as I walk my dog through empty streets and cold air. It feels good and it feels fresh but it feels empty. Fall could never love me waxing poetic. She's too pristine and out of reach; she does not care that I want her on paper, simply brushes the lushness of her satin hair against my cheek and dances away behind that curiously yellow moon, to the enigmatic phantom that could ever do her justice."

You got a favorite?

Pointing Out the Absurdities

2008-05-18T02:42:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone. I'm sorry that it's been awhile. I've got something to make up for that, though. The following is a sort of stylized non-fiction. I wrote this in High School and to me, the technique is terrible but I think you'll agree there's something redemptive about it. Go ahead, have a crack at my real life, then we'll get back to literature. In a sense, this is more like a 'blog' than anything I've ever posted. Therefore, consider this my 'bubblegum piece'. I hope you enjoy it.

Pointing Out the Absurdities

I was straightening my patterned red tie in the cold reflection of a rectangular mirror. Wavy brown hair rested in sway and a neutral thin face watched my slender fingers nimbly work with disinterest. The cluttered restaurant was somewhat occupied but no fresh customers had shown up within the last half hour or so- the still air was stagnant and the early evening was dead. I tied a half Windsor knot, gazed deeply into two fatigued brown eyes, and headed to the front entrance.

I moved past several red and white striped tables, roof mounted televisions, messy children and body filled booths. Dull silverware scraped cheap plates and ice fell to the bottom of empty tumblers in rhythm with inarticulate human voices.

When I arrived at the front, another host had just clocked in. His name was Martin and he was short, built timidly and I doubt anyone would have considered him good looking. He'd tell 'yo momma' jokes incessantly and go A.W.O.L. for twenty minutes at a time, text messaging on his cell phone in the track-lit confines of the men's room. He was Mexican, had a funny last name and he needed a shave.

I approached without a word, in my usual stoic manner, looking down at the hosts' podium, which included a much revised labor card and a color-coded seating chart. Everything seemed to be in order, but out of the corner of a wandering eye I caught something that was a bit… 'off'.

"The blue genie?" I said flatly.

"Yeah!" he said, "That's my nickname. The blue genie."

He had sufficiently scribbled out his name on the labor card and replaced it with "The Blue Genie." He had done it in every form of seriousness. He turned sideways to face me in a fully open position, and I could see the knot in his tie was awry.

Both of us looked like professional penguins, with our white shirts, black pants and red ties.

I looked at him with a neutral expression. The last golden rays of lingering sunlight were spilling through the windows and illuminated the darkness under his green eyes.

He was older than I was, but that never seemed to be the case.

Finally, I asked,"Why?"

Of course, he gave me the roundabout ("Take a guess!" "No idea." "C'mon, just one guess. ").

I humored him when I said flatly, "You hold your breath and grant wishes."

"No," he said, giving himself a sophisticated chuckle, as if delightedly laughing at a joke only he understood. "Close, though." I carelessly shrugged, turning back to the podium to check rotation.

He offered an explanation eagerly and with velocity, as if the opportunity were fleeting, "My friend named me it. Blue is just my color, always has been. It's my favorite color," he stressed again, "and they call me genie 'cause I make all the ladies' wishes come true."

I didn't laugh. At least, not on the outside.

Instead, I went about my business, preparing to leave. I swept the entire restaurant, cleaned the men's room, gathered up all the menus, the whole shebang.

When I was finished, I approached the manager, who was sitting at a table next to the bar with some waitresses who were experiencing the lull of clientele. She wasn't much older than I was, less than ten years for sure, and she always kind of treated me like a little brother, helping me with things like adjusting my tie or collar. I was actually the youngest person working in the restaurant, at 17 years old.

"Maggie, can I go home?" I was always as straightforward as possible.

She tossed her dark hair aside, and gave me a friendly, tired look that was comparable in itself to the receding day. "Depends. I kind of thought about keeping you here. You entertain me."

I nodded patiently just one time. It was an absurd thought, keeping someone on the clock for entertainment value. But it wasn't the most absurd thing I'd heard all day.

"Maggie," I said, "Martin wants us to call him 'The Blue Genie'."

"What?"

I reiterated my statement and clarified it, providing all the information I had. She erupted into a bout of laughter. In fact, everyone around her erupted into a bout of laughter, a terrific domino effect.

She said after the waves of laughter had subsided, "Go get him. Bring 'em here."

I walked the length of the bar, through dwindling puddles of fading sunlight, to the front door.

"Excuse me, Martin. Maggie would like a word with you."

He looked up from behind the valued concealment of the podium. "What did I do now?" He began to slowly walk the warm path I had surrealistically traced moments before. I followed behind him without another word, towering over him and providing an odd comparison. He stopped in front of her in full display.

"Hey Martin, what's your nickname?" Her eyes grew wide, eager, expectant.

"What?"

"The blue… what?"

He instantly caught on, and I could see the light of understanding illuminate in his normally dull features. "What?" His withering voice was full of childish denial. "I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"I mean, I forget." He turned to me, "Is that why you brought me back here, to make fun of me?"

"Hey, if you want a nickname, people have to know it."

"Your mom needs to know it."

I sighed.

Maggie leaned across the polished bar and explained it to the bartender, a fit man with glasses and a beard, who consequently rang a dark bell situated from the ceiling one time and yelled, "The Blue Genie!" between fits of "Glorious!" laughter, as if providing a ceremonial toast. A few embittered regulars within earshot began to laugh as well.

I looked back at Martin. His eyes were cast downward.

He returned quietly to the front door. A preoccupied waitress was sitting next to Maggie. I had failed to acknowledge her, which was strange because we were pretty good friends. She was dark skinned and very into Wicca Witchcraft and New Age.

"Hey Anna," I asked habitually, "how's my aura?"

"Not too good today, babe." She replied sagely but with a secretive smile. She, too, had been laughing.

"I guess I better go home and fix it." I was somewhat serious. I hadn't expected that answer.

"Don't worry, babe, everyone's does bad once in awhile. Maybe you're just tired."

I felt a kind of metaphysical dirt upon myself as she said that. It was as if she had just pointed it out and it had been there for some time. I took a moment of earnestness to reflect, just for a second or two, upon absurd things such as wanting to be called "The Blue Genie."

What came to mind was that pointing out the absurdity of the nickname had suggested that any normal person would not have demanded such a handle. As it turns out, I had learned that 'normal' was a set of criteria that no person could meet, although they could pretend otherwise (and for humor's sake) by pointing out the absurdities in life as if they were all nothing short of supreme travesty. In this case the person becomes less of a comedian and more a promoter of social standards. A real asshole.

Martin had me sighing again.

I went to the front with him for my last couple of minutes on the clock.. I apologized to him. I even sincerely called him "The Blue Genie" like he had wanted, but I could still see the effect in his defeated eyes, in his empty mannerisms. The damage had done, the male ego is a fragile thing, and every man is an island. I bade him farewell, punched out, and left for the distance that the parking lot offered in the most bittersweet way.

I put on my silver aviator sunglasses as I drove. They made me look like a professional, like a pilot or a detective, especially considering I was still wearing my penguin suit from work with an untucked white shirt, sleeves rolled up and top buttons undone.

I decided to stop at a supermarket. The air was stuffy and I really wanted something to drink.

When I pulled into the black-topped parking lot, I saw a girl I knew from school. She was helping an elderly guest to her car with some groceries that sat in the sanctity of plastic bags. I began to get the feeling I was less of a person and more a creation in somebody's well plotted storyline. She recognized me and waved one softly carved hand, and I waved back. After the two had passed, I drove forward, made a left and I parked, making sure to pull the parking break and put the car in first gear. Before I turned the ignition off, I inadvertently released the clutch, which killed the engine.

I began searching the cup holders and in-between the seats for loose change. In a matter of minutes, I found approximately one dollar, sixty five cents. One of my favorite quotes came to mind, "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." That was Teddy Roosevelt.

I entered the store and immediately went to the beverage section, flowing under sterilized lighting and signs advertising the savings to be had. One side of the beverage section was a giant refrigerated unit that held beer and other individual drinks, and I moved to the area that I imagined would contain Yoo-hoo, which is best described as nearly chocolate milk but not entirely. Like so many other stores, there was no Yoo-hoo to be found, so I instead opted for a PowerAde. I would have bought it too, it was blue and temptingly cold, but it cost almost entirely what I had, possibly more with sales tax.

Instead I picked up a fifty five cent Hershey bar, which I took off the bottom rack of the candy shelf that sat before the checkout register.

While I was checking out I saw Sara at the end of the register a couple of lines over. Even from a distance I could see tiredness in her movements and in the distant reflection of her fatigued brown eyes. I paid for my chocolate bar and left.

Right as I buckled up, Sara walked in front of my parking space. She was gently pushing an empty cart. I immediately unhooked my seatbelt and pulled the door handle upward. I got out so quickly that I hit my knee on the steering wheel and barely missed the roof with my head, afterwards sprawling clumsily upon the door. I said with all seriousness, "Well, hey Sarah…" I was not entirely bothered by the lack of quality in that salutation. I just took off my sunglasses and cordially waved.

She smiled brightly when she saw me and walked over with enthusiasm. "Hi there!"

I took a good look at her in her uniform. I really hated company attire, especially the kind I was still wearing.

"How are ya?" I said, sounding a little Irish.

"Tired," she said. She really looked it, too. "I worked all weekend and I'm fucking stuck here 'til late tonight. I pretty much got no sleep between yesterday and today. What are you doing here?"

"Buying chocolate," I said. "It's a mood elevator, you know." The chemical release of serotonin due to the intake of chocolate was something I had picked up in a class we took together.

She laughed, recognizing the source of the bit of trivia. Sara then motioned to my clothes, "So what do you do?"

"I work at a restaurant." I smiled politely.

"Do you like it?"

"No."

"Aww, I'm sorry." I put my foot back in my car, about to give her a friendly farewell, but she asked me, "So what did you do this weekend?"

"Worked a lot, pounded two Red Bulls to get through my shift, and ran seven miles on Saturday night." Running was about the extent of my freedom.

"Is that healthy?" she asked as she looked at me with mild concern.

"Nope," I answered. I ceded a half grin in spite of myself, and she laughed.

A moment passed.

"Could I be honest with you? You won't take offense, will you?"

"No." Every mental alarm I had triggered. This was not going to end well.

"Last year I hated you. That was before I knew you, though. Now I know you're a good guy."

'Good guy' made me cringe. She was still talking, but I had momentarily tuned out.

"Well, I'm gonna go back to work," she said tentatively and after a few minutes time.

"Yeah, good luck," I said. It came out a little more callously than I intended. I offered a small smile in departure. As I turned away, I noticed the expression on her face was one of confusion, lips pursed and eyebrow over eyebrow.

She said a few more words to me as I walked away. I responded nothing short of amicably, and soon we parted ways. I leaned up against the side of the Mustang and looked up at the sky. I already knew my Hershey bar had melted in the cupholder where I had left it before I got out. A portly man walked up to a car parked one empty space away from mine.

"One of those days, I guess" I said slowly, sincerely, lowly.

He looked at me as if I were being absurd.

Hi.

2008-04-17T16:47:00.001-07:00

Hello there. Its nice to see you again. Your hair looks lovely today- you know, in a visceral kind of way. Me? I'm doing as fine as ever, I suppose. Just living in the States, you know. Not watching television anymore- that's made me feel so much better. You should try it out, maybe for like a couple days or a week, and if you don't like it you can always go back to watching television.

I know you may have been going through some tough times lately, so I just wanted to say hang in there. Wish I had the answers. There's a lot of violence and sadness out there, you know, and a lot of fear tactics and extremism and what not. There's good stuff too, consider a bag of jellybeans- for every jellybean you eat and like, there's a weird jellybean that tastes bad and is hard to swallow. Yeah, I don't like jellybeans either.

Oh, and would you like to read these pamphlets on how to save your immortal soul? Just kidding. Almost had you though. I have no idea how to save your immortal soul, but I can bandage a cut pretty good. I know first aid and CPR and everything. I can even operate a defibrillator if your heart starts acting funky. I'm excellent like that- I can draw really nice pictures, I can sing songs pretty good, I can do a head stand and even a backflip on a trampoline (provided its a big trampoline, I'm 6'4"). I can also ask people really smart questions; I can look at things and think up really cool questions too. Hey! You're not so bad yourself! I bet you'd be really cool to draw or something. Gee, you have nice eyes. You're a good looking person, do you know that? Can you play an instrument? Do you have a lot of stuffed animals or anything? I bet you're a poet, or at least a writer.

But, hey, hold that thought, I gotta get going. I've got a final exam in a few hours, and I haven't done enough studying. I just wanted to say hi and that I know sometimes it hurts, but I don't feel bad for you. I just feel hurt, too.

The In-between

2008-04-14T20:34:00.000-07:00

(Just some rough fiction I drew up today. It took me about an hour. What do you think of this? Brilliance? Garbage?)
I had a real fuckin' head ache.

And no coffee. Where were they with the coffee? How long had I sat? They missed a spot when cleaning the table and that surprised me. Wasn't a bad joint, not a dirty one. They needed to get the sticky off of this one table, and then everything could be... complete here. This one table was ruining it.

I am not a murderer. It wasn't because of lack of dedication or perseverance- I'd been sitting at this table all day waiting on a fuckin' cup of coffee. I lacked gall, no other word for it but gall, like the kind the waitresses all have to wear those pink dresses and white frocks. This place tries to be conservative. Nothing is conservative anymore, nothing is traditional, and that makes this joint more of a theme park than a real restaurant.

If it were a restaurant to begin with, anyways- I heard those places serve coffee.

Without irritation I raised my hand to a waitress passing by, her blonde locks and timid form catching my attention. Two fingers up and pressed together like a tall man leaning on a shorter one; "Excuse-"

"Shut up, Henry," she says. Says it like it was real easy to say, like she said it for only my sake, like she was tired of saying it altogether.

"What the hell did you say to me?"

Two blue eyes stared at me frightfully, bunny's eyes peering out shyly from the depths of the rabbit hole, and her voice quivered"... How can I help you, sir?"

"That's not what you said just now!"

"I-I don't.. understand? All I said-"

"Yeah, all you said. I asked for a cup of black coffee somewhere around an hour ago, and I'm still waiting."

A series of bumbling, patronizing excuses tumbled out of elegant lips; the curves of her young form pressing against the disgusting censorship that was a conservative pink dress, and what‘s worse, a dress made not of something fine like silk but of coarse material scarcely fit for a hand towel. I should have liked to taken a picture of the disaster of her existing here and called it art nouveau. And, in keeping with the spirit of all things artful, I checked out her ass as she walked behind that white topped counter halfway across the room.

In the corner of my eye was a blur, and I was slapped in the face. Clenching my cheek, I turned my head back to see across the table a pink dress, sitting there, angry at me.

"You're an asshole and a pig, Henry." She raised the same hand, the left one, to her face and brushed away the wild brunette strands of hair- always brunette, never brown. Brunette, brunette, brunette.

"Yeah, what business is it of your's anymore, what I am?" Wishing she would have taken that fuckin’ thing off. It left a mark, I could feel an imprint with my fingertips.

"Is that how you are, now? A tough guy?" Her voice was acquiring her bizarre tone of mournful anger, and her already frosted-blue eyes were forming ice crystals.

"Shut up. Where's my coffee?"

"Don't you talk to me like that, you son of a bitch."

"Where's my fuckin' coffee!" I slammed my hand down on the table, causing the silverware to jump up in a bizarre dance and my palm to sting.

The young waitress was halfway back on the return journey between my table and the coffee pot. She stopped dead in her tracks, right there between the counter and the white washed wall, wide eyed and staring at me, as if she were about to cry. There was an overabundance of silence.

I exhaled slowly, raising my hand upward and beckoning softly, "Its... Its ok. I'm sorry. I wasn't yelling at you."

Almost tearful, veiled in disbelief, she slowly moved toward me, warily setting the coffee down in front of me.

"Thank you," I said as my eyes travelled up the length of her exposed arm and to her chest, wrapped in that hideous dress, that hideous affront to all things beautiful.

And it was as though I heard a whisper.

"Hmm? Speak louder, please."

"...W-who are you... talking to, sir?"

I reiterated with measure and curtness, "I wasn't talking to you. It'll just be the coffee for now, thanks."

I waved her away and she left quietly, still carrying that mystified look on her face. I sipped from my cup, and sat it back down on the tabletop, accidentally knocking it into another coffee mug and spilling a bit upon the surface- not much, but I was going to wipe it up before it became a sticky mess anyways. Having no napkin on my side of the table, I reached across, but my hand was slapped.

Keep your hands to yourself.

"Just give me the napkin."

No.

"Stop being a bitch. Give me the napkin or I'm going to-"

"Going to do what?" Her precise features became caustic and sharp, trying to slash me open from across the breadth of the tabletop, "He was bigger than you, I couldn't hardly handle it. Harder, too. Lasted longer-"

"-That's enough-"

"-More of a man. You didn't do a goddamn thing. You just turned away and left. Came here-"

"- Will you shut the hell up-"

"And the good part? Right when you walked in, I came- honest to goodness, harder than my life, I came."

I had a real fuckin' headache and my elbow was sitting in stickiness surrounded by a myriad of mostly-full coffee cups. I spoke slowly, "Went for my pistol first. Kept on walking."

A man tapped me on the shoulder, my blond haired angel standing behind him near the counter. He was old, balding, and wearing square framed glasses that matched the sparse lines of his white collared shirt. His tie invaded my person space from where he stood, leaning over, "It might be time to go... I said, sir, are you ok?"

"Fantastic. Who the fuck do I gotta sleep with to get a cup of coffee around here? I‘ve been waiting all fuckin‘ day."

My Velvet Underground

2008-04-11T16:34:00.000-07:00

my love is
being too big
for a pony
candywhite and goldenmane
swirling in circles
music in circles
being absolutely ridiculous
to those watching
but absolutely sensical
where it matters

CHANCE MEETING

So he swirled, in the darkness, in the dusky silk that was.

Frosted crystal and darkness and solitude.

An idle finger served to propel the blackness in cyclonic circles while deep brown eyes drank in the painting around him. In the company of one he would contemplate freely, a lighthouse over a serene oceanscape that glittered under heaven-tapered ethereal lights. The darkness drew to his lips of stone.

Dining, across the distance of the room of night and golden ray, was a young man and his feminine companion. Across his unperturbed shirt read the large logo of “Nike”, with her’s answering “Ambercrombie”- identification, code for each other that only the select could read, and extrapolate the hidden meaning from.

From where he sat, he would never be able to hear their words amongst the sea of voices, utensils against plates and the occasional ringing of bells. No; he did not want to hear when the mirror of eternity was much more prone to reflecting actions. Forever reflected was Nike’s hand when he took Ambercrombie’s and held it atop the table. Curious, however, was the benign opposition the more delicate had against its new placement and fastening.

“More soda?”

“Hmmm?”

“Would you like more coke?”

The story of the waitress. He knew her parents were first generation immigrants, that she was a little older than him and putting herself through school, that she may as well have been working in her family’s restaurant for free. They had never exchanged more than a passing glance.

“No, thank you,” he answered politely, elsewhere still.

Tracing a beam of light she titled her head to see Nike, professing in earnest. “Awww, isn’t that sweet?” She spoke from the edges, entirely sure her voice was awash, just as their’s were, in the ambiance of a world in motion. Gradually, as she entered the realm of cognitive night and observed, her left eyebrow arched upward in adherence.

“Well, that’s sort of funny,” she stated distantly, with wist, “but I think she wants her hand back. That guy, I swear…”

Lucifer tapped him on the shoulder and placed a red hot itinerary in his open right hand. Warming to the waitress in tone, he shattered the sheet of glass-ice that tended to form between two unfamiliar bodies in motion.

“Well, just hold on a second,” he said with slow calculation, “I don’t see her doing much to get that hand back, now.”

“That’s probably because she doesn’t want to hurt his feelings.”

“Why?” he queried, those reflective pools of maple now enveloping her alone.

She sat her empty pitcher down and adjusted her wrinkled apron slightly, providing herself a moment to formulate. “She cares about him. I suppose she’s willing to put up with it because she thinks she loves him.”

“Hmmm?” He rubbed his chin, daring not to intervene. He had learned that pure humanity, for the most part, had to flow unobstructed, if at all.

“Well, young people always think they’re in love, then old people make fun of them for it. Isn’t that how it goes?”

“Is it?” He answered, emptying the last thimbleful from the bottom of his glass.

She frowned when she said, “I don’t know.” A tired, worked hand gesticulated to two across the way, “But all the same, I don’t see anything there.”

He decided the luxuries that distance afforded him were, in fact, not luxuries at all but treasures in themselves.

A polite smile arose in place of the conversation.

“I’ll go check on your lemon chicken.”

And as the sheet of glass-ice was being rebuilt, a force of benevolence overtook him. Through the reforming cold, “Quote Goethe, ‘Love does not dominate; it cultivates.’”

He wanted her to know the nature of the beast. He wanted her to track it down, even more than he wanted it for himself.

It Is

2008-04-05T02:04:00.000-07:00

About painting. Climbing into a stained, ragged shirt with a tube of pthalo blue in my hand. Acrylics, specifically, because they make the most sense. Men like my father didn't paint. The thing about acrylics is that you've either got to plan masterfully or paint like hell. They're going to dry quickly, and once they're in place, that's the picture. I suppose a nightmare would be where I am made to paint quickly and achieve nothing of merit from an impromptu work, or conversely being stuck in limbo for fear of lack or ineffectiveness of planning.

I traced my fingers over her back and off of her form. Shifting myself, I leaned upright on the edge of the bed, squeezing the coarse fabric between the spaces in my fingers; slowly clenching and unclenching, pressing the nails into the roughness of the bedding.

The softness of the warm moon shone in tangent through the window and onto the back of my neck.

"...ehm?"

I extended my arm outward and retrieved the dark shapelessness that had become my collared shirt, and I lofted it to my shoulders. Carefully and with measure I phased the steely buttons through each thin slit, slightly intrigued with the nimbleness of my own hands and preoccupied with the idea that I had not before noticed their inherent virtuosity.

"-The fuck are you doing?" she said to me, the lush smoothness of her exposed abdomen and chest copulating with the invasive moonlight. "-The fucks wrong with you?"

I stood up, my body quivering.

Are you fuckin' leaving are you a fag or something?

I worked my fingers over the last few buttons but didn’t speak

Scared little boy she said you're a scared little boy are you a fag or something you afraid of me then little dick? can't get hard over a woman?

Challenge in the touch, she rounded her palm, a tinted whirl through the emptiness between us and struck my backside.

I can touch you I answered over the music playing softly through the walls moving the white and the stinging I can touch you any way I want but Rodin sculpted the hand as though he couldn't stand to touch her because she was burning his hand. I can touch you now.

I put my hand on her breast and she smiled

Quit talking like that and come fuck me she said because I made her smile

I shook my head I shouldn't be able to touch Rodin

Who the fuck is Rodin

"Nevermind," I softly flowed my hand down the tender, alluring skin on its return journey to resting freely at my side.

If you leave now you’ll be sorry. I fucking mean it Raleigh

never again do you hear me never again

She started for my wrist, seizing it with surprising ferocity. Looking down at her I saw two dreary pools in horrified and dark eyes.

"Why don't you want me?"

I stroked my hand through the air, "Couldn't paint you."

"What?"

"I don't know why I said that. Don't know what that means."

"Is it my body? It can't be my body if you've got a-"

My eyes fell slightly and followed the darkly carpeted path to the door, "Body?”

"What? Raleigh! Raleigh wait, don't go out-"

Didn't answer.

"You're not wearing pants!"

When had I taken them off?

“And you’re pitching a tent.”

I turned around, stepped back to the bedside and leaned over to retrieve my clothing, discarded carelessly next to the mattress. A streak of brown tagged me in the cheek and I fell against the wall.

You don't fuckin' tell me no the fuck do you think you are

I held the side of my cheek grabbed my jeans and rolled away the blood throbbed and my forehead clenched like giant aching and I said I wish I were gay a man would have given me time to cover up

She started crying again why is it why is it I've never met anyone like you but I didn't answer I just sat there a minute in the quiet because I didn't feel ready to answer

As I pulled my pants around my waste and buttoned them, "I don't know. Circumstance or decisions. You're not in a room with me, and I have no sense of where you have brought me."

I stood up again.

The air weighted me down and my words fell like calculated tragedy, "It’s funny to think about whether or not its too late." Somewhere there was music playing loudly now- I realized that I had intended to ask a question, not to her, but to the reflective stillness of shadows.

“Is it too late?”

She had embraced her knees to her chest, a caste of elegant tan limbs with raven hair spilling of curls in front of sheltering arms, very much like the bitter tear drops falling behind. It was earnest, unmitigated weeping, the breed that comes after not-so-sudden revelation, but as my eyes ran over the sculpted outline of her almost naked body and my ears drank of the ethereal sadness haunting the every space around my shoulders I found myself moved to the point of paradoxical desire. Many things- pity, empathy, grief, wonder, melancholy- but all subjucated to a fleeting form of desire that exists not to be sated but for its own sake, as though I were falling in love with an entire evening if only for a sunset.

Profane, I knew premeditatedly, that I should desecrate the moment in a manner so visceral and coarse, but in the easy whisper of an early morning under-current, “I’m... sorry...”

She was graceful. Her sepia arm unwrapped slowly upwards, the faint suggestion of two brush strokes in the timid dark, but elegant fingers gently swayed without distress and I was an inoffensive leaf; the magnitude of my presence only by slight degrees permeated into her awakening mind.

Left quietly.

Noir Story

2008-03-29T18:11:00.001-07:00

(Written for AP English, my Senior year of highschool.)

"There he is…"
"Look at him, what a weirdo!"

I could hear their malicious jeering from every dark, icy corridor of my mind. They were speaking blatantly in the small dark space within my heavy head- fiendish, laughing hyenas ripping apart the dirty, coarse fibers of my soul. The hellsong of the acoustics vibrated too intensely for such an enclosed space and surely something would shatter. There he goes, they say, there goes the guy with the internal monologue of a noir detective film.

It was my metallic cross to bear and I lived for its cold, pseudo-velvet touch; the subtle amounts of pain enticed me like a harsh, straight shot of heroin to the kidneys. I first discovered the dark narration arising from within me last week at McDonald's.

"Do you want fries with that?"

The girl gave a tentative look as I garnered a malignant insight into her soul via her blue eyes- I was taking a swim in an ocean of death. She was my own personal Lucifer, tempting me to fall from grace with the insidious superficialities of the "real" world, a lacerating burden that would crumple any mortal man, provided the proper timeframe.

Not that time couldn't do the job by itself.

"Oh, no thank you," I replied, looking upward toward the blackness of the roof and at Nietzsche's dead God, "I would like… uh, what is it? You know, the ice cream things with the little pieces of fruit in it?" I snapped my fingers as the thought barreled through the steely doors of my mind like a legion of hell-hounds fleeing the infernally blazing gates of Hades. "Oh, a parfait!"

But that's all part of the grim, dark past- ideas that belong solely to the ages. They're all dead now… or at least working at another McDonald's, but I can still hear their sardonic voices mocking me. Sometimes the complexities of life destroy even what would seem to be infallible and concrete. A Hershey bar becomes a Butterfinger.

To ease my mind off the burden of my past, I went to classes and attempted to be reawakened to a sunlit world of multi-colored butterflies where I am not subjected to the hellish grasp of… uh… laughing hyenas ripping my soul apart… again… but with fire this time- hot, burning fire. Senior English was my mistress of the all-consuming black night, and I'd shoot her into my veins of metal until they collapsed in upon themselves like so many post-glorious black marble pillars. Even after the veins left, I'd inject into the pink, supple flesh, building the blackness up until it consumed my entire body, and I'd never have to wear clothes again.

"Hey there Heathcliff! How are you doing today?"

I grunted, brushing past the spectacled teacher and her subtly stylish brown hair.

"Would you like to go get some water?" She asked me. "You sound like you've got a bit of something stuck in your throat… Go on, before the bell rings. You can make it."

She was trying to send me away, like the prodigal son, so I could return and be thrown to the wolf-pack that was the death of her mercy. I would have none of it, and instead claimed a depravedly colored brown desk close to the door and against a wall- it was as much a prisoner of this bland and devouring classroom as I. I could rest easy- there would be no assault from my six o'clock and a quick getaway was available, should things turn for the worst.

Ambience. I could hear the pencil sharpener start its violent cycle of cutting away the old, useless wood- it had served its pathetic purpose and was now obstructive to progress, or "c'est la vie" as the French say. The more I heard the sweet, poetic chopping of the writing implement, the more I thought about love and what it had done to me.

I met her between recess… uh, I mean nutrition break, and Seventh period. She had a math book that could slap your mother in the face and run off in your Dodge Ram holding your father's hand without so much as a single glance backward. Why, daddy?

Hair and eyes as dark as the soul of Dick Cheney. A body like a long, lonely highway; curves in all the right places, that my fingers hungered to take at various speeds. She wasn't a woman, she was a weapon.

I knew I loved her when she sat down on the plastically grated bench with me at lunch and said she hated the band Chicago. Or maybe it was the city, I wasn't really listening. True love is hating the same things. Suffice to say, with my dashing good looks and Robert Redford-like charms, we were swapping fluids before the souls in Hell could proceed with their next lament of lacking ice-water.

"Bless you," I said while wiping my face and handing her a snowy-white Kleenex along with a bottle of hand sanitizer. When you're in my line of work, you've got to keep both your nose and your hands clean.

"Sorry," she replied with red eroticism in her cheeks and a suggestive, fluttering wink, "these damn allergies…"

"Baby, I'm your medicine," I said in baritone and with inscrutable manly bravado. Ten minutes after she left. Not that the effect of my charm was totally lost- a passing group of freshmen, who fell within earshot at the integral moment, re-routed and took a longer way around to wherever it was that they were walking. Where do they go, anyways?

Time had passed and I still thought of her, it kept me up into the waning hours of the infinitely empty night-I hadn't slept for a week, and it would be eternities before I saw her again. The next day, at school, she was hand-in-hand with a dark skinned Indian boy that I had never seen before. I refused to believe the woman I loved could be so unfaithful. I rose to confront her, every muscle in my back clenched with animal rage and the fury of a burning world in my eyes.

"Oh, hi Heathcliff!" She said to me as if nothing were astray, casually trying to lightly play the stomach-wrenching scene off. I could immediately see right through the sickly-sweet venom that ladled out from her cute tone of voice, "This is Raheem."

Outsourcing had gone just too far. I wiped the sticky residue from my pale mouth, dropped the warm bottle of whiskey in my stilled hand to the ground and disinterestedly watched the liquid-brown explosion turn into a million meaningless pieces- then I callously turned away, brutally cutting all my decaying losses off like a plagued hand covered in the black-crimson of gooey, open sores. Or, at least, I would have done all of that if I were old enough to buy alcohol.

I felt a warming in my cheeks, so I took the lighter out from my back pocket. There was a tremendous amount of heat coming from beneath my eyes, as well- it must have been the sun; it was a really hot day and not a cloud invaded the deceitfully serene sky. "Uh… hi."

She pointed to my clenched fury of right fist, to what I really was holding, a bouquet of flowers, "Wh
o are those for?"

"Uhhhh…," I droned, searching the brilliantly twisted labyrinth of my mind for the next line, "They're for… uh, my dog. He died."

Little did I know that specific line was the standard for ending almost all conversations. It was like a thousand fiendish hyenas ripping my soul apart or something.

As soon as they had left, I decided to ditch the added weight of the bouquet. It was limiting my ability to move or take action, and if I got stuck in a tight situation, I could kiss my ass goodbye.

It was the damndest thing. Right when I dropped those flowers in the trashcan, I felt drops of rain on my face.

"Play it again, Sam."

"Heathcliff! No talking! You should be doing a thinking log!"

The screeching, hellistic war-cry of the disgruntled teacher brought me back to my unwelcoming, rejecting senses. Little good it did, focus came to me like a cheap, fickle prostitute with one ear, and soon enough I was back in the past, owing money, waging wars and fighting battles already lost. Like the night Murray died.

I held him in my arms, screaming like I was being jabbed in the fleshiest parts of me with a sharp, h+ot poker. Help never came to us there, under the unrelenting rain and in the middle of the forsaken road. Night blanketed his face and I could see less and less of him as he slipped away. I ran my ice-cold fingers through his soft, angelic hair and stared into his fading dark eyes for as long as I could. Finally, I buried my numbed face in the lifeless corpse and sobbed into the hollow darkness, "I'll miss you, boy."

"Heathcliff! Why didn't you do your thinking log!?"

When I look up, it's with rainwater enveloping the shiny coins of my eyes and sincerity seizing all of my features. Bittersweet reality claims its place in my words,

"… I can't turn it off…"

Paper Flowers

2008-01-10T19:23:00.000-08:00

In the tea room there is color. The walls are washed crisply white and lined with rich, maple wood but there is still a myriad of color. There are flowers in the room. There are flowers on the wall.

And there is music too, because the music is silence surrounding my footfalls on hardwood floors. Infront of me, Mrs. Kyogi walks gracefully and with purpose. Mrs. Kyogi is middle aged and beautiful with features carved from the bluish winds sweeping over the icy mountaintops of Japan, yet still a defined mantle of warmness beneath the blackest night that was her dark, straight hair- like night, pulled back and reserved.

I point, “That’ll do.”

She shakes her head and purses her lips. “You will grow tired of it. You tire of it now. Choose better.”

My eyes return to the wall and I see sunlight entering from a small rectangular window across the way. Greedily, as I can have my choice, I want for the best and my eyes devour all until they fall upon an electrically purple blossom with a bright yellow center.

“That’s it,” I suggest, “That’s the one.”

Mrs. Kyogi blinks slowly, just once and then speaks, “Look more closely.”

Her soapstone fingers lift the petals ever so gently into clearer view. And I see…

“Already beginning to wilt. It turns away from the sunlight. It will not last even two more days.”

A sigh escapes my lips and I slouch to the solid ground “Must I choose?”

Mrs. Kyogi says nothing, simply stands and waits for me to ready myself again. The assortment of them all, in one place, at one time, is unearthly; is bewildering. Their greens, their yellows, their reds, their blues, their violets all over take me in different, swelling tides until I am no longer standing atop the sanctity of logical stone beaches, but afloat in an ocean that I can neither understand nor describe.

“Ok.”

A flash in her dark eyes and a slight contortion of her painted lips mark mild displeasure and a more conflicted state. I rise to my feet and breathe in deeply, the aromas over taking me- exotic, otherworldly scents, tempting me, promising me.

Mrs. Kyogi starts to usher me outward, but my eyes fall upon a blossom above the door. It is large, colored black in the center, gracefully wrapped in light brown and whimsically splashed with orange. On the outer edges rested a soft dress of bright yellow petals. It is eccentric, imaginative even, as it poises, thriving in the sunlight. I find myself speaking, barely above an uncertain but more certain whsiper, “That one… That’s the one.”

I stop in place, denying even another step. Mrs. Kyogi turns around and looks at me with confusion in her features. Her unexcitable, wise eyes trace the path from my impassioned face to where my vision rests above the door and she starts to smile. She gracefully moves to it, elongates her elegant form upward, and removes it from the wall. Slowly turning, she extends her cupped hands into mine, the delicate couriers moving as if in dance, flowers in their own right.

And I am holding the flower.

Her smile is a novel I‘ve never read before, containing sadness, alleviation and truth, “It is no flower at all.”

“I don’t understand…”

“You feel it is made of paper.”

I run my fingers over the void in my wondered hands, so invigorated. The futility, the hopelessness and the defeat overcome me as I crumple the falsity to the floor and leave too coolly.

Another Dynamic

2007-07-21T16:20:00.000-07:00

(I actually submitted this to Newsweek. Let's consider this a sub-entry while I enjoy my weekend.)

The exam room, to my eyes, was always a little less benign in appearance and suggestion then I would have preferred. It seemed as though everything went from one shade of off-white to the next, from the dull walls to the cabinents the color of my khakis.

The exam room and I were somewhat color coordinated.

I had followed the dark skinned technician in at his request. Through his heavy middle eastern accent, he had asked me to assist him with a patient. As he readied the cassette, I drank in the dimly lit scene of a sickly old man lying on a gurney next to the exam table. I knew that we would be unable to move him, I could tell almost instantly- he was so heavily wired and lethargic in his movements that it would have been too risky and, for that matter, not worth the effort.

My nervous tic set in- I adjusted my name badge, sneaking a pleading look at that big ugly word “Intern”, as if just the thought of it immediately disqualified me into a safety zone.

I felt the chill of unfamiliarity as I looked at the aged, sickly human being that so needed and deserved help from us, and I felt my insides freeze up- I was far from being the master of this sensation. I needed more time- I was too green.

The procedure in question was relatively sophisticated in terms of positioning and, as previously mentioned, the patient was, for the most part, completely immobile. Though we would not be moving him from the gurney to the exam table, we would have to manipulate his positioning on the gurney itself.

Touching him was an odd feeling. Not unpleasant, but just something I am very unfamiliar with. Its like, at first, you're touching cold, lifeless rock. Gradually, though, its as if your touch starts to illicit a response, as if the stone is coming to life; and so much tension from me, about how I could error, about how I was doing something incorrectly, about how I might cause harm instead of do good. About how I longed for the days when I could play videogames with my older brother for an afternoon, and shut my eyes to a world where people could be in such misery as displayed before me on that gurney.

The technician and I could not manipulate his position entirely by ourselves, try though we did. After our various failed attempts, the technician requested that the patient make an effort. I nearly rolled my eyes- it was obvious he was very ill. I was humbled when I saw the precursors of movement in him. At first, I thought that old, withered grip was reaching for the side railing of his gurney. I was taken aback slightly as he reached higher and took hold of my gloved right hand.

The whole process proved only moderately successful as he attempted to shift himself. Eventually, we realized there was nothing-doing and we'd reached the stopping point- the technician began a few checks before he could start collimating. All motions stopped.

The patient hadn't let go of my hand.

Touching a stranger for your job is something that's only slightly awkward at first, something one can easily move past. However, brushing up against a stranger just a little too closely in the supermarket on accident is very awkward indeed. Your only reaction is to step back and reclaim youown personal, isolated space. Our mechanics lead for a rather cold, but ultimately efficient world, at least in the eyes of social faux pas.

So my first instinct was to recoil from him. However, I found this was only a mental trigger and that my body hadn't altered its position in any given capacity. I had ceased positioning him and started holding his hand.

I was so unsure of what I was doing, so nervous that I was breaching some sort of patient-employee dynamic, that I could feel my cheeks warm and my throat close a bit.

When I finally looked at the radiology technician (guiltily, I assure you), he made no indication that I was doing anything wrong. Reason restored its throne in my mind, and I breathed easier as I realized I was doing nothing inappropriate, and if anything, I decided I was helping the man, if only offering the kind of support that sympathetic touch offers.

It was as if I was doing something that I was supposed to be doing.

So I steadied my grip, like a handshake, appropriately firm. The technician was just about ready to shoot and, not wanting a dose of radiation myself, I had to leave the room. And so I let go. For as intense as the experience was to me, the patient and I had all the fluidity of a hydrogen bond.

After I collected it from the film slot and run it, the film appeared on the digital screen and I peered over the technician's shoulder. From behind his singularly buttoned, white lab coat I could see the imaging of tired lungs traced with the misty-grays that could only be fluid, the kind of fog that comes before a cool nighttime.