THE RADLEY HOUSE

Mango Bones--or, whatever technical botanical term applies to those in the prenatal form of posthumousness, (hell, I guess just regular mangoes

2011-10-15T00:56:00.001-07:00

[excerpts of Excerpts of Madness, Decrepitude, and Shoplifting, Somewhere in the Florida Everglades]

H.M.
+
C.T
I was fourteen when I had my baby. Fourteen.

With Heidi.

Me, and Heidi.

[. . .]

Clara (née Ivy)
By the third time the starchy man-boy with the backwards Dolphins cap and Bermuda shorts--terrible meatball polo-- burnt-noodly tattoo, on his arm, something in calligraphy, Jesus Christ as big around as a candy dish, ($200 crock of shit, 18th birthday gift, probably, from his parents probably, the name of a girl) though at least it wasn't barbed wire. By the third time he molded his prime rib neck around glance at her--just sitting on the bench, just watching the washers--Clara stared right back. She hated gawkers.

Could not stand gawkers. Could not. Could not stomach a rubberneck, no balls on a rubberneck, no apparent business of their own, they had no right to make business of anyone's else's business and no balls to say so, they curdled traffic at five o'clock. They made her feel like she was losing on points.

[. . .]

The Cocaine Letters
. . . feel a not at all inconsiderable degree of wistful pity, on the topic of Radish. This so long as you're wanting all honesty here, ~~little brother-man~~
mijo-mine <-(See that beauty, right? Education! This Spanish stuff is cake)

(p. 4)
You won't see any boys back homewards-bound, too much like Radish So a basis for comparison is hard for me to pick out for you. Danny might be the closest (Shit-the-Sandbox Danny that is, Danny down the street I mean, NOT Danny Rockford that spineless fuckin bonbon. Shit-the-Sandbox Danny you remember. Danny ~~Rockf~~ Fiat.) Danny might be the closest it gets, But still plenty of wiggle room between him and Radish. Radish a pretty tragic figure.

See here, mi mijo, Radish, such to my surprise, something of an unrealized prodigy. In this case in the field of medical science. Yes indeed!! Quite the natural! In fact ~~as a matter of fac~~, I have it heard, from a multitude of (very reliable mostly) eye witness accounts, that Radish in fact. . .

On the day of his birth. . .

This fellow. . .

(wait for it)
turn ------>

Page (5)

. . . performed his very own Caesarian section. (HAH HAH HAH)

(The prodigal child! Right! (In medical science, and, dental development alike! Right! Right mein mijo!!!!

(HAH HAH Haha HAH HaH Hah Ha) but really though this is one cold-boned motherfucker.

If you want all honesty here, the reason I brought up Shit-the-Sandbox Danny (page 3) is probably since I almost do, every damn time I talk to the guy. (hah ha) But that's par for the course. Par by far, little brother-man. When four hours in a Boston Whaler is the only thing separating you and Havana ~~(aka La Coca Mecca)~~ (akaka Schnoz Vegas) aka Cuban Disneyworld. you spend more like four thousand puckering up to some categorically spooky cunts.

[. . .]

Clara (née Ivy)
Saturday, lunchtime, nice buttery autumn weather, so how odd then--right--that there were only two people doing laundry? Day like this! This time of day! How odd! Baffling! No one else doing laundry, except for the two of them, the man-boy must have thought. For some suspicious reason. Saturday. Mysterious. Terribly, tragically mysterious. Some real Agatha Christie shit here.

This guy spiritually channeling Fred Durst through the oujia rag of his Fruit of the Loom (clearly visible, Clara noted, all the way down to the half-court marker of his linebacker ass), was no doubt puzzling over where everyone else was. Where else but a laundromat, was time worth spending. At lunchtime. On a Saturday.

Perhaps she, that woman over there, knew something about it; and perhaps if he, Acting Representative-in-Chief of the Florida Chapter of Scooby and the Gang, simply eyeballed the woman's woke-up-late ballerina bun from fifteen feet away, for some seconds at a time, in between hauling the muggy guts of a load of colors from the washer, then possibly the accused could be lanced boil-like into a Best-Selling confession.

Sorry, Shaggy, Clara thought as she stared. No swamp ghosts here. She scrutinized the strawberry jam of razorburn all inside and around his coffee-ground beard--though, maybe it was just acne. No Shyamalan reveal. No shrieky violins. Sorry, Shaggy, "Rosebud" I ain't.

[. . .]

Marcus was smoking pot on his thousand threadcount sheets with his boots still on when he decided to kill the neighbor's cat.

[. . .]

Clara (née Ivy)
. . . "--my brother, Jesus. He got some, fucking. Jesus. Some tribal, something." Contemplatively, looking pained, he scratched the bristles and the pink of his neck. "Seahorse. Some fucking thing like that."

Clara laughed, along with him, at the half-told joke except the guy was not laughing. He was not looking at her. He was smiling, a little, but just watching the washers. He was also, very actively, not rolling back down the sleeves of his terrible meatball polo, and was, instead, continuing to very unsubtly bend and ramrod his elbow to make the horseshoe of his tricep make the noodles of his Hebrew tattoo shimmy and shake, like a "no vacancy" sign. Clara wished she had still had the bench to herself. "How big?"

"Big." He held his hands up like he was playing basketball.

"Oh, wow."

"Yeah."

"Wow. Yeah. Where?"

He still was not looking at her. He seemed bored. Which bothered Clara, not as much as the stares had but it still bothered her, that this guy would think that after peek-a-booing her from the washer for that long that he could pull off acting like he hadn't been, and then thrusting his guns on display as if it were always necessary to roll up the sleeves of his murder-me-marinara wardrobe, lest they pop over his shimmying no vacancy horseshoes and yeah, sorry ladies, there's no helping it, Derbys number 1 and 2 just take off at a gallop on their own like that.

It bothered Clara because she knew, knew photographically well, every sweating shape and shade of an affectation of confidence when she saw one.

And, it bothered her. It bothered her, because this Xbox Live motherfucker was pulling it off.

"Abe, by the way." He held out his hand.

"Like Abraham?"

"Right."

Clara took it, and shook it. "Nice to meet you, Abe. Aubrie."

H.M.
+
C.T
How I found out is Heidi's mom and dad drove up to talk about it. They are nice enough folks. I saw them pulling onto our street just as I got back from school. They had this shitty soup-colored Plymouth Reliant. Old car. Old car. Lots of dogs had been in that car. You could just tell. Not from smell, there wasn't any dog smell. The upholstery just had that feeling to it.

I liked that car though. Heidi's dad would let me help with the oil changes and tire checks sometimes. He showed me how to put in a new radio, too. Nice man. Nice folks. Heidi's parents didn't grudge their girl a harmless little jr. high crush, not even a black one. Cool parents. Nice to me. Nice enough folks. The shittiest stew-colored Plymouth to get its upholstery smeared with roadtrip dog balls and drool but you know? These things happen.

Besides. That day I found out about me and Heidi, the Reliant sounded pretty tremendous. Real lusty. Way better than anytime I'd helped with the tune-up. I watched from the mailbox trying to figure out how Chrysler could fit a hemi into that.

Real tremendous. Real cavalry sounds. Hi-ho Silver kind of stuff. You can get some heroic sounds, out of even a Plymouth Reliant. I guess if the mood so takes you. I guess if you're wanting to mow somebody down enough.

[. . .]

Aubrie (née Ivy)
. . .and she reached in down, to the absolute bottom, and pulled--pulled hard, from her heels, like she was dragging a child from a well--and came up with Abe's black work slacks and white work shirt and Lucky brand jeans and a creamy green blouse that must have been a girlfriend's.

The button on the jeans seared a perfect coin of whiteness and awakeness on the side of her thumb and Abigail dropped it, clutching the slacks and the blouse to her chest tightly, as if they would try to wriggle away, like living things, which they might have, hell, who knew? God, but they were certainly warm enough.

[. . .]

Fisherman
. . .and Benji sat and thought, for not too long, about how not so different at all she was from Laura. Not at all. He decided she was not different, at all, from Laura, not at all, from the past Laura at least. The old Laura. That is, the young Laura.

The Laura on their honeymoon thirty-five years ago--thirty-six, next week--in Bora Bora, Laura who baffled room service at breakfast by ordering ice cubes for her milk. The Laura who, smiling at him, mischievous, I know a secret, secret, do you want to hear?, slunk from her slip like a Queen of the Nile. The Laura who came twice underneath him with her eyes closed.

Laura with blonde ringlets painted on her cheeks and struggling neck, Laura with her face shining slick and turbulent, like she was puzzling out some terrible decision, or like fighting in a thunderstorm, like oceanwater, Laura with her heels like cowboy spurs in his kidneys and her teeth welded to his collarbone so tight so hungry he could almost count the ridges of her molars, her bite so tight they were almost conjoined, her fingernails cultivating cornfields from the skin of his back, Laura with her eyes closed.

The sobbing Laura, leaking Laura, the salt-of-the-earth the apple-of-his-eye Laura, who came twice, underneath him, with her eyes closed, in Bora Bora.

Yes. Yes, he decided. They were not at all different.

And as Benji sat, thinking this, something tender, and warm, pooled upwards in him, something that was not pity. Not really. Not pity, not really--he would have let the girl go, had it been pity--but it was something like it, and with this something, so tender, this something warm, curled in his chest like a napping tabby, Benji leaned gently forwards and pressed a kiss to her forehead. He blanketed her body with his own. He pressed a kiss--and another--against her cheek. Her jaw, this time, and then another where her eyebrow met the bridge of her nose. Benji kissed away where his sweat had fallen and dotted her skin.

He laid heavier on her, then.

He laid heavier and it brought their chests to meeting, like another kind of kiss, a more honest kind. The tufts of his chest hair brushed against her undeveloped breasts with its own heat. Their skin was clammy but clean. Clean-feeling, like after a long bath.

Benji made certain their bodies lined up, just so. He wanted the warm, tender, something in his chest, newborn-babbling in his chest, Benji wanted it to be felt by another. He wanted someone else to feel the napping tabby curled up so soft and living in him.

"Do you feel it?" His whisper ricocheted back into his mouth--messy, moist, sauna swamp moss--against the soft-boiled slope of her cheekbone. Of her earlobe. The downy hairs of her neck; they shivered against his breath. "Can you feel it?"

The sleepy tabby purred, tender and warm, in his chest; he went quiet so she could hear. His chest so warm against hers. His heart, babbling away, in happy, Morse gibberish, so tender, and warm, there in his chest; tender and warm, the flesh of his chest; his chest against hers, tender and warm, very warm, very warm in comparison, hers; in comparison to hers; hers cold, cold, so very cold already; only two and a half days and already decomposing.

[. . .]

H.M.
+
C.T
. . . me and Heidi, holed away under the neighbor's tin duckboat, molding up around each other like clay. My shoulders banged off the sides. I still had a boy's shoulders and hands, and nonexistent rabbit ass, but there mercilessly naked and sweating under the duckboat over Heidi I felt giant. I felt enormous. Giant. There was a big, tin, tupperware top to the alpha and omega and the here and everafter, trying to keep inside everything. Keep it inside. Keep it safe. But it all would flip and bangle away to flounder-smelling sheet metal and float away in the swamp if I did so much as sit back on my heels to breathe. Breathing.

We could hardly breathe, under there.

I didn't care though because I was giant. I wasn't worried about air. I had bear paws in the dirt. I was an ogre. Bear paws like catcher's mitts. The zipper of my jeans was chewing up the my thighs just above my scrawny chicken knees just under my Dolphins boxers but I didn't care. I couldn't hardly breathe but I didn't care. Those aren't things you notice.

"Claude. Claude, wait, stop."

Heidi is one of those people who has a certain sound. And when she makes it, you have to listen. Just a tiny, curving sigh, clear and glassy, but flimsy, too. Like a fly wing. And when she makes that sound she has all of your attention by the throat.

"Claude," it was dark but we could still see each other a little, "You're squooshing my hair."

One of her butterfly barrettes had come loose and was sticking out of the mud and chewing into my palm. I couldn't see it, not something that tiny in the dark. Even when I picked my hand up, trying to see it, I banged my elbow against the side of the boat, but I could feel it, Heidi's butterfly barrette, and it was like I shrank backwards past 100,000 rooms of evolution into something small and wet.

[. . .]

The Cocaine Letters
. . .heart just goes pop! like a gravy balloon. Like a big zit. Two dollars per nostril down here. You believe that. Two fucking bucks? Dos, ~~little broth~~ mijo! 2!!!! Cheaper than a bottle of Yoohoo. A guy down here can pop his heart like a gravy balloon, for cheaper than rope, if that's what he's wanting.

Ivy
The men in the kitchen had on denim workshorts cut off at the knees and white socks and brown boots and sweat and nothing else. And some had sunburns, too, but nothing else. Ivy could smell them all the way from the staircase.

Her mother served peach tea and lemonade and ice water in mismatched glasses that glittered from their own cold, for which the men thanked her, some making grateful shows of sighing and smacking their lips at the taste. One said something that might have been about beer, as a joke, and the others grinned and shoved his shoulder and her mother made a joke back, and they laughed.

The men lined up peacefully along the counter where her mother had laid out one loaf each of white, wheat and rye; jars of Hellman's mayonnaise and French's mustard; chopped onion, and lettuce and sliced tomato; bloated wedges of pickle; leftover barbecue chicken, from the night before, trimmed; a crowded tray of cold cuts rolled into fancy little tubes--like her mother liked to prepare them, all the time, even in Ivy's sack lunches--rolled unseemingly in the shape of snapdragons. On the stove sat packs of Keebler cookies. One of the men picked up the cookies and made to sit at the table, looking very serious--as a joke--while the other men grinned and shoved him to the back of the line. Her mother said something about beer, and then something else about no middle ground, and they laughed.

Her mother's offer of her own seat at the table was refused good-naturedly. So it was she, and four of them, and her husband--just returned from the pharmacy--at the kitchen table talking of things other than the yard.

So you're from Cincinnati.
When you say your wife was due?
This one--right here, see it?--fell off a motorcycle. The one on my leg was a sick dog in the neighborhood.

The rest of the men simply stood along the counters, mostly quiet. Strings showed in their necks and jaws as they chewed. They hunched as they chewed and kept their plates close to their mouths, catching crumbs. They were like the dogs at Uncle Reggie's, not in a mean way, not bad--only because Ivy could not tell them apart.

She could smell them all the way from the staircase.

The smell of them--of the sweat of their skin, and the burn of their skin (the burn in their skin, in their muscles; the smell of the work, their work, of the effort of them)--would swarm back to her. Years later, freshman year, university. Her roommate would peel away the silver film on the mouth of a can of Folgers for an all-nighter of biology and the smell of it, the smell, would come at her like a cudgel. The smell would slide all over her, snug, and oiled, all over, would slither on like a raincoat. The men in the kitchen had the smell of uncooked coffee and snug, oiled metal.

H.M.
+
C.T
. . .I didn't like the dolls. I didn't like the idea, and I didn't like Heidi climbing up so high. But I still helped hang them up. I helped. I had a part, too. So I helped.

Even if I only had to because her uncle told her bullshit ghost stories. Supterstition. A person buried in a swamp turning to an alligator, even babies, bullshit story, and telling her that dolls would make sure a person remembered they were a person and what people looked like but you know? These things happen.

Aubrie (née Ivy)
. . .she reached behind herself, watching herself, in the laundromat's bathroom mirror, watching and feeling the white work shirt's material pulled taut against her ribs, like a loom, a bare half inch of air between the cotton and the valley of her spine. She was tight inside it, tight enough to be inside it, reaching behind her to feel it all, all, reaching back so far around her like a straightjacket.

"Warm." She sighed, and it sounded both relieved and bewildered. "God. God, they're so warm."

I would never

2011-09-20T16:45:00.000-07:00

have recovered; never; would never have Renaissanced from the bottlenecked burn ward in Belgium
-- l'Hopital Saint Dunstan -- have been resuscitated from the ten-patient room with the oil-painting view of the bearskin rugs of the neighboring fields of wheat; fruity booms of whooping cough. From nurses' sterling voices in starling clockwork chorus: "--quartered apples, steamed asparagus, braised mutton for lunch," from war widows, their steady saline bleating from the waiting room -- too goddamn many clocks -- thousand thread-count sheets with thorny warning smells of live, but panicked meat; the mineral bouquet of peroxide, cotton swabs, cotton masks, iodine -- flamboyant trickles, and rich whorls, of brassy caramel-sauce urine on vanilla-bean tile: leaked steamy and fevered from pulpy bladders boiled thin from inflammation, from infection, from incisions, boiled away, cooked down into infertile bloodless mash not unlike the Eucharist after three seconds in saliva.

I would never have recovered, had the veteran done so.

The nurses wheeled him in post-op. Unconscious, and prone, but tomcattish and box-bodied. Soldier's shoulders have a means of visibility even under pounds of blankets. He was not a small man, but still heavied and vulnerable from anesthesia, curled babyish, a petulant cheek pillow-squashed under a cashew beard. (only temporarily, two weeks at the most, he was told when he awoke -- only until the soldier ward in Brussels could catch its breath.) His injuries were enviable. His legs, only, mostly: calves and hams, clipped Achilles, portions of oxish ass and back. Four meters north of a kettlecorn landmine. One of six of formerly twelve. Clapping hands and thunderbolts distressed him.

He was singular, in the ward, in having neither headdress, nor helmet, nor halter, nor kerchief, nor cowl nor bridle nor bonnet nor boa nor ballgag of plaster and gauze and medicinal lard about his jaw nor neck nor eyes. His legs, mostly. And those would smooth up pinkly soon. Each and all of us, there, bedridden -- yes, and the veteran, too -- but only the veteran to talk with the veteran. The rest of us inert. Insensate, in other places; or invalid: legless, cauterized, etherized, or unwilling, only the veteran for the veteran. He was too whole to be there.

He was mostly healthy and his appetite reflected that: breakfasts of cold cuts, porridge, butter and black currant jam, toasted rye, a pitcher of cream he would sip from directly and unmanneredly. Then followed two cigarettes, self-rolled, with ballroom choreography, from assertively Turkish tobacco kept in a braided buckskin pouch on his bedside table. Always, for the nurses -- while they cracked the window for him to chute his smoke, teasing This is the burn ward, you know, removing so tenderly the tacky bandages like peeling a peach, unperturbed by the smell, commending his hardiness when he winced, noting and surveying the cookedness of his legs -- for them the veteran would give intensive reports of the prior night's dreams. Never had he had them before, never, but since his first night in the ward he claimed a gauntlet of bittersome nightmares: Enemy airstrikes, massacred friends, German troops that swallowed bullets and shells out of air, like lobbed grapes; a whole forest of mustard gas around and inside his home, his very own home, in Eysines. He told his stories with his hands. He spoke, too, of course, but the story was mostly in his hands: moving florid, eager, clear as calligraphy, like mimes and magicians try, like salesmen would kill to -- cutting deft through bare air, across eunuch proximity -- collaring tight sailor's knots to any hold in his listeners; pulling them in. A true soldier. Rare and pitied is the soldier unsublime at telling stories.

The truthful one, perhaps, even rarer; and so while the veteran's nightmares were smoothed by cashmere sympathies of any seasoned bedside manner, the nurses could weigh them only as heavily as children's.

There were visitors for him, at first. Often. Never family or wives, no, always much more splendid things: postures curt, polished, like phoenix statues; august, certain, decisive things; courtly Anglo armor, badge-mosaicked Bishops and Rooks, checkerboard chests, uniforms trim and iced and piped like display pastries. How was he healing? How long would it take? Was the pain very bad? (pocketchange compliments on his service, here, typically; his healthy complexion, at the least; collection plate wishes for his swift return.) Dupuis and Cantes were already up, already high-chinned on a train back to Bruges -- they had never seemed more heartful -- and a horse doctor from Münster had salvaged all of Chevalier's arm, all, even his fingers, and thumb. Although Roux was now deaf. Why, he hadn't already finished his breakfast, had he? But he had hardly touched his ham! (the veteran, himself, would ask of any vacant beds in Brussels.)

Something about hospitals: there are no calendars. No calendars. Not in view of patients, anyway. None. Mondays, Mays, and the 21sts of June are all artifacts, stiff, yellowed, chalky pottery in the dirt. Glass-cased museum things -- mythical things -- thunderbirds, minotaurs, fairy mounds, maybe. As dusty and distant as your favorite bedtime story. You can expect to know the date, so long as you expect it whispered in your ear by Oberon. Unless seated in the waiting room, or the receptionist's desk, or otherwise the shallower wards kept for patients of imminently anticipated dismissal, you will see no calendars.

Clocks? Yes. Yes, oh my, oh plenty of clocks. Clocks on walls and bedside tables, wrists of nurses. Clocks over each and every exit and entry. If Pagans make their luck by nailing horseshoes over doorways, in hospitals they nail clocks. If your blacksmith neighbors tacks up Christmas wreaths, then your doctor neighbor will tack up a clock. If the Hebrews slathered theirs with lamb's blood then their shaman must have tried with a sundial. I have a theory: Big Ben, and Father Time -- during sabbaticals, post-lunch siestas, or simply days when business may run slow -- intermittently seek, find, and fuck one another in hospital broom closets and bathrooms the world over, by avenue of precisely juxtaposing their pulpy distended pendulums at just-such an angle, one that allowed for amorous tantrummings at a perfectly rhythmic clattering counterpoint until either of the two fruitfully, inexplicably -- miraculously! -- strikes estrus. A Virgin Marty, if you would.

Hospital clocks -- should they be, in fact, be some breed of otherworldly tryst-affirming lovechildren -- would then at least have a semblance of reasoning for their steady and unceasing and incessant descent from the five-meter plaster heavens. Like fucking manna.

(something about clocks: they teach you of, and keep you on your schedules: pilltime, bathtime, bedtime, breakfast.)

(something about calendars: they tell how long you have had these schedules.)

Without a calendar I could never know precisely when, but at some point, cold cuts quietly vanished from the veteran's breakfast. The rye toast, next. The butter after that. The black currant jam. The cigarettes -- singularly -- were doubled.

Simply residual stress, tightens the stomach, he explained, when the nurses expressed concern, Perfectly normal. It meant he was healing well, he said. It had happened before, in Warsaw: enemy sniper had picked and nicked at his ribs, like Easter ham, he told them. (the jacket he had worn then was kept close, by his bed; he held it up for their inspection like a schoolboy with a rainbow trout: a bomber's jacket -- cotton -- bullet-peppered thickly at the ribs, just as he had said; blood-salted. gunmetal, in color.) He told them he had healed quite well then. No trouble.

Of much greater concern, the veteran insisted, were the nightmares: His father's skull, crumbling like a single peppercorn beneath the hoof of a six-legged Thoroughbred; his brother new and dewy carrion in the neighbors' onion patch; his wife: oh so sweet-skinned and vanilla-young and veiled at the altar, Zinfadel blush, doelike demure, Noël lips even in the midriff of spring -- then her, turning to him, terrible smile, propositioning his mouth with schoolgirl's plaits of shark teeth.

Stress, said the veteran. He spilled Turkish crumbs on his chest as he rolled his fifth cigarette.

If the ward in Brussels had wanted to catch its breath, then it seemed to have choked to death: there was no more talk of it. But at some point the topic had become a foreign one regardless. Irrelevant, too abstract; intangible. Immaterial to the things of much deeper distraction to the veteran: Packs of black dogs with smoking fur and human hands that left no tracks in mud or snow, horizon to horizon of enemy soldiers with bald pudding faces, rubbing elbow to elbow with allied soldiers with bald pudding faces, bloody coffee, crucifixion, monsoons of sulphur, doors that opened only into ogres' mouths, dirty and docile and watchful children that said nothing as they were sardined crackingly into furnaces and boilerrooms like far too much laundry, boa constrictors, army ants, neckties that turned to eels, brass buttons that turned to fat jungle spiders, floods of pitch, red-eyed oxen, snow composed of thistle and alkaline, rifles melting mudlike in his arms into purple, screaming, humid newborns, his own funeral procession with six pallbearing Satans.

When he began to refuse even porridge, the nurses spoonfed him.

What might they know of hags, he asked, witches? Banshees? Sleep things? Night things? Le croque-mitaine? He said often, when he jerked awake, he could not talk or move, and his eyes opened only a little -- just a little, just enough to see her next to him, reaching scabby and hideous -- though he could feel the evil force of her pushing down on his chest. Paralyzing him, he said. Like an elephant's foot.

The nurses told him gently no, no, that was simply one of his medicines; it kept him still at night, so that his legs could heal faster.

At this the veteran whipped his head backwards and away, mooing Nooooooo, didn't they understand? Did they not hear these stories, here in Belgium? That was what hags and banshees did: they waited until you were asleep, and then came, and magicked you to the feeble deadweight of the day of your birth; helpless.

Then, said the veteran, his storyteller's hands in flowery full-mast, porridge dribbling his beard, then, they pull your mouth open, wide open, with their scabby devil's hands. He yanked mulish at his beard, like it wasn't playing fair. And that is when they make you eat the dreams. The nightmares. Piece, by. Piece.

He fed himself terrible, invisible things, morsels of monster. He watched their faces forreactions with corrosive urgency.

Yes, the nurses said, yes, of course, they knew quite well. One pinched a beak out of a napkin and plucked the porridge from his beard.

He asked to be flipped over, at bedtime. Flipped fully, on his stomach. He explained that the banshee could not sit on his chest, then; perhaps that way he could breathe and then move, he explained. The nurses gave no response other than to oblige, shrugging to each other faintly; if nothing else, changing bandages at breakfast would be simpler.

Something about bandages: they crossbreed with the ones our own bodies make. And so they stick together, unnatural -- inbred -- and they hate us for it, they wish to punish us; this is why when we pull one bandage from another, they bite and pluck and sting (though, in fairness, this part, with the biting -- your body's hatred of you -- most every, all of us, most each of us all know). Removal, then, takes a very tender and wary technique -- wary, moreso than a safecracker, moreso like some shape or shade of aimless, desperate wood-thing, lost and needing, rolling their dice on an iced lake; patience; precision; like husking hand grenades, maybe; lip pinched in teeth to keep quiet against sour vinegar pricks of stirred-up scab -- wary technique that I, myself, had practiced and pigeonholed, invested in, and heavily, terribly heavily -- perhaps something like an elephant's foot.

Peeling peaches is no trial.

Something about my injury: It was my legs, mostly. Everything else, too, of course, including speech, and an unsound, unsteady head -- the last two, in which they gave wafer-thin chances of possible recovery. But my legs mostly. The both of them, on my arrival: chewed, baked red, couch leathery, cracked and black and dragonish, like Christmas roasts: Long-Term Patient: Near-guaranteed permanence of mutism. Near-guaranteed instability. Near-guaranteed invalidity. Invalidity. Incapacitation.

Two meters of air between two beds is a fantastic dream -- a hellish dream, when you are an invalid.

"Bed to bed" would not fit at all -- something more like Sun to Moon. Fantastic. Hellish. And more importantly: impossible. Impossible, but, for me -- me? -- we? we -- for us, the two of us; us; it was only time. Time, we needed; mostly. Us two: me, and the veteran; him. The veteran heavied and vulnerable with sleep, unconscious, prone, corkboard butterfly helpless, curled babyish and candlelight fragile with little shriveled dead skins of dried porridge still stuck in his uncropped purgatory beard -- feeble thing -- foul, healthy thing -- and his legs, mostly, his enviable injuries, smoothing pinkly like a peach, him and his unnatural, unfair, inhuman wholeness, unbelonging in there, the bastard -- the child -- the veteran; him.

It was him, then. It was the veteran all along. Not time; not "us;" most certainly not me: Moon, drunk by sun: perhaps like a pitcher of cream.

The veteran pulled me to him -- reached out florid, picturebook hands, magician's hands, hangman's hands, tying sailor's knots with urgent, corrosive tightness -- and he pulled me to him.

He did. All him.

Only half unwrapped, my arm, only half -- took over twenty minutes, at the absolute quickest, on all the goddamned clocks -- and with that, that uselessness, that hand, how could I have pulled him to me? Pulled him away? Pulled anything, much less pulled away? Impossible. Not with that thing. Sour pricks of open scabs, stubborn puffs of gauze, swollen skin red and wrathful like a mother hen. New skin, somewhere underneath, unready pink.

That hand could not have pulled. The veteran's, only: the veteran's, who saved me. The veteran the candlelight. The veteran who rescued me, from the burn ward in Belgium, the veteran the sun; my martyr. The veteran I stroked tenderly, so gently, from scalp to nape to mouth with my banshee's hand.

"Your mother's eyes," (his ear looked so soft and fine, so fetal, inches from my teeth, tearable, a sliver of pear) "self-stitched shut, like a scarecrow, with the strings of her violin. Her skin is split and cracked like dead, thirsty dirt, the crows have already found her, she is meaty-yellow with blisters; cysts. Your children are three-eyed wolves."

He was only partly awake, enough so to see the hag's hand. Even if his eyes were closed, though, he could feel it; could feel its texture, its intent. His whimpers were hot against my fingers as I tapped his lips to feed him.

"They are down, at the foot of your bed. You cannot move. They swallow you whole."

Until my release--upon proof of my mobility, and soundness, and speech--(until the veteran's transfer to the battle-trauma ward; in Brussels)--I made these visits to him. Nightly. It became easier, with time.

things I stole:

2011-07-05T16:00:00.000-07:00

-one (1) purple stuffed dolphin, from a neighborhood girl, from her bedroom during a birthday sleepover

- one (1) copy of The Berenstain Bears: In the Dark, from Ms. Emerson's second grade homeroom

- a pencil sharpener from the school bookstore, made of buttery soft plastic, shaped like a dog with a human smile

- the library's biketire roll of Scotch tape [I was trying to fix the pencil sharpener.]

- packs of spearmint gum from my mother's brakeless Mercury Tracer

- a half-empty tin of Altoid mints from my mother's brakeless Mercury Tracer

- a pouch of fine-cut Grizzly chewing tobacco from my mother's brakeless Mercury Tracer

- fake pearl earrings, from my mother

- Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones, from the school library

- a box of apple juice from an unwatched crate in the cafeteria

- $2.45 in quarters and dimes scattered on my father's nightstand, next to his silver reading glasses, right by his hypothermia-blue Bic lighter, close to his splayed-down copy of something or other by Mario Puzo, his caved-in pack of Marlboro Lights

- My father's hypothermia-blue Bic lighter

- three (3) Lisa Frank pencils from the girl who sat in front of me, who would cry during thunderstorms

- five (5) of her erasers, mango-colored hearts, blimp lips, a butterfly. [They were those cheap chalky rocky ones that would leave big skidmarks all over your paper. So you'd try to erase those, too, but of course that was always a stupid plan, I tore one of my spelling tests in half.]

- the $10 bill Mrs. Dalesandro left on her desk

- at least two (2) dozen (12) No. 2 pencils, from the boy who sat on my left, whose father was a cop, who said his father had shot fifty men as dead as doorknobs, who threatened that he would get his father to come and shoot you, too, right between the eyes, if you didn't hand over the kickball, or give him a turn with the Bop-It, stop being so mean to him in Battleship. [Mrs. Dalesandro thought he was the one who stole the ten bucks, I still don't know why. He was suspended for a week. At some point in the middle of that I was called to the whiteboard, me and two other kids, we were gutting the class's math curve, they called us up to the whiteboard to fill in less-than greater-than problems. And at some point in the middle between me unsnapping the marker with its fruity sulphur smell and Mrs. Dalesandro telling me "Well, that was a very good try!", at some point between these things I remember coming to the uncomforting conclusion that I guess it must have been God. God did it, for justice, is what happened.]

- at least two [too] hundred [fuckin' many] sheets of loose-leaf paper from the boy who sat on my left, whose father scared me, who I hated because his father scared me, the boy I frequently and happily crucified at length for stuttering over his 'p's and 'k's and 'm's, the boy I'd bait on the playground with the kickball or Bop-It, who would threaten and follow, exhausted, asthmatic, whose inhaler was a regular hostage of mine and others, who would finally unwrap his throat into some animal sound between a sob and a bark and would lunge, who was slow, whose pinkies and thumbs I'd snatch up stupid and cruel and steer and torque and twist like I was cranking a jack-in-the-box.

- a Durex condom from my uncle's wallet

- Twix, Reese's Pieces, Bubble Yum, orange Tic-Tacs from gas stations; and books of matches, crude postcards, lighter fluid, M&M's, air-fresheners shaped like pine trees and Hawaiian leis that all had the identical scent of boiled sugar and ozone, Mello Yello, Fun Dip, a German shepherd bobblehead, a pair of sunglasses that bulged outwards oily and fat like horsefly eyes that I broke on the basketball court within an hour of taking, highlighters, a Harley Davidson bandana, keychains with tiny stuffed animals, notecards, batteries, mints, pens, gum, caffeine pills and powders packaged lush and thickly bright ike foreign explosives. [One of the clerks was very visibly a burn victim. She would always smile and wave when I came in, and when I left.]

- a plastic red jug of gasoline, about half-full, and a bottle of lawnmower oil, from a stranger's driveway

- a crowbar from a nearby construction site

- a cheap switchblade, 8'' long, with initials "G.P." in permanent marker, from a nearby construction site

- most of a hummingbird, from a neighborhood cat, that was incapable of dying for eighty minutes but could scream quite well for seventy

- at least twenty 2x4s from a nearby construction site

- a box of baking soda and bottle of air freshener from a grocery store, to remove the smoke smell from clothing

- packs of spearmint gum from my mother's Jeep Grand Cherokee

- a .38 caliber bullet from my mother's desk

- a .38 caliber from my mother's closet [for twenty minutes.]

- a Camel cigarette, from my stepfather. [When they had songwriter friends over, for moonshine and Stouffer's lasagna, I ducked out to the backyard and tucked down by a healthy little murmur of honeysuckle. I cupped my hand protectively over the lighter and cracked it, biting down uncertainly on the filter in an attempt to hold it steady, with terrible clumsiness but hey, it was lit, and with that accomplished I took a moment to collect myself. I briefly wondered if the little firefly glow was visible from anywhere. I shrugged the anxiety aside, though, and then shrugged quite literally: I let my neck roll very slowly to the side and drank my chin upwards, and backwards - artful - in my sincerest rendition of a Soviet femme fatale; I set myself. I steadied. Then I pulled, hard and deep, dragging on the fragile back of the Camel with the granite grimace of the dignified damned, pulling hard with organic, untempered, magnificent cowboy bravado, pulling deep, before exuberantly puking every fucking pint of my fucking guts up from their putrid fucking roots, all over the ground and grass and healthy fucking murmur of fucking honeysuckle. I opened up like a septic Mount Vesuvius. I have no idea where it all came from. There was a very generous pile of turkey sandwich and fruit punch Gatorade already waiting for my knees when I finally doubled over, a little less femme fatale and bit more epileptic leapfrog, for all the world and neighborhood to hear bawling and squirming in my own stomach acid salad like a basset hound that had nosed into the drain cleaner. My family, as far as I know, still thinks this was food poisoning.]

- inestimable CDs I didn't want, and DVDs I didn't watch, from electronic stores

- an adjustable hinged knee brace from Academy Sports

- a violin

- one (1) Polaroid picture of my mother [a teen, tired, crossing mudflats alone. She's wearing overalls twice her size and age that are caked and flaking brown, she's tucked the bottoms into her already-overrun boots with dim and pilgrim optimism. Her hair is a different color than I know it to be. It's lighter, much lighter, more brown, not quite my brown but almost, noosed up loose on the back of her neck, wonderfully wind-chewed. She is mid-stride and her hand is half-mast against the sun as she squints into the camera. At first glance, when I was younger, this was where the photo ended for me - girl in boots, freckled and acned, in the middle of chores, maybe, too much sun and no smile in sight because of it. I see her a little better now. At first glance I overlooked the defensive dip of her chin, the bite-stripped fingernails, the tiny swells of tendon in the ribs of her jaw that meant her teeth were vaulted shut. I overlooked her hand raised - not just to block the sun - but also bunching up and inwards, coiling, withdrawing, fermenting very gradually into the blueprints of a fist. She is staring into the camera from only ten yards but at least fourteen years away], one that I stole from her mother.

Who the hell is Ezra Pound?

2011-05-04T21:51:00.001-07:00

April is the time I get uprooted the most, I become clipped and restless, I try on bad habits like I'm buying new shoes. It's lively but anxious. Mostly it's the watery sandy-itchiness that gets back in the tic-tac-toed scar tissue of my baaaaaad knee (think: handlebar moustache! waggly eyebrows! eggshell waifs gagged and bound to traintracks!) I guess because it's thawing out?; I guess it likes winter better than I do. In winter it's pretty polite, it only gets creaky and whiny the day before snow.

(though in my head, when I'm thinking about it I mean, sitting in class or terrible-colored bathrooms or at redlights, I can't help pushing a pencil eraser/fingertip/coffee cup down through the denim into the bubbly numb gap in the cartilage, where the surgeon worked, [two of them actually], in my head I see it looking not much at all like a thing that would creak but instead very squirmy, pocket-linty, like gristle trimmings on a salaryman's dinner plate.) Up til April though it's pretty well-behaved.

This year in the middle of researching Civil War medicine was when it hit room temperature. I tried folding and propping it at any possible agreeable angle in the library and ended up kicking the shit out of some poor guy's ankles. ("Oh-- fuck, sorry man.") I'll be honest: the impact was refreshing. The research paper had come aground way sooner than I'd have liked and there's no doubt it showed in my shoulders and eyebrows. It did warm things, hate to say, for the cavewoman in me, taking it out on a stranger like that. That must have showed too since he stuffed his bag a couple minutes later and took off for another spot on the other side of the bookshelves.

(I'll be honest: I liked that it got me the table for myself.)

There was an unforeseen abundance of roughly six hundred goddamn pages dedicated to amputation alone, since apparently there were (are?) different (kinds?)(techniques?)(styles?) (fuck.) One very informatively called the flap method was preferred by the Union army because it involved less blood loss, required less bandages, and could apparently be performed in as little as two minutes. A kind of sleeve was tailored from the skin several inches below the necessary point of removal, then split twice down the sides; one of the assistants would hold these out of the way while another one bullied the main artery shut and while the surgeon surgeoned. Then the sleeve would be folded over very neatly, quite like the chromosomes had lined up thirty years previous with that exact intent in mind, buttoning up the drooling pocket where two minutes earlier had been potential for musket-loading and letter-writing and apple-peeling, and poker-playing and lover-loving and grudging masturbation, but through the alchemy of ether and salmon-shaped bonesaws could become a pink nub and delirious meat. The sleeve would be folded up very neatly, like a fortune cookie.

"... but when performed poorly, the cleft bone in these amputations would continue to grow, and in time begin to protrude through the stump."

Up til this point I'd been enjoying pretzel sticks.

For all my talk of taking instinct over intellect*, this picture of a very individual and physical mutiny is pretty horrifying. I can't find any particular roots for the fear though. Invasions of the Bodysnatchers was not one of the movies I bandited out of bed to eavesdrop on from the hallway, (I still haven't seen it actually, or even got much a handle on the plot, beyond the involvement of bodies and their otherworldly abduction by means of perhaps snatching), I've never had a seizure or sleepwalked or anything like that. The closest it gets would probably be the scene in Alice in Wonderland I once had a nightmare about, the one where she found that her shoulders were nowhere to be found: all she could see, when she looked down, was an immense length of neck, which seemed to rise like a stalk out of a sea of green leaves that lay far below her.

'What CAN all that green stuff be?' said Alice. 'And where HAVE my shoulders got to? And oh, my poor hands, how is it I can't see you?' She was moving them about as she spoke, but no result seemed to follow, except a little shaking among the distant green leaves. For all she knows she could be spoonfeeding heroin to the white kitten.

When I was younger I was much better seduced by the Hatter and Cheshire Cat (who wasn't?), but I've come to find Alice more and more interesting, I think because I like her the least. I think because Alice is an invader. She talks very politely with the Pigeon and Mock Turtle, but she HAS tasted eggs, certainly,' said Alice, who was a very truthful child; 'but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know.'

'I don't believe it,' said the Pigeon; 'but if they do, why then they're a kind of serpent, that's all I can say.' She's invaded the nest, and she's talking with her food; Alice is a cannibal and doesn't even notice. And that something as animal and primitively simple as breakfast could be usurped around into something destructive even by accident gets at me as not even a notch beneath horrifying. ("Oh-- fuck, sorry man.")

([These are the things that get into my head in April.])

I'd like to think April's cruel with good intentions-- that it thaws the cavewoman out just so I've got time to recivilize her by the end of July. I'd like to think there's some other better method though; I'd like to find, just above her head, some necessary point of removal; I'd like to eschew any offer of ether and hold up my hand in request to whoever may be standing there watching and say 'bonesaw'

[*see: "sour grapes"]

You murdered me on horseback

2011-04-06T05:27:00.001-07:00

of that I am certain, though if while I was the courier soldier or the barebacked jailbreaker or the drunkard jockey with the colic heart there is no telling. The horses could, if they could.

You might have watched the fog downhill as carefully as a deafling for the gold flutter of buttons on a blue coat. You may have already known, but still overlooked, that you would almost certainly hear the horse first. You may have hidden in a treeline of pine or breathy cypress. You cut camp with a bowie knife. You had no pot for boiling snow; you had left your wool blanket for the fevering Georgian boy with six sisters; you damned yourself bitterly for both of these things. You shined the newborn leather of your suckling boots whenever movement was necessary. You crunched seeds of raw coffee, one at a time, with such desperate care and veneration that in your mouth they became an almost butter. You left the meal of them in the lining of your cheeks to ring them with feeling. Your fire was ailing and smokeless but warm enough for baking wild eggs in the ashes; this saved you; your hunger would have smothered your need for quiet to instead snipe overhead at fat squirrels or potshot careless foxes; you would never have found blackbird and jackdaw nests if your boyhood was not spent burgling orchards. I came to you at last, the third morning, with some message of some importance; your parchment skin and knobby meating of your spine had become witchdoctor's toys. You had polished holes into your boots. Your arm and the butt of your Whitworth struck no familiar harmonies; the wood of the rifle made no place for the cords of your shoulder; both croaked and rebelled from the cold.

I came to you with the senile blue frown of my cap pulled low to my nose and fogging from the mouth, the thoroughbred gutting uphill over branches and fogging from the mouth. You watched through your brass scope and it welded a ring of snow around your eye. Your knuckle curled around the tongue of the Whitworth while you breathed in the maybe pine or cypress; you curled low and light your quiet body like the pages of a burnt bible; your thumb snapped back the hammer and you saw the horse's ears twist around like lips with the sudden taste of medicine; you braced your aching arm for the rifle's coming kick; you squeezed and shut your eyes; you opened them and watched me claw and heave backwards, you watched me slither into snow, you saw the gold buttons flutter and scatter and spark like a smashed oil lantern. The horse gutted uphill, fogging from the mouth, and carried past you, without us.

tribe

2011-04-05T08:21:00.001-07:00

The first thing we did we made sure Hammy couldn't make it there, you can't give much anything to Hammy, he's one of those whimpery simpery leaky types who the doc must have forgot to cut his cord. Munga gave him bad directions, though - took care of that.

I got off with almost a whole pack of Lucky Strikes from the apartment nextdoor. When he came over to fuck the babysitter Mr. Rizzo left his door unlocked, so I just ducked right in and took them up off his coffeetable, it was half under a stack of poem books but it only took me a couple minutes to romance it out. But when I did I knocked over the Chinese takeout box sitting there as an ashtray, it looked like at least, it spilled Black and Mild wrappers and sweet and sour sauce all over but the place still looked mostly the same so I'm not worried. We used Kittychop's lighter and smoked them in the clubhouse.

I told how there was a couple switchblades out on the coffeetable too, a very shivery-good Mexican picklock long as my hand, and maybe a trapdoor stiletto I thought that it was, and Irv said I should have taken one of those too. Kittychop said forget that, I should have taken the both, so the one couldn't turn around at me later to try and get the first one back. Munga said fuck that, weren't good smokes good enough? and that the both of them, Irv and Kittychop, needed to stop thinking like spiccing sandmonkey kleptos before they got the turn-out-your-pockets out there somewhere. They were probably wondering what klepto meant so they didn't say anything. Munga the brains of us, he knows things like that. When we ask too much about what he means with some of what he says he professors up some other thing to say we don't know, like mongoloid philistine zipperheads or nigger-noggin bourgeoisie. Sure wish I'd taken that Mexican picklock.

Tut doesn't talk much since his head doesn't line up very right. When he was younger he tried clearing out for his aunt's place in the suburbs and got as far as his fire escape when he fell and busted his jaw in three spots, it healed up all wrong. Next to Munga he's probably the smartest of us. Once what he did was steal a bunch of Colt 45 from the grocery store, what he did was take some clear packing tape and one of those cardboard 12-pack boxes of Coca-Cola, and two six packs of Colt 45, then Tut tore open the box of Coke and took out all the cans and tore off the plastic on the 45s and piled the cans in there and taped it all up. Irv and me were there with him. We almost got caught. Tut went up to go buy the Coke box, since if he slunk around too long he'd get suspicious. So me and Irv slid in behind him nice and tidy to hide up the cans. We had just started hiding them behind the Wheaties boxes and granola when someone came up around the aisle, but me and Irv still had armsful of the stuff. So Irv shoved me over with his free hand at the end of the aisle, right there were some big Hefty garbage bins or something like that to hide up behind. Irv shoved a hand over my mouth and whispered nice and icy if I give us away he will snap my fucking neck like a candycane. Don't think for a second I take that sort of thing. I shoved his hand off and whispered fuck you, zipperhead, before I run your twiggy dick through a bandsaw. Irv took one of the cans and came down like he was playing Whack-a-Mole with it right in my eye and holy shit did that hurt. I dropped all my Coke and grabbed for his ears, I ended up only getting his shirt and the side of his hair but I still managed to headbutt the shape out of his nose. And then believe me we were into it.

The guy at the end of the aisle comes up, he's the manager it turns out, and sees me and Irv going de la Hoya all over each other. We stop, and we all look at each other. He stood there looking at the cans of Coke rolling on the floor and us two looking up at him and he said "What the hell are you kids doing?" and had us put the cans back in the soda aisle. Then he told us to go home. We met up with Tut two corners down and drank some of the 45s on the way to the clubhouse.

Tut's been doing research and figured out how to do tattoos himself, he's got his dad's calligraphy pen grinded up to a point and India ink. Kittychop said he will trade a pair of panties he stole from some blonde fox's laundry for a picture of the Playboy bunny on his arm. Tut snorts because we all know Kittychop just stole them from his sister but Tut draws it for him anyway. Irv got some Popov vodka from somewhere and we all have some to keep the sting down. And to disinfect, Munga says, while Tut is drawing him up a big roaring lion on his back. I don't know if maybe Munga was moving around too much or if maybe Tut just wasn't as good with a pen as his dad, or what, but it didn't look like any lion I've ever seen.

Cicada Said

2011-03-14T11:15:00.000-07:00

We were insects the all of us do you remember that? Waxy glitter crayon colors? Whirring grooming gardens? Hooks and hives and venom. We were insects we hated children.

Summer came and we hated them in hundreds: sucking biting screams-at-sundown, legs like lunatics kicking like rowboats dragging like bullwhips like buzzsaws, all over bare feet sticky backs naked necks. Summer came and we ate their ice cream out of the dirt.

We tunneled beggardly blind needy in armpits in earlobes, (they could never feel us then - we were invisible when we wanted), we built altars in the fleshy bends of knees. We sunk thin and righteous like doctors' shots like crusaders' steel and it was there we were healed, it was there we were whole. We were home, then. We stayed and lived quiet as gems until drunken uncles found us with the red ends of cigarettes.

Summer went and our skins did too, the all of us we turned into other things. We were scratchy candy wrappers scraps of comic books we were litter in driveways and windowsills. We were shell casings on the sidewalk. Summer went and the children (we hated them) they crushed us under sneakers on the way to school.

Baby Rube Has Gone Off-Call

2011-02-16T11:59:00.001-08:00

Well I guess what I'd first like to know-- that is, what I'm asking, being-- how you all come to want me here answering your questions when me, I had not much say in anything to start with. I just help around the office. Keeping things clean and such as that. The Sheriff, he taught me how to fix good coffee just right, the secret there being to add a little cinnamon and not say a thing about it to a soul. If you don't tell nobody then the taste is Very distinct and fine, but if you mention just like oh well I added a little pinch of cinnamon, then that's all anyone's going to taste and you'll never be let near that pot again. Do it just exactly this way Reub, Sheriff says to me. It turns the flavor very distinct and fine Sheriff said. And him giving me my own uniform to work in in the daytime. But more than that I know how to clean the cells without help, though that is mostly only using a rag and mop and bottles of cleaner on the puke and pee and sometimes blood there in the drunk tank, if you'll pardon me talking of ugly things like that.

The most I ever really did, though this being something I wasn't supposed to, this being that once when we had a boy come get drug in for having a knife at school. Some such thing. He shouldn't have been there. The Deputy he had him drug up there by the desk, and sat him down to ask him things, but Deputy didn't put cuffs on him, see we do things different down there. Sheriff says We operate different than them big boys upstate, and when he says different he means better, and when he says boys he's meaning you all, no disrespect. Sheriff, him, you can't always take seriously all the time, Sheriff being something of a bullhead. But we had this boy with the knife in there and I was up front emptying the trashcans and Deputy is asking him all kinds of things. And I am taking my sweet time because it is not very often that I am up front at the same time that these things are going on. And this being a young fellow, we don't have him cuffed, only Letting the whole weight of the situation keep him seated, what Sheriff calls it, when they're still young enough like this boy that trick works very nice. And Deputy has his eyes down on his paper and not much looking when the boy jumps up like he got springs in him and grabs over the desk for Deputy's pistol. And Deputy he gives a shout and falls plop on his back like a baby bird and I am right there with the boy's arm pushing in. And I am pulling it up and around like he is a horse who won't sit easy. I say to him son I have your arm up right here in quite a way. I told him son, if you keep on this kicking and so on then I will must to break it, he says Break it then. Sheriff he must have heard the racket from the storage room and come up right about then, and he's there right on time to see me pop the boy's arm into something useless. And he starts yelling quite fierce No, no, no, no Reub. Goddammit. He come up and he shove me off the boy and almost fall on the desk himself, me being the bigger and older of us, and Sheriff very much sick with the whole situation as he was. Goddammit Reub you big muley retard. And he buffs me away and the boy, he's still bent over the desk, and rolls over on his side quite sluggardly like by popping it I turned his arm into a very terrible heavy thing, and he is screaming for his parents and lawyer, and he is spitting and drooling and cursing quite ugly and crying wide open all over Deputy's papers. And I don't even know what else.

That was the most I ever done. And for that, I got what we call the Siberia... sir?

Begging your pardon?

... no, sir, I didn't hit the Sheriff after he said that. Why you ask?

... Well sir I wouldn't say he said it if it wasn't what he said. I'm a good hand at remembering what folks say.

... well if you say so sir. Do I keep going?

Alright. Well.

They give me what we call the Siberia treatment for awhile. Siberia being a very far-off place with no people you understand. Anytime someone come up into the office, even just the milkman, especially even when it was the parents of that boy who I broke his arm, and them being quite eager to have words with me, even then I stay in the back. Sheriff he said Just keep your nose clean and don't worry about it Reuben, him saying this while busy with other things and not much looking at me. He does not much say my name all the way like that. I can't remember the last time he did. So I tell him, I say sorry Casey and he says Sheriff, Reub. Just keep your nose clean alright? he said to me. Don't be a baby over it. And I didn't press at him any, me trying to be grateful you see, because understand I knew he was taking on awful kinds of water from what I done to that boy. He didn't have to you understand. Anyone else, they would have just cut losses and had me shipped off to anywhere instead of paying out the nose to a lawyer, but Sheriff, instead he gave up a lot of say in how he run things down at his office in keeping me on. You don't know how big a thing that is for him to give.

And the reason he done it, you understand-- the Sheriff me and him are-- in actuality, you understand, on paper-- me, and him, we grew up together. We're brothers. He's my little brother. We try and keep it quiet from most folks you understand, what since People might think he's playing favorites. Which considering how he fixed things up for me with the boy with the arm I think he might have been playing them anyway. He run into trouble himself awhile back, with a colored family from around here, in a same sort of way you see. Sheriff he was just Defending himself in the line of duty and people trying to say he didn't need to shoot that boy who come at him. They say He was unarmed and probably didn't even charge you, but Sheriff he told Wouldn't charging me with no weapon make him all the more crazy, and yes he did charge me very aggressively, unless you want to ask him for his side of things. Sheriff got out of that one okay too. He is too sharp to let people cheat the best of him and you better believe I am happy he was sharp for me too, and him not even wanting any credit for it. He can be a bullhead but he is very generous without asking for any pat on the back you understand.

Then, when they come in to change everything around, they being you all up here upstate, things were more Strictly enforced and Regulated which included cuffs on the wrists of the boys who didn't belong in there. The other big thing though, this one being more important, was that the upstate sent us a lady to keep records and documents on us and other certain things. Miss Francine is a very pretty lady but I don't need to tell you that since you all have met her by now I am pretty sure. We never had women working and we never had colored folks working in there either so Miss Francine caused quite a stir you understand. On top of her being wonderful to watch and listen to you understand.

Though Sheriff was all kinds of eaten up over having some new colored lady come charging in like that, and mixing up in his business and all, him liking much more the faces that he is used to. You don't know how big a thing that is. But when she comes in and introduce herself to us, and her being so clear and not sneaky and very polite about what she was doing there, we could not help but like her. And Miss Francine already very warm to the area. She said she Visited a lot when she was younger her grandparents mostly, and so she did not make too much city of herself to us. And we could not help but like her.

By this time I was out of Siberia, and having trash to empty and coffee to make I got the chance to talk to Miss Francine very often and me I always tried to stretch the chances by emptying the trashes very slow. She said You can just call me Franky but I never did. No thank you Miss Francine. Me, I got quite a beetle in my boot over that sort of thing. Proper ladies like Miss Francine they should hang onto their proper names long as they can and not a minute less, no thank you ma'am. But then she asks Well do you care if I call you Ruby? and I say okay. I don't mind that sort of thing since most folks they call me Reub to begin with, that just being the first part of Reuben. Folks they seem comfortable with that. It makes them comfortable with me and they smile a little at each other when they call me that instead of something stuffed up like Reuben, which I'm not all that keen on if I'm honest with you. And Miss Francine being so sweet to me and nice-looking too.

I don't know what kind of work she does exactly except there were lots of papers and she had to talk with Sheriff very often. About figures and policy from upstate up here. And things like that. Sheriff says It's all gobbledy-gook to me unless I have a little coffee in me, and he offers to make her some with the pot in his office which is a French press where they can finish talking and Miss Francine she looks at him for awhile and smiles very strange at him, and she says Okay but just for awhile. And now with the new Regulations now we have to keep Sheriff's door shut all the time.

I do not like this because doors are not see-through like bars on the drunk tank and so I do not know what kind of place I am walking into even if I have been there before. This is another important thing. I am not used to doors being closed and so when I went for Sheriff's trash can I open the door not thinking anything of it and I wish I did, but I got the door open and see Miss Francine sitting in Sheriff's chair with her legs open up wide like hornet wings, her knees up by her ears almost. And Sheriff's dogged way down on the floor like folks do when they drop their glasses. For a second I'm thinking that's what this is, that Sheriff just dropped something where Miss Francis was sitting, and he's looking for it, but then I see their clothes are all mostly gone and I see that he's loving her. Not sensible though. Not in the normal way like you'd think, though. First of all he got her all naked only to give her his jacket to wear while he was loving her. And where's the sense in that? You'll excuse my ugly talk here. This is just what I'm seeing. She had his uniform jacket on but not done up or nothing, and she has her hand wrapped around the back of his neck, and Miss Francine she is pulling him to her like a waterpump.

She got Sheriff's pistol in the other hand and it's pointed at his head where he can't see, and she's looking down at him very strange all the time. Not like you would think, either. Not the way ladies do in those private books if you'll excuse me talking of ugly things. Miss Francine, she wasn't looking down the way ladies do at boys they're sweet on, and she wasn't looking aggravated or queasy like the ladies in the private books either. Scared is more like it. Yes. I think more scared.

And angry too, like she's wanting to hit him, but she's scared of doing that, too. Like when you see that snake laid out on your porch getting himself warm or a spider on your shirt, or a yellow jacket rattling around your ears and smelling up on your sweat in summer, and you want terrible to mash it crush it kill it with your boot your hand your newspaper, but for the most part usually you just set there and wait for it to be done and go on away. That's the look she had on. Real patient but only cause you have to be.

Miss Francine, that's the look she had on her, and I don't at all think high things of it. That's not a look should be there when you're loving.

Sheriff he don't see me and for a minute Miss Francine don't either, but once she does she looks up at me and I can see now that she got tears on her face and Sheriff must be hurting her I just know it I just know it. And then I am grabbing a head full of hair and Sheriff is screaming What in the hell Reub goddammit and Miss Francine, she has the gun pointed up at him still, but trying to cover herself up too, and she is still crying without making any noises just looking scared. Sheriff is still screaming Goddammit Reub you numb little shit until my hands are around under his chin, and I can smell the cinnamon coffee he drank while he's breathing hard at me and I can smell something else I can only guess about. And then his the smell's gone because Sheriff he's not breathing much.

Oh, Ruby. Miss Francine she is not looking at me but at Sheriff's gun and then at Sheriff on the floor by his trashcan. It's my name she's saying, but she won't look at me, just the pistol is what she's looking at and the place Sheriff had been between up in her. And she dropped the gun and covers her fingers up over her pretty face like she thinks it'll go to pieces, and she said Oh Ruby Ruby Oh Ruby over and over, just like that. Over and over. I swear to God all the goodness was pulled right out of me. Oh Ruby.

I wanted to ask her... begging your pardon?

... no sir, I didn't know that. Miss Francine never told me she had a brother. Much less that he'd passed away. I'm sorry to hear that.

... I didn't know that either, sir. That's awful. Some officers just abuse what they got. You boys catch the one who shot him?

I Watch Your Hands When You Talk

2011-01-31T09:18:00.000-08:00

Were you put together backwards, was your skull glowing hot with lightbulb filament before even your heart clicked on? I wonder. I won't say so, since it's prying, but yes of course I do wonder. Was the excess heat siphoned off through your mouth like rabid champagne, crammed dripping into Mason jars, kept and left to dust in the basement? Did you warp the wood of the walls of your nursery? (I wonder.) Your pillowcase must be covered in scorchmarks.

The vital heat in you is steam, and me - mine being smoke, there's not a lot can be done that can keep us from going the same places, and there's not much wrong with that or I hope anyway. In theory, anyway. I hope. Smoke is distractible sometimes. It's known to linger in lungs and the barrels of guns and crematoriums, it's seduced to licorice mischief by mirrors. Smoke is led around by the nose, by a breeze or breath, but as a vital heat if it's fed then it rises just fine just like any else, even steam, (I hope.)

When we get there I will listen to what you say and I will say things too and though I will try not to pry I also will. Sorry. I will pry and I will singe myself and be sorry for that. You are big strange money in the belly of a kettle, and it hatches a magpie in me. (Sorry.) I will singe myself until I know better but mostly though I will listen. I will listen, and while I listen I will watch your hands until (I can look you in the face) until I can know your words better, and that way I can hear you better when you talk, and know better what you're saying, and not shrink and peel away from the booming Dresden dynamo of the wires of your head, like the rest of us do. I will listen but I will also watch for fists.

She is a thing of the hothouse,

2011-01-26T08:31:00.001-08:00

syrupy warm and soiled, scalp scraped down into a herringbone braid with the aid of a bathroom mirror. She is a thing of staying and keeping. Words can wait. The lines of her palms read like animal tracks, and were she to try and have them read they likely wouldn't be; not that she would. Foreign coin is no smell that's alive and well in the pockets of her houndstooth coat.

At the age of nine she decided to be a figure-skater and informed her parents, and while they gathered medical papers and insurance potpourri to sign her up for classes they discovered she was born twice: once, when she was born, and again when the certificate clerk was chemically flogged by the perfume of a liquid-hipped secretary. At the courthouse she watched anxious and ununderstanding while her parents slouched and flexed and bristled like wicker at the desk attendant who was everything but impressed. She said so in her posture and pucker. She was wrinkled all over like treebark and butcher paper and had a jaw like a sink full of dishes, and was doing everything in her power to show how very utterly unmoved she was because she knew that that too was a kind of power.

And she was unmoved, very utterly, except for the toffee-soft lumps of guilt that slunk under her tongue and stuck to the ribs of her teeth at the look on the face of the little girl: covered up to her nose by the counter, clawing it in a boxer's clinch, staring up at her hard and terrible with salt and quinine. The iceskates were pulled up to her sapling chest, too hard and with too little arm, like she wanted to attack her with them.

Instead of wrapping them and giving them away, for a gift, for little cousin Claire's birthday - which is what her parents would have liked and told her to do, over apology ice cream, on the ride back, her letting hers melt and wiping it quietly on the leather carseats when no one was looking - she sat up late after lights-out, with her back to the bedroom door and looped and noosed the laces into each other. Then she tightened them and noosed them again, and then tighter, and then again, until the skates were unusable, until someone would have had to dissect them like the skins of Siamese twins and ruin them because once she had them so noosed and so molded and mongreled to each other, that much, that tight, there was no one who could uproot that one from this one and still be able to use them for figure-skating no way no how no chance, except maybe God.

That made her suspicious. She waited, a moment, for the door to bust open like a thunderlit Black Cat and splinter inward behind her and crush her like a peach, or for the window to crack wide and hungry and for an unseen thing to begin sucking the air and toys and furniture and her from the entire room and to gobble her up, but if God was watching, it was without much interest.

She tucked her brand new skates between her mattress and its frame, up near her pillow. A kind of dreamcatcher for herself, she thought, maybe, to keep around just in case, unseeing the wet scrapes and pink leaks on her palms.

Ransom Notes from God

2010-12-26T00:05:00.000-08:00

We were late in getting back to Marcel's and that was my fault and did that make you angry? No don't answer. You and me we both know I kept you waiting. We blew on our mugs of microwaved tea and whittled bananas into our cornflakes and the weatherman said True blue skies all day, alllllll day long, friends and neighbors, with just a smidge of fog in the evening, and a nice fresh breeze coming in from the west while thrusting his hips like a drunkard god as if it was he himself magicianing the wind down on us all from the west, friends and neighbors, all day, allllll day long, him and his dandelion haircut. But you shook your head and kept your eyes in your bowl and said you knew better than that, because you smelled all the clouds swelling up like chef's blisters and the thunder clearing its throat from not too far away and I know, I know, I should have listened. That was dumb I know. I know better than that.

So even when you were all set for Marcel's, all primed, all propped up broad and lofty like a mainsail against the window in your Irish linen shirt and good waiter's shoes and talc, I was still flipping furniture for my sneakers. You know you could have gone on ahead. Before it started coming down, I mean, I would have caught up I'm pretty sure, you could have gone on ahead, you and me we both know you don't handle storms so good and you know for a fact there was no chance I'd have an umbrella for the both or even the one of us. I can't hold onto them. They end up at the bank or bus stop or grocery store. I like to donate them to chance, I like to think. Three dozen umbrellas at least that I've paid for or been given as gifts or dragged from the shed crooked and leathery like fossilized bats and I can't use a single one, none, they're all in hiding. That gets on your nerves I know. Even when you joke about it it gets on your nerves I know.

Once it started coming down, I mean really coming down outside, you just kept waiting by the pictureframe window next to the front door, in your linen and shoes and talc not saying a word not a single one and all propped up broad and lofty like Custer's flag. You could have gone on ahead. Outside the windchimes and lawnchairs were throwing tantrums and I could hear it the whole time, me trying very hard not to look at you, trying to unpretzel my fingers to knot up my laces keeping my head low and all doubled up over my feet like I'd been gutwounded.

Some of your neighbors the ones with the uncut lawn, the ones who called the cops on themselves when they found sneaky little gremlins of pot growing in their morning glories and baby's breath, I ran into them the other night at the gas-n-go. Their kids are both talking now. These neighbors they helped me turn down my cigarettes by offering to pay for them and they asked what your violin case was doing out with the rest of the junk on garbage day, Tuesday, no maybe it was the Tuesday before last, they weren't so sure, and I'm not going to lie, that kind of made me scared for you. For you, and at you. Not of you but at you, there's a difference there I think, say it out loud and it hits your teeth harder and cocks your tongue like a Winchester. I'm not scared of you, but for you. I'm not scared of you, but at you. The violin case though terrifies me.

I know it was my fault we were late in getting back and that made you angry, but you didn't say anything, not a single word not a single one and I should have listened. I know. When they come in the truck early early Tuesday morning and stop and wonder at themselves who in the hell would throw out something like that, it's perfectly nice, except for the case being leather and getting rained on like that, when you hear them you can just keep on walking there's no need to turn around. That's just me back in the fog, telling you not to worry, it's alright, go on ahead with a chamomile hand at the ache of your back because you and me we both know you don't handle storms so good.

But that must be a trick of the fog because the whole time all I'm thinking is no wait, hey stop, come back, hey hey what's the rush? wait wait wait wait for me and pulling and ripping and mauling at your shirttail like it's what's taking you from me.

Secrets About Washerwomen

2010-12-15T12:26:00.001-08:00

The last time I hummed was while riding the bus in the balmy mouth of May, tucked between an Italian man and fleecy schoolchildren. I stood as steady as I was able, elbow cocked outward and upward in the appropriate capital "L." My chin was tucked in polite contemplation. Sweat and cigarsmoke and laundry detergent made the skin above my nose crease.

The driver had the radio turned to a local station, something that's become something else by now, and a song came on that had played at my brother's wedding. I had been maybe six at the time (had shredded my dress in the church hedges) (had smeared it with mud, like warpaint, while chasing after garden things) and as a young and selfish thing had completely ignored my brother and his bride. I couldn't even say the color of the bouquet. The sound, though - the wedding band, playing that song, the boys from the nearby highschool with their untrimmed guitarstrings dangling like the snaggled beards of medicinemen - that stayed, somehow. It came crawling out after twenty year's incubation creaky and thick and unsummoned.

I don't hum but I can feel the want of it rolling warmly from its sleeping place; or not quite the want of it, though maybe. More the want that was behind it. I can feel it like tremors through a telephone wire while I'm stitching my work slacks, or peeling potatoes, or hammering new limbs onto the coffeetable. Not only the wedding song but other songs too. Sometimes it feels wrenching and unnatural. Hot honey poured onto a Greek god's harp melted down into an ointment ore.

Sometimes it is the pinprick of pizzicato. One day, a full choir.

In the indecisive days of winter when the spring brings a limbo of itself, maybe-yes-warm-mostly-no days, seashore days, it is wrenching and rending enough to double me over with its morphine mourning and glittering gutter. It's those days that I drop my knives, or bowls, or French china, and take the kitchensink as a kickstand.

Afterwards I write one of my letters to myself. If there's time. These all end with Stay remorseless, Stay in love, though none are ever signed.

This morning I stood barefoot, on the wooden porch, to force my blisters to breathe. I ate two mangoes without mercy. Their sugars took root in my face and hands like warpaint.

It is 9:32 in the morning

2010-12-06T10:32:00.000-08:00

and Bryce is a small and anxious thing. He is out of cigarettes. He is simmering. He is sizzling like New York neon with his colorblind hands and his mongoose mouth and he is a dozen hungry things on the inside: (1) a stripmall mannequin stripped eunuchly nude, hauled out to the grinning curb on garbage day (4) a custard yellow stray, a Labrador bitch with sagging tits and a French-braid zigzag of heartworms (8) an acrobat with polio. Bryce gets up and moves around the livingroom because the stillness would sterilize him.

Ellie was by earlier and said: that is, said with her mouth while her face said Just stop it, stop it would you?: that She would be back later that night, baby, don't eat yourself up too bad okay?/Yeah okay./And take a nodder if you can't settle. Just stop it okay. Okay?/Yeahokay./but that's a lie, both of them: that is, what was said by both of them is untrue and didn't happen. It is 9:33 in the morning and Bryce itches all over.

He is out of cigarettes and cannot remember where he has hidden the nodders, not that they would help much: they are only feathery teases of iceberg gunpowder and they would not help much. A little. Not much. He wants instead to snort fat lines of circus-colored paint, six meters long, six miles long, off of ladies' caramel cream thighs, he wants to leave his vanilla cobweb breath on their makeup mirrors. He wants his skin to take on the taste and texture of a welcome mat. He wants blindfolds, and he wants sedatives. He wants tightrope walkers, dozens of tightrope walkers, staggering and swaying on his cat's-cradle spine, and he wants to huff genielamps of napalm and crackerjack ammonia and let their popgun fumes crawl up and around like soldier scarabs in the tender tissues of his nose and mouth and throat: eat them: burn them: fuck them raw.

And Ellie: he wants Ellie too, because Ellie: knows where to find steel wool and candlewax, Ellie: knows how to bite and twist and gnash with pliers, and Ellie: can straddle his face or suck him off or pin his arms under her knees and giggle while she wiggles and wobbles the crunchy tube of his throat between her thumb and middlefinger, or ignore him, or shove his cock into a bottle of liquid nitrogen.

Any of them, all of them. Bryce doesn't know-- he isn't the one to ask. Bryce can't make Ellie's decisions.

Once when he was twelve he jerked off in his grandmother's bathroom, ignoring the cotton-candy doilies and August-piss potpourri and naked porcelain Cupids and thinking about a vigorous detention with his teacher. And even though Bryce took every pain of Christ to leave no trace, and he didn't, not a single smudge or smell of a young boy's biology, even though he left it as clean as a goddamn clinic when he was done, there was a cheaply meaty swarm of guilt that swelled up in him for days, forever, especially at night: like the mustardy throats of frogs. It filled him with ill and strangeness. It made Bryce feel like he was way up high in a hot air balloon, just him, and it was almost sort of nice, sort of exhilerating: rawly, like he was a grape that had been peeled in someone's teeth and was now supple and infantile to the whole world. Nice in a way that made him think maybe there was a sunset up there with him, a lovely bruisey gutted jellybean sunset that he had all to himself up there, up in that hot air balloon.

But also hypodermic and murderous in the way that he knew it was made to crash: was poisoned: was going to cannibalize itself against the ground soon very soon. Not immediately, but immaculately: wholesomely. Two years later at his grandmother's funeral the balloon was all that Bryce could think about.

A car gargles foggily by and he looks up and out, buzzing like a honeycomb, sticking to himself, but it isn't Ellie: isn't there like she said she would be.

It is 9:34 in the morning and Bryce is a small, anxious thing

((It took a disappointingly brief amount of time for this to turn from "rough portrait of apprehension and masochism, both sexual and emotional" to "smutty SAW fanfic."

Upon rereading, I'm blisteringly reminded of Nine Inch Nails's "Closer"!))

The horse screamed first.

2010-11-30T20:04:00.000-08:00

It’s an awful sound. It peeled and cored and quartered me, like new fruit.

I flinched, and dropped the plate I was drying, and it smashed loud against the floor and I flinched again. That’s all I could move, for a moment. Even if I were all grown and wise with a head screwed on good and tight I would have done the same thing, it's only natural, anyone would. Even you know the feeling. Right? When dumb fear bites into your ribs and bloats your heart up with hot mud and hot metal, and the whole mess of it sinks out the bottom of your chest and past your stomach and into your legs and through your feet, and welds you to the floor? You know the feeling, don’t you? It’s a small hell but it’s there.

“That wasn’t..?”

I was still stone by the time Alex got her wits back. She looked a little pale, and was trying to peer out the window over the sink, and then I’m not sure what else, because I was already gone. “Ava!”

The sidedoor gave way for me and I was sprinting towards the stable (the Morgan screamed again, ripe and heavy with anger, and then Dominick screamed too) with absolutely nothing in mind. At least not that I can remember. I might have been thinking How far did he get him out? or Maybe he slipped off in time? or something else like that, trying to piece out what was happening before it had the chance to happen and hurt everything into nothing.

Then I saw them in the field and sweet God, it was horrible to watch. Make no mistake. It was awful. I think mostly because it was almost beautiful too. Or maybe I feel that way now, seeing as I’ve got enough foulness in me to think such a thing at such a time, with the awfulness of it and everything. I didn’t mean to though. Awful things strike you full of awe, and if you’d seen it you may have done the same exact thing. Words defy the sight.

The Morgan - sweet God the Morgan. He was lit up like New Year's. He was a war of himself. All fury and bone and sinew, twisting and braiding in a mangled tangle just under the bourbon gleam of his coat, and still screaming. Varnish and tarnish and tyrant. It would have been a rare treat to watch, and enjoy, if Dominick hadn’t been so crooked and quiet on the grass under him.

From there - well, I’m still not entirely sure what I had planned to do once I got there. Distract the horse? Fight him off? Throw Dominick over my shoulder, and? I don’t know. I didn’t know. Everything was rushing to get through at the same time, like the people in the door of a theater on fire, so I never really knew what everything was. Maybe the way I saw it, was that it wouldn’t really matter what I did once I was there, if I never got there to begin with. It’s what seemed most important I guess is what I mean.

Fifteen or twenty yards off when I was close enough for the Morgan to catch notice and turn towards me, he made a wall of stone with just the look of himself and I hit it and stopped dead. No tripping or stumbling, even. I just stopped dead. Teeth and eyes and firestorm. God, but he was stunning.

The tendons of his legs cinched and clenched and wheeled him around sharp, and powerful, that deep neck and solid body coming at me like a dowsing rod and I stood and watched and thought how awful it would be if Dominick was dead. If he had died. With a skull all caved inward like a bowl or a spine crumbled up into stupid useless lumps in his back. If he was dead I knew it would be the closest to murder that I would ever get.

Awful. Just awful. A nightmare come real.

But when the rifle cracked, and the brass-and-velvet muscle of the Morgan’s chest tore open like taffy, and big ripe gumdrops of blood came down and sprinkled Dominick and the green grass all around him, and the scream shriveled to a squeal and then a gurgle and then nothing, it was every bit as ugly.

I stayed in bed the next few days, so I can only give you the broad strokes of what happened after. One of the stableboys, Brody, a real crackshot if evidence is evidence, he was the one that got the Morgan. All the way from the stable. Pop probably gave him a raise or vacation or something for being so bold and quick to save his youngest daughter. I wasn’t sure what to think of it.

Dominick turned out fine. Just fine. Ripped up like a roadmap with about as many lines, and a broken this and fractured that and a nice big dent in the shelf of bone over one of his eyes, but other than that, he was just roses. I wasn’t sure what to think of that either.

And no, I don’t know if Pop ever compensated Mr. Connelly or what. Was the Morgan getting killed off enough to call it squash? Or maybe Pop forked over whatever horses he’d been eyeing, free of charge? Or I don’t know. Maybe Mr. Connelly wrote him a check for his boy dragging out one of the race animals and getting it shot. I’ve yet to ask. I don’t think I’d be satisfied with any answer.

At some point while I was still in bed, soaking quietly in this sort of thinking, Mama poked her head in and asked if I wanted to come say goodbye.

“No.” I didn’t want to do anything.

The hall-light had turned her into a shadow on the wall, and I watched it think for a moment. Surely, surely she was about to press me. Was about to tell me to get over myself and get some manners, that a little moving-around would do me good. Snap the lightswitch on. Rip my covers off. Something like that. And I got ready for it - I got ready to argue her. But then her shadow shrank away and the door clicked shut and I wasn't ready for that.

Then it was just me and the dopey evening light. I never knew cotton sheets could choke you so bad. They made scraping noises when I curled up against my knees, and I thought for sure, for sure, that I’d never be able to fall asleep this way. That I’d just lie here for a few more days or so, staring at the wall, waiting for it to stop drawing itself into pictures of boys folded up like butcher hats and horses busted up like animal crackers. But I must have eventually drifted off, because then it was morning, and the big glittery dragon racehorse trailer and its owners were all gone.

This was all awhile ago, though, so things have more or less smoothed over. You know. Just evened out. I think on it sometimes when I find myself turning idle, but not much other than that. Mostly I wonder just what it was he was expecting, just how he saw it playing out, I mean. All the in-between. I’m more than certain how he pictured the end of it. Probably something like, him swinging off the Morgan’s warm granite back, smoothly as cream of course, and giving me one last sharp city look. Watching me, on purpose, saying with the polished-up look of himself This is your fear and your fear was nothing. Letting those oily eyes grease up his words and then push them in as deep as they would go. Then rattling off back to California. To Anaheim. To his racetrack, in his glossy foreign car. Instead he rattled off to the doctor in a field truck that could have just as easy ended up a hearse.

What did he make of that? What did he think when he looked back on it? What sort of feeling was it, right then, the one that lit up in the pit of him, in that place where his heart and his throat came together, the moment he saw it was all gone bad? I still wonder. He was a piss-poor gambler, with a chiseled-up face and ugly centipede scars crawling all under his pretty glossy clothes. Can you run a racetrack that way?

This wondering doesn’t do me any favors, though, so I try my best to keep from turning idle and thinking on them. Around mealtimes in particular. There are only so many excuses I can invent for a lost appetite, and it might raise a strange mood at the table to say that everything would turn to blood in my mouth.

I wonder how much of it’s the Anaheim boy’s. And how much I’m to blame. And I know it’s a foul thing, but I can’t help hating him for that.

((I completely forgot about this story until about half an hour ago. It's the last ~1400 words of an ~8000 dealy that I never quite finished about a year back. There's all that development stuff and exposition junk and etc., but it's also like 7000 words, and it's also pretty shoddy, so I'll just have to wait and see how well this trimming right here airs out. Hopefully the story is still there!

The Morgan is a breed of horse that was used specifically by cavalrymen in the Civil War!

I seem to really like horses, but only when presented as lovely vehicles of injury and indifference and the casual chaos of nature!))

O Filthy Pilgrim

2010-11-27T13:11:00.000-08:00

"You remember them thoroughbreds at your brother's wedding? Those big glossy bays?"

He looked over, from looking out the window, from watching the naked rows of dirt fail to swell into a garden. His wife was sitting up in bed. For the first time in awhile, which was good. It was good seeing that. He could feel her collecting pieces of him and that was almost good too: The dirt in his jeans, the dirt in his nails.

"We took em down that backroad to your old schoolteacher's. The one you were all sweet on." She smiled, bright and sudden, like a fresh book of matches. "Oh, now, it's alright! Don't you look all shamed, now." He couldn't help looking down at his jeans.

"Don't you look all ashamed. You were a boy, after all. And she was a nice lady when you introduced us. You remember that?"

He nodded.

"You remember?"

"I remember."

"But your brother's wedding-- we had them thoroughbreds. The bays. They were the prettiest color. You remember the color of them?"

He nodded."

"Like clean pennies underwater." She was looking upwards, and licking her lips. Like she had eaten the copper straight out of the thought, like she would have seconds if she could ask. "Like the ones people throw in wishing fountains. You remember? The color of them?"

"I remember." He began peeling the skin and soil from around his nails.

"And we took on down that backroad, the one to your old schoolteacher's, and we just... we just let them bays just go. Just cut em loose. With our heels down and leaned in and they took off with us." She licked her lips again, and looked at him. "You remember that?"

"I remember that."

"We had em wide open, didn't we?"

He nodded, because they had. The bays had gone wide open down that backroad, all thunder and thrash and dirt and dumb impact, lungs dragging whiff and snort and bodies heaving work and jerk, power things, fear things: hot-eyed. Him damn near killing himself on a sycamore branch, and her latenight tobacco hair flying up and away like shaken champagne, laughing, so far up the road, so far way up ahead of him: That laugh high and steamy and anxious like a teakettle snuck into the woodwinds. Porcelain, eggshell, kaleidoscope, just wonderful.

"You remember that?"

He nodded and stood up.

Her glass of water was empty, and with it being 3 o'clock she needed her 3 o'clock medicine. And so he would get her the water to take it. And when he reached for her glass she reached out and touched him on his filthy wrist, and the both of them looked at each other.

"Hey, now..." She licked her lips, and smiled. "You remember them thoroughbreds? At your brother's wedding?"

He was a hooked carp: choking on something small and metal, way back in the grate of his neck. Water filling his nose like something spilled: something warm. "I remember."

"You remember? Them big shiny bays?"

"Sure do."

"We had em wide open, didn't we?"

"Sure did."

Renaissance-Woman

2010-11-12T10:26:00.000-08:00

I've taken bites of out the moon and if you don't believe me? Look for yourself. I have written award-winning hymns on the topic.

I have fished in the Euphrates and pissed in the Ganges and painted bowls of fruit, as well as nude women. I was on death row twice. I have hopped freighttrains and snorted blow out of saltshakers and built bridges and then burned them. I have a chameleon tattoo.

I have fucked a one-armed man and no, his wife never found out, at least not that I know of. I've constructed a model of government that is perfect in every conceivable way if only people would listen. I can write backwards. I am triple-jointed. I can capture the attention of an entire business street at 8 o'clock in the morning, on a Monday, with the use of only a silverdollar. I can name everyone who died in 1947.

I have performed roadside surgery with a sewing kit and delivered babies in New York traffic. I have taught old dogs to shake, and young dogs to take out the trash. I have picked the pockets of graverobbers.

I have played Russian Roulette with tigers and with timberwolves, and would you hazard a guess at who won? (Death is nothing to me.)

I am wanted in twelve countries for: courtly love, for: martyrdom, for: drunk-in-public. I make a mean Irish stew.

I once slighted a Mongol soothsayer and was cursed with spinelessness, but succeeded in winning her backbone over a hand of poker. I have a collection of pocketknives.

I've arm-wrestled winter and foot-raced the plague and fist-fought nations and notions and boogeymen. Once, I seduced a succubus. I can play most of the piano.

The Devil went down to Georgia but turned and left once he saw me.

I've dragged priests from burning buildings, I've run gin-joints underground, I've thrown stowaways overboard. I've broken hotel furniture. I've stolen ballpoint pens from the bank and run out on the check. I've scaled a crooked Babel redwood in the Ragnarok cannonheart of an April thunderstorm in order to retrieve a child's kite. I've smoked cigarettes in Guam.

I have made blind men see, and then prescribed them glasses. I am a decorated colonel with a tacklebox of medals. I can track men like a bloodhound. I've killed two birds, from a hundred miles, without any stones at all. I am a deft hand at origami.

I've seen snow leopards in Nepal, and I've operated dowsing rods, and swum the Nile though crippled, and sung sonnets though gagged, and eaten fire. I have married kings and buried kings and reaped the fruits of their decay.

Death is nothing to me. Death is nothing to me. Death is nothing.

(I tell It so, each and every day)

((I don't know either, but GODDAMN this was fun.))

Der Erlkönig

2010-11-08T08:30:00.000-08:00

They ask him after lunch and before grammar What do you want to be when you grow up? and Felix isn't sure what they mean. He sees it's a question, and he sees that they are waiting for an answer, but all the things in the middle are limp and useless. Are blank, and oily, and there are no numbers to sink his fingers in.

Well, what do you want for when you're older?

Felix thinks about that.

He would like to ride his bicycle, someday. A sister of his father's had heard about him turning eight that April, and sent him one. Felix had been in love. On sight, instantly: spine-winding world-stealing love. He remembers that it might have been blue. It is hard for him to say for certain, since father had gotten angry, and sent it away, calling it bribery. The next day Felix had asked one of the servants to pull the dictionary from the shelf for him and looked up the definition:

"Corruption," it told him, "esp. of an official of some standing, in the form of money or other valuables."

Well? What do you want to be?

"An official," says Felix, biting his lip.

Okay. What kind?

The dictionary hadn't said.

"I don't know." He bites his lip a little harder.

Well, just be simple with it. What do you want to do? What do you want?

Felix thinks about that.

He wants to be a surgeon like his father. Maybe. He wants to make medicine. A good kind. He wants to heal his mother so she isn't lying in her miles of silky red bed when he leaves for school and still marooned there when he gets back, so she doesn't leave pharaohs' tombs of big glass bottles and circuses of little orange bottles lying on the kitchen counter, so that Felix doesn't knock them over with a noise like an angry zoo when he is making a snack. So that father would stop giving her the little orange bottles. So that he would have no reason to give her them.

So that she could play her music a little more quietly at night, her opera, when Felix should be sleeping, so that she can sit up straight when she tells him things like "The Germans, precious thing-- leave the cooking to the French, and the fighting, the fighting is for the British-- but to the Germans leave the music. N'est-ce pas?" So that she could say other things to him instead.

Felix thinks all these things, but he hasn't said anything, cannot think of anything. They are still waiting for his answer. He wishes he were in math class.

"I would like to fix things." He lowers his chin to look at his books.

That's good. It's good to fix things. You want to be a designer, to fix people's things? Or a vet? To fix their pets?

He lowers his chin and says, quieter, "I would like to fix things."

"Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt;
Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch ich Gewalt." —

((I worked out the other day to a recording of Marian Anderson's contralto "Der Erlkönig," from like 1936 or something. Lifting weights to opera, particularly when it's sandwiched between Bjork and Man Man and Those Poor Bastards = STRAAAAANGE EXPERIENCE, FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS.

One day, I will decipher my fascination with mangled childhoods!))

dopechoked & rumstruck

2010-11-05T03:48:00.001-07:00

It's a trap door, I know that now. It took me awhile. Sort of rickety and arthritic but the hinges never squeal when it opens, at least not that I've heard, sneaky bastard. Usually it leads to the attic or the boiler room or just the film noir junkyard backyard but sometimes, ah well, sometimes it goes down to the cellar, and that's when all these things get away from me. They get strange. Things get strange, down there. Or on their way up maybe. I don't know.

There are crows and ravens here, big sprawling licorice emperors, big fleecy wreckingballs, all propped on top of the trees and crawking politics. In between the big issues they make off with the neighborhood cats probably. Probably, anyway. But have I seen any cats around? Come to think of it? Any? I haven't. (see, all of this is pulled out of the attic-- I don't know if you can tell but there's a slow-witted airiness to it-- It's all twisted up and wrung around, but it's kind of soft, at least a little, like a ball of yarn maybe. it's from the attic) I don't think I've seen any cats at all.

It's not even the fact that they're birds that does my nerves wrong, even though that doesn't help either. I don't know. They are not terribly ugly things. Carrion is no sore sight to me, not really, and they wait their turn. I blame mostly my mother's childhood cabin in Hoonah on the Pacific in the unwashed craw of several miles of mudflats. I don't know why we visited. It was too tight for a family of five plus two plus Jesus, plus the rest of the town's Jesus, and there were things that were caked into the wrinkles of the walls that I was too young to give a name or shape to but noticed. Everyone did. We all left, an hour later, for hamburgers at Mary's Diner. We felt confused and crookedly new like we had been thoroughly wiped and scrubbed. I tripped on the way back, in the mud: my cousin had loaned me a pair of brittle but warm rubber boots that had once been red, and even if they were a little too big I liked them, and even while walking through the hungry mud like I had a poor puppeteer I liked them. I didn't like the ravens and crows, though. They are too keen for me. They are flying razorwire. I was too young to put words or sense into what they were, or what it meant, but I knew that looking up and seeing their trainsmoke wheeling and curling over our heads shrank up my insides, and on the way to Mary's Diner when I tripped in the mud in my cousin's rubber boots I somehow knew this is their chance and I covered up my head in the mud and (the boiler room, this is the boiler room, mostly scraping out ashes and letting off steam, this is where most of it comes from) and just waited. Then my uncle pulled me up, and we kept going.

The Tlingit tribe native to Hoonah (the Káawu Kwáan, or the more catchy People from the Direction of the North Wind, or more simple them red folks) see the ravens and the crows as their ancestors or at least the spirits of them. They will drop their still-orange cigarettes and halibut gear and gather together to gather tinder for a witchfire for any one damned tourist who jeers and throws rocks at the birds. They play for keeps on this. The Pacific water is not at all hospitable, and they have few qualms about throwing you in. (the backyard is always a toss-up, a potluck, always a little crueler or maybe just brisker than I like to be, just a little chillier, just more corners and angles, like a domino. I think sometimes the neighbors' things get mixed in with mine) They play for keeps on this.

(the cellar I can't show much of, it comes and goes as it fancies, the trapdoor slinks around and loops back like Bertilak's fox, like a sailor's knot, like a hangman's necklace, and if I can't even get a ball of yarn untumbled then how could you expect me to do it with all that) though at least it's not razorwire (but if the leper smell didn't wring your stomach too bad, and the carousel musicbox eulogy didn't put you to sleep, you could sift through each and every shred of hearsay and shock of heresy, every hit of heroin, layered like a massacre casserole underneath the buttermilk crepe-paper afterbirth of the jackal's wedding, the honeymoon's in Florence but the bride is back in Fresno, and the flowergirl, well, she had somewhere else to be)

I guess it might pay to get out a little more.

((man these things wander like nothing else, also when did I did develop such a phobia of ending sentences))

Since Dogs Been Dogs

2010-11-03T16:39:00.000-07:00

Mason was a patient man, or patient enough.

He raised three very fine and very courteous children - alone - and shipped three young adults off to University. He buried his father and his mother. At their funerals he shook hands and took clean bundles of white flowers, and said thank you. His face was smooth when he signed away sixty childhood acres to make room for Ample Valley Condominiums. When the ground was still soiled with April, he moved his dozen cows and his handful of things to a foreign house that was much closer to the highway. All of his pictures in their braidedbronze frames were arranged on a smaller, cleaner, colder fireplace, one that smelled nothing like woodsmoke.

And if his hands shook just slightly on any one of these occasions, Mason was certain that it said nothing against his patience.

But Charles and Danny were getting his hands to shake awfully that morning and it had nothing to do with grief.

"You two wanna save your mouths for breathing?" Mason kept working while he talked. While he puffed. The shovel wanted only to nibble at the ground, only to scratch and shy away, but Mason bent firm and merciless with his knees and back and elbows because like it or not, the fence needed mending.

"I'd sure like to, Mr. Mason." It was Danny that said that. Danny was the grocer's little boy except that he wasn't all that little anymore. His face was all wrapped up in itself, in an ugly look, and when he turned he spat in the wickerbasket of the grass. His wrists were draped up on his shovel draped up on his shoulders, like a scarecrow, and he swung them, back and forth, and left and right. It made the muscles in his chest work. It made them show through his overwashed wifebeater. "If dear mister Charlie here would deign admit that he missed the boat on this whole Korean debacle." Danny was a good boy but he could get that way sometimes.

"'Debacle' he says. Talks awful nice, don't he Mason." Charles was hitching his pants up. Then rolling up his sleeves, casually, then hitching again. In order to free up his hands for this he shuffled his shovel back and forth the entire time. "Those classes over at Etheridge doing you good, then? Huh?" Charles had loaned Danny's daddy some money to help pay for the classes. "Sure sounds like they are." He was a good man but he could get this way sometimes.

"Just admit you're a goddamn racist, and we can get this fence done up."

"You watch your mouth, now. Taking the Lord's name in vain. You watch your mouth." They were only uncle and nephew but they had a sameness to them when they argued. "It's bound to get smacked, in the right company."

Mason couldn't place it, though. The sameness when they argued. It was a strange one. Maybe the same sort of sameness that garbage gets. If you dump it out on the ground then yes, certainly, you can see each different piece of it. The coffee grounds are not the eggshells are not the Virginia Slim filters are not the Hamburger Helper box, but once they you have put them in the garbage you can't help looking at it all the same way.

Mason thought it was sort of like that. "Let's just get this fence done up, fellas."

"That's fine, then. That's alright." Danny seemed to be waiting for something. He was shifting a little more now, was readying himself. "Just admit you can't stand a gook selling you gasoline, and we can get this fence done up."

"I got friends died over there."

There it was.

"It ain't like he's the one that killed em!"

"How do you know?" Charles shrugged and scratched his chin. "Could be his daddy was the one."

Mason took a moment to catch his breath, and wrestle it down. His chest was not cooperating with him. It felt tough and swollen, and stringy, like discount meat. While he rested and waited for air to come back to him he looked all around at the area that was still fresh and unfriendly in his head. Mason had taken it in before, of course, more than once, and should have known what to expect, but still found himself watchful and sad and marveling: yellow grass and road, and brown grass and road, a backwash of tacklebox litter and green grass. Some buildings.

Mason almost went back to work. Something pulled at him, though, and he kept on looking just a little bit longer until something a little ways out there moved, and Charles and Danny shut up and looked over when he asked "What's that, there?" Mason pointed a finger from around his shovel. "By the road."

It was a silly thing to say, but Mason only thought about that once it was out. For a minute he thought his eyes, too, had made a fool of him, that he had only seen a shred of old tire or the ribs of a milkcrate, but then it moved again, and Mason could see that it was something alive or at least mostly.

"Scrap metal." Charles was squinting, pulling his crowsfeet high and tight like reins. "Eighteen-wheeler went off the road awhile back."

"Weeks ago, actually. They still ain't finished cleaning it." Danny looked back at his uncle, taking up his scarecrow posture again, swinging back and forth. "That road's an awful big help for our little town."

"Brings in business from up north."

"Yeah, and it's gonna bring in businesses from the same damn place. You're gonna see less diners and more McDonald's." Danny had passed with a B in an economics class at Etheridge. "It's the same as anywhere else."

Mason did his best to ignore them. He was still looking at whatever it was. "It's something with a little life in it, I think."

"Probably just a coon," said Charles.

Mason disagreed. He picked through the gravel and hamburger wrappers and made his way over to the pile, still carrying his shovel.

"Mason? Mason, c'mon now-- we got work to do!"

A black and white border collie had taken up under the sheet of metal. It was splayed out on its belly, exhausted and small, or at least trying to make itself small, or maybe into a piece of the ground. When Mason had come up with a shovel the thing started taking about forty different angles in defending itself: growling, but also whining, and pulling its ears down, but also pulling back its lips. The whole time it boiled with anxiousness. One of its backlegs was tangled up and around like dirty laundry.

Mason almost reached down to it, but stopped when the dog looked ready to bolt. Instead he leaned on his shovel and they just looked at each other for a minute or so. "How we doin there, chum?"

The collie, tongue rolling and panting like a thirsty engine, tried one more time with the bowlingalley of its teeth.

"How's this, then?" Mason put his shovel off to the side, placing it flat. "I'm not here to dig you a grave. You see there?"

The collie was still watching him hard, but at least put away its teeth.

Charles and Danny had finally stepped over their tools and come over to join Mason, walking close enough to rub shoulders.

"Whoa, there," said Charles.

"Shit." Danny came forward, then choked himself off, then looked at Mason. "Jesus, you see that? Look at that."

"Leg's broke." Charles scratched his chin.

"Some bastard hits a stray and just drives off. Just drives off!"

The collie tried to bolt and fell and cried out hotly in the way that dogs do and Danny said "Oh, god, don't do that. Sorry."

"Ain't a stray, anyway." Charles had a way of saying things that sounded very sturdy. "He eats good enough, looks like. And he's been brushed down before."

Mason nodded.

"But that's a damned good break it's got."

Mason nodded again.

"It's that goddamn highway." Danny's lips were wrinkling like he wanted to spit. "That goddamn highway. They need to shut that shit down."

"Don't you cuss like that. And don't you blame the road, either." Charles scratched his chin. "Dogs been getting killed and crippled since before roads. They'll keep getting killed and crippled til they're done being dogs."

Danny said nothing but was still wrinkling his lips.

"Now, the thing to do here is call the animal shelter." Charles was squinting, pulling his crowsfeet high and tight like reins. "A break that bad, they'd probably just go ahead and put him down."

"Oh, yeah. That's the way to do. Who wants to pay a little money to keep a stinkin' stray around?"

"Oh? You wanna take him in yourself, huh? You got space? You got money for it?"

"Fuck you, Charley." They moved at each other like cavemen.

"I can keep him for a little while," Mason said, still looking down at the collie. The other two stopped and stared over at him.

"What's that you say, Mr. Mason?"

The collie licked its chops and watched Mason squat down, maybe ten feet away. Even from there he could smell the creekbed vinegar of infection, and that was sad. It made a mess of Mason's insides.

"I can take him. I don't mind."

Charles and Danny looked at each other and didn't say anything for a minute.

"Damned decent of you, Mason." Charles laid a hand on his shoulder and patted it strangely. "Damned decent. You need a little help from us, you just let me know." He straightened and rubbed his lower back with his fist. "Let's we all call it in, for the day."

And he and Danny went off. Mason could them talking the whole way back: voices tight and low, and tense, like an acrobat's wire. The collie didn't seem so bad off now. More curious than anything else, but Mason told himself to tell himseld that it was still a dog, and a hurt one at that, and hurt dogs have teeth even if you can't see them all the time.

He gritted himself and started to stand back up. And did, eventually.

Mason went straight to the house and came back with his truck, and moved around some of the cedar planks and red tarp back there that had rotted. What had he been planning to do with all that? He couldn't seem to remember.

After a little sweettalking, the collie was in the bed of the truck with taking Mason's arm off, and maybe even wagging its tail a little bit, maybe, and Mason drove 20 miles an hour all the way down Hillman Highway where the limit was 55, and was passed by seven or eight goofy-looking bastards who shook fists and flipped birds, and when Mason pulled into the gravel driveway by the house he realized that he had not felt so fired-up since that time when he was nineteen and had done 130 past a liquor store.

A few days later and the collie still did not have a name. Everything else, yes: a pillow and a foodbowl and a waterbowl and some newspaper in the corner, a chewtoy: some too-small candycane ballcap that a high school buddy had sent in the mail, and looked just awful on Mason, but no name. Mason had had an Irish setter named Fluke when he was younger, and that was a good name. Mason had buried him when he hit a ripe old fifteen, used his pocketknife to make a little crucifix and carved "FLUKE" in block letters.

Now it was a condominium, though. The thought hit Mason as he was bringing in groceries and it suddenly made them very heavy for him.

He dropped them on the table, louder then he meant, while from the corner the collie started thapapapaping its tail against the linoleum.

"Hey there, chumu." Mason smiled. "How we doin?"

He walked over and leaned in to look: the bone had set alright. Mason had wondered if dog bones would set the same as people bones, and it looked like it had this time at least. It was the closest the collie came to biting him, but it didn't. Mason felt oddly proud at that.

He leaned in a little closer and smelled the wound: the mossy gleam of infection, and old alcohol, and also blood. The color was not so terrible.

Mason took the collie's cnout and turned it to face him, jostling a little, just to tease. "You behavin yourself? Hm?" The collie tried to lick his hand. "Hm? Doin alright?"

The collie panted blankly. Mason got a noseful of the breath, and the smell-- Mason's face went strange. He let go of the collie's snout.

"Oh, well now." Mason patted the fur behind the collie's ear. "Well."

After a moment or so he straightened up, and cleared his throat.

"You ever get a steak, hm?" He rattled the groceries from their bags on the table: mostly cuts of meat and vitamins. "At that old house of yours?"

The collie's ears wrinkled back for a moment.

"Couldn't make em like I do, I bet. How's that sound for supper?"

The dog panted and watched him at the stove.

Mason pulled the steaks from the spongy packaging, threw the bloody gelatin and cellophane in the trashcan.

"Wanna let em set a bit." The collie was watching him with incredible interest from the pillow. "Let em warm up a little. You cook a cold steak, it goes all tough on you."

Mason took a roll of Charmin papertowels out of the cabinet and tore off a handful, and placed the roll back, and began patting the steaks dry. "Want em dry, too. You put em in a pan wet, it's just like steaming." He began setting up the skillet and the garlic and the butter. "Same reason we wait to put on any salt. Salt pulls all the water out of the meat, and then you're right back where you started."

The collie panted and watched.

Once everything was set up, the steaks were still a little too cool for Mason's liking. Another fifteen minutes or so. He turned to the sink, and twisted on the faucet, and almost began washing his hands, but instead he turned and walked back over and eased himself onto the floor next to the collie. It took a minute for his legs to cooperate. The collie's featherduster tail plopped against the floor with a boneless rhythm, and Mason let his hands be licked and nipped at.

"You got steak comin, you know." The collie grinned blankly at Mason's goodnatured growl. "Don't ruin your supper."

Mason sat there a little longer than fifteen minutes. The pan was almost too hot, by the time he got up, but still suitable. He oiled and garliced and salted and peppered the steaks, and the skillet seared them richly with a wonderful, crackling, golden smell and sound. He started counting up to ninety in his head, and looked over to see the collie watching him. He winked as best as he could. "Wonder what the poor folks are having tonight?"

The collie licked his chops, once, and Mason smiled.

"You got a little chill, like I do?" He reached ninety in his head and turned the steaks over with a weak pair of tongs. The meat sizzled like an orchestra. "You don't suppose that fireplace would do us any good?"

The thapapap of the collie's tail was picking up power as the wonderful smell bloomed in the kitchen. The collie's tongue was liquor red and lively. Its eyes were warm and spry and savvy as it watched Mason closely, blankly, not understanding a word.

Hot grease popped and bit Mason on the arm, and he winced. He looked away from the collie quickly, back to the darkening meat in the pan. The smell was wonderful. The smell had Mason's mouth watering near enough to drown him.

"Got a little chill, myself." He put the tongs back on the counter.

May was just warming itself up by the time Charles and Danny came back. It was too late to finish the fence, too hot in the daytime, but they told Mason over the phone that they were damned keen to get out there and try, and once they were in Mason's kitchen and finishing up the last of Mason's Heineken, the fence came back up into conversation. Danny suddenly remembered the collie.

"That little dog we found! I'd forgot. I saw the little pillow and all over there, and completely forgot til now. You take him to the vet, Mr. Mason?

Charles's face brightened. "Well I'll be. You take him in, Mason? They give you a bill?"

"We'll split that bill with you, Mr. Mason."

"You split it if you want. I got mouths to feed."

"Oh don't you start." Danny reached for another can and saw the case was empty. "Mouths to feed. What'd they tell you, Mason?"

Mason licked his lips. Then he took another sip.

"Mason?"

"The collie's dead."

Mason almost left it at that. He wanted to leave it at that. He didn't, though. Danny and Charles looked ripped and tore up, but then Mason said "I put him down."

"You put him down?"

"I took him out back and shot him."

"What the hell you go and do that for, huh?" Danny had stood up and looked ready to tear the kitchen. "You a goddamn loon?"

"What the hell you do that for, Mason?"

"The rot got in his blood." Mason took another sip, looking close at the grain of his table. "I could smell it. Another day or two, maybe, he'd start losing appetite. Start hurtin."

"You cheated him that day or two, then."

"He was comfortable." Mason looked over at them. "He wasn't hurting any."

"You fuckin' cheated him, you wrinkled little whack." Danny had his face wrinkled up like he wanted to spit. "The fuck you do that for?"

"You didn't got the right to make that sort of decision, Mason." Now Charles was standing too. "I think I better go call someone about this."

"The hell did he shoot it for! We got vets! What did he shoot it for, Charley?"

"That's good, then." Mason started to stand. And did, eventually, once his legs cooperated with him. He began collecting the bottles to throw them away. "That's good, to see you two agreein on something."

((I foresee huuuuuge revisions for this bad boy. Classic case of "Oh man, what a cool idea! I need to do that!" which turned to "OH GOD WHAT, THIS EXECUTION COULD BE SO MUCH BETTER"

Mmmm... execution...))

... And There Came a Great Hunger

2010-11-02T09:44:00.000-07:00

They stopped for lunch around two o'clock, when it was too warm for the bugs. He unpacked: the baggies of egg salad sandwiches, the bottled lemonade, the box of cherry cordials. She set up: the napkins, the plates, the Easter-checkered afghan. They bumped hands and grabbed for the same things at the same time, her to move them to make room for something else and him to move them back to where they were, but after some careful maneuvering they were seated and looking at their food.

Gorgeous, huh? All this space? he told her. Feels like there's no one else for miles. He rubbed his hands together, crisply, and cleared his throat and reached for one of the sandwiches. Mmm. Looks great. You use your aunt's recipe again? With the honey mustard?

We're on a hill, aren't we? She was watching the sweat run on her bottle of lemonade.

What? He unwrapped the sandwich with a lot of noise, and crushed the plastic in his fist. I don't know. What? A little, maybe.

She carefully placed her bottle of lemonade on the blanket, holding it, trying to keep it flat. The silverdollar top of the liquid was tilted, leftways, and trembling.

Yes, she said. Her voice had a cast-iron bottom to it, and it was drinking in the heat. It was warming whatever was hiding away on top. Some citric accusation, some poisoned patience, sitting heavy and ready like a gargoyle. Do you see, right here? My lemonade is on a slant. It could spill.

We're on a hill, then. He bit into the egg salad sandwich like it had wronged him and hurried to keep talking before swallowing. Where's the harm in a little hill?

You said it was all flat, out here. Bone-flat-- that's what you said.

Where's the harm in a little hill?

She was quiet.

You're gonna like it out here, he said, looking into his egg salad sandwich. He was frowning. From the sunlight, he was sure. It's gonna be great for us. You'll see.

She was quiet. He started to take another bite, but didn't.

The room, she said. Upstairs. The spare bedroo--

My office, he said. I can make it my office.

No. She traced her finger, carefully, all along and around the top of the lemonade bottle, like she was cracking a safe. I think I'll sleep in there for a little while.

He stopped chewing and looked at her.

Just for a little while, she said. Once the movers are done.

He kept on looking at her for a few moments but then went on chewing. Slower, now. She was biting her lip.

You look nervous, he said.

It's the sun, she said. Very bright, she said.

But then something in her face shed the rest of itself, stripped nude and harsh, and she bit down harder, like pitbulls do, and looked at him. The movers, she said. When they came they asked about the Spiderman bedding--

Or, he said. Or. We could talk about something else.

That house is too big for us. There were wars being fought in the lines of her face.

Let's just enjoy the sunshine, he said. Loudly, too loudly, as if she were very far away, and he reached for another sandwich and unwrapped it with a one-handed tangle of static and throat-clearing, and with his other hand he grabbed for his lemonade bottle. She watched him with twenty-four karat hate.

It'll be nicer out here, he said. He was muffled and staring out at all of the nothing. Don't you wanna break into those cordials? I know they're your favorite.

She was quiet. He would have seen her crying, if he had looked.

Well if you don't, I will, he said. He shuffled his sandwich and lemonade aside, with a little maneuvering, and reached for the box.

Love me some cordials, he said, as if there were crowd of people waiting. He slit along the edge of the plastic with a fingernail and stripped it away and lifted the lid, smiling watery down at them. You gonna let me eat these all on my own? Come on and have one.

She was quiet.

Baby? He looked over at her and would have choked if he were chewing something.

All you had to do was buckle his fucking seatbelt. There was soaking hate on her face, a rotting wet menagerie. You dumb son of a bitch. You remembered your own, didn't you?

He stared at her big and sick, and tepid. The box of cordials slid sideways off his lap.

Oh. She dropped the sweating bottle of lemonade and caged her face in her hands. Oh, such a little thing. And for what?

At some point he had begun to cry, too, crying not like he had at the funeral but like he had in Cub Scouts: when he was seven, when he had gotten lost from the rest of his troupe in the woods and felt like the only thing in the world. He had cried awful then. The kind of crying that comes from cellar-deep in a person, from the minerals of them. He was crying that way as he reached out to touch her.

Please, baby. Please just have one. They're your favorite, aren't they? Aren't they baby? I got you a box on our first date. You remember that? I was an hour late picking you up because my car was so shitty? Because of the Chevy? Remember the Shitvrolet? But I made it up to you, didn't I? You gave me another chance didn't you? Didn't you baby? Here.

He took one of the cordials and crawled, an infant again, and brought it to her mouth. Here, baby. Have one. Please. Please. Just one. Just for me.

The lemonade had spilled all over the Easter-checkered afghan and even though he begged her, even though she wanted to, even though she had loved cherry cordials since she was a little girl and had snatched one at her second cousin's wedding recital, and even though she crowbarred open her jaw like a liontamer just long enough to take the candy on her tongue, she could neither chew nor taste it.

((Sort of like the lovechild between "The Hills Like White Elephants" and"A Small, Good Thing"! A lovechild that is THEN MURDERED.

Someday, I might write something happy!))

Her last name was Butcher

2010-11-01T08:19:00.001-07:00

til August. She picked up and left off with some concert pianist. A clean-shaved, Roman-nosed, calcium-blond pianist. You know the type. He went on tour over in Europe I think it was, ticking the ivories in 50,000-seat arenas for some charity group, one helping out families of childhood cancer victims. The motherfucker.

Well oops, no - that came out all sideways. Quick, now, call the midwife! This baby got its foot in its mouth somehow!

Hm. Let me think a minute what I'm saying.

Hm.

Well see, we lived on almost the same street when we were younger. Me and the Butcher girl. Well, when that's what she was, I mean. You know. We lived on almost the same street and sometimes I'd ride my sixspeed by her yard and throw pinecones at her chunky vanilla lab Marble, and she'd come running out and chase me off and I'd laugh. I asked her out to prom but she said her grandma was sick and so she was running around taking care of her and all. I said alright, but don't think I'm just asking you out for form, if I can't go with you I can't go period. Trying to put my heart on my sleeve for her, you understand.

But then right before the prom she got better, the grandma that is, and my best friend at the time Jared went on and went to prom with the Butcher girl even though he knew I had it out for her and all. He rented a two hundred dollar white tuxedo and took her out to a steak dinner and as I understand it, was a complete gentleman. I wonder how he's doing sometimes.

Not too long after, she broke it off with him. Real gentle. Then she got on a bus for something with museums that she liked to do, or art galleries I think it was, and what do you know, meets a concert pianist. Motherfucker!

I know I seem a little sore about it. I am sore. I'm sore, and not sorry about it at all. If you knew him you'd know what I mean. A pianist, for the love of Christ! Think about it!

Just think about it. You know how I mean. Let me try and think what to say with it. Hm.

You ever go to one of those school carnivals? The kind run by all the kids to teach teamwork and organization. And that sort of thing? They still have them sometimes. You've been to one.

And there's all these shitty little macaroni art prizes that they made themselves, with about ten pounds of glitter, and all of it flakes off on the drive home and infests your upholstery for weeks. And the funnel cakes are mostly just marked-up Little Debbies with the packaging stashed in the trash, and there's a dunking booth that they nigger-rigged off in the corner doesn't work quite right so the class clown's got to jump off on his own if someone hits the target just right? You've been to one. You know the impressed look you have to wear the whole time you walk around, just to spare the kid's feelings, you know?

This pianist never took off that look. He had it all the time. Talking to parents, talking to preschoolers. Talking to me. Oh, that motherfucker! Talking like he just walked out of Oxford! Chin stuck out, like he's aiming at you! And that piano! That goddamn piano playing! Motherfucker!

Hm. Hm.

And then running her off, like that. That girl. That... oh... what was her name... oh, gosh! You know who I mean.

((Taking complete and shameless liberties with the format of NaNoWriMo, and instead doing a collective 50,000-word abomination of shorts that may or may not be polished and submitted for publication come January?

DON'T YOU KNOW IT.))

are their seeds hardy things?

2010-10-24T09:37:00.000-07:00

Prickly pears! It was prickly pears that they must have snuck into her shoes. Or in her socks, yes more likely her socks, just as she was reaching over the bed for the other one, after she had wrestled the first onto her ankle, just before leaving for the factory that morning. Prickly pears!

Or maybe burrs or brambles, from the bushes from around the house, back in Raleigh. Maybe those. Or the silvery bitey spindles from that jack and ball game that they liked to play. Janny's children had slipped a little thing like that into her shoes, just as a silly little prank, just that morning before she had left for work, and that was what was making them hurt so bad.

Janny laughed a little to herself at the thought, and almost dropped the screw she was screwing into the third-to-last hole on the eggbeater handle. Prickly pears! Where had they even found them here? A fruit stand? There weren't many of those. Some, but not many. Absolutely no trees at all though, none zero zip, unless you counted the Christmas trees that they put up in some of the nicer shopping places. Janny hadn't seen trees in months because this was not the sort of place for them. They would take up room. They wouldn't fit. Even if Janny had smuggled along a seed from Raleigh, maybe an apple seed, or a peach pit (the kind of seed changed each time she thought about it, just for a little change, one time she even thought of dragonfruit) even if she had smuggled one along and stowed it away (in the lining of her Sunday blouse, her best blouse, her favorite, the one that was clean and bright and sweet as weddingcake) (the one she had traded last week for socks that would fit) even if she had smuggled along a peach pit or a cherry stone from Raleigh and then planted it here somewhere somewhere not too hard somewhere not too gray or gritty or full of garbage then even then it would not stay. It would not plant. It would not ever be there to begin with really. It would die of thirst, and would shrivel up, and tumble away into the pigslop trough of the street gutter with the rest of the rat turds, it would never have left Raleigh to begin with, it would just sit sad for a little while and then shrink up into a little raisin of itself (oh, oh, but raisins, but what if Janny had smuggled along raisins? raisins were grapes weren't they? they had seeds didn't they? surely they had seeds, grapes had seeds, and raisins were nothing more than thirsty grapes, and just how well did grapes grow? were their seeds hardy things?)

"I could learn to make wine," Janny said, dreamily, somewhere under the locust swarm of the machinery. The thought made her wiggle her toes even though it ached her. Her feet were bloated sickened campfire logs, were ready to burst out of her new old socks.

And yes it ached her but then reminded her of the children, and their little prank, and how clever it was of them to pull off such a thing while they were still asleep.

"Why - I could make wine from the prickly pears, I'll bet!"

The thought crumbled Janny out into a smile.

The girl next in line looked up and around, snagging her hand bandages on the eggbeater. She could have sworn she had heard something.

From Martin, with Love

2010-10-18T06:20:00.000-07:00

Little cuz-

Hey! :) I have run off to work to pick up my check and make sure my coworkers are not dicking around too bad (hahaha) so I am just writing you this quick little note (I hope you are like me and check the kitchen table first thing hahaha) for when you get back from school. I think they let you out at 3 or I think 4? Its been a while for me (hahaha) but if you are hungry I brought back some Indian food from Tessa's place. You remember my girl Tessa. You and her built houses with sugar packets at the Chucky Cheese when you were little at one of your birthdays. It is some kind of chicken ticki something and some kind of vegetable pancakes with no wheat (how the hell did those camel jockeys do that?) (hahaha) So go a head and grab some out of the fridge if your hungry. It is Tessa's weird health food shit but it actually tastes not so bad if you tell yourself it is just breakfast bbq or something like that (hahaha) Maybe a little of that Heineken will help it go down better hahaha? (just kidding you should not be drinking at your age)

This is just a quick note but I want you to know this whole thing with your mom and dad will blow over. Trust me. It is good sense on there part to send you over here. You should be able to count on your other family when these kinds of stuff come up and it is hard on the kid, I know (remember when I had all the same stuff a few years a while a go with your aunt and uncle. trust me.) I know its tough stuff but you know you can always count on me for advice if you are confused about something or just want to talk. You have always been very mature and understanding for your age and that is a damned zippy thing to have in this world let me tell you something.

I know you are not the type to take things the wrong way and that is also a good thing to have. misunderstandings can really shit things up in work home and even in traffic. You are very mature for your age and so i know you do not take things the wrong way. Like the other day when your teacher called and you thought you were in trouble. But you just left something back in the class. We had a good laugh over that didnt we? (hahaha) or like when I came in the other night when you were asleep in the couch and I had a little bit too much (hahahaha) you know I sometimes crash on the couch when that happens and sometimes Tessa is with me. and I was just a litle confused is all that it was. my hands get away from me sometimes you know (you remember watching my baseball games right) (I got piss poor say over my hands you know?) (hahaha) You have always been the real quiet independant type sharp to boot. I know your sharp enough to know your mom and dad do not need any more stress now then they got and any way we both know it was just an accident right? I know you are a smart kid and these sort of things are no problem for you to understand.

just a quick note

All my love Big cuz Marty

Horse sense

2010-10-14T09:44:00.000-07:00

Eddy wanted to kick himself underneath the desk when he looked from the side of his eye and saw that Barbara girl still standing by the doorway. She was looking dead at him. She was watching his broad brown hands, watching his stern booming mouth, watching him circle and scrawl around everything that the Wilkes boy had fucked over on his essay. Eddy should have called out the names.

If Eddy had called out the names, he could still talk to the list of kids who were failing or cheating or coming to class all blitzed to shit, could help them untangle the christmaslights of ink around their eraser skidmarks, could talk to them. If he had made out a list of them. Then when he didn't call out Barbara's name, and she hung around at the door anyway instead of catching the bus, then the other kids would give her Looks and then maybe she would be tugged out the door by her own little strings.

Eddy hadn't, though. Next time he would.

"Where you get this essay done?" Eddy aimed the question at the Wilkes boy's paper, and only then did he look at him. He didn't talk and look at the same time. Eddy had a strong voice, and if he talked and looked at the kids at the same time it seemed to scare them. He never really looked them in the eye, either, "In the library? In your room?" for the same reason.

The Wilkes boy let his hands wiggle in his pockets. He was trying not to lick his lips. He was sweating, under his coat. "Kitchen table." He smelled like a restaurant booth.

Eddy could smell him, and he smelled like a restaurant booth. An infant mash of food and musketeer tang of silverware and nicotine and fake red leather. The Wilkes boy probably worked, probably bussing tables on top of school. Had lied and said he was eighteen, had thirty hours a week on top of school. Had probably pulled this essay out of his ass on his smoke break.

Eddy glanced up at the Barbara girl by the door. She could hear every word they were saying.

"Kitchen table?"

"Yesser."

"At home?"

"Yesser."

Eddy looked at him again. He didn't say anything. After a moment, the Wilkes boy rattled his throat and licked his lips, and only then did Eddy look away.

"Try it again. One more time. Look here - at the notes I got written down for you." Eddy found a free margin, and used his inkpen to matador a loopy red DON'T BULLSHIT ME. Then showed it to the Wilkes boy. "Alright?"

He licked his lips again. Then again. He was sweating, under his coat. "Ye-- uh, yesser."

"Freetime on the weekends?"

"A little, yesser."

"Try to get it to me on Monday."

The Wilkes boy nodded a few times at the floor. He had a sadly handsome face. The broad jaw and eyebrows of a redboned black boy. Redboned was what they called it. Or maybe it was just regular handsomeness, and Eddy was making it up to be sad all in his head, because of the circumstance and all.

Maybe, even, Eddy was just making the Wilkes boy up to be handsome, just so that Eddy could make it up to be sad. Eddy didn't like spinning his wheels over things like that though, so he let the thought slip out the door along with the boy. He was gone with a dry chuckleshuffle of his clearance sale coat. The restaurant smell, that took a little longer.

Eddy almost started talking to the Barbara girl, almost asked her what it was she wanted, but he didn't. Eddy ignored her. He knew what she wanted, anyway, just like he knew how she would lie about it. He began packing up his folders and his lunchbox into his tortoisebrown suitcase and ignored her.

"Mr. Burcher?"

He didn't say and kept packing his things, but he looked up. She was still over by the door. She was dressed up very fine, like a diningroom table, and she was holding herself like a torch, and she was looking at Eddy like he was the last cookie in the box. She wanted to come up on him hard and Eddy knew he was in trouble.

He wouldn't have, if last week, Barbara hadn't asked him over for dinner. To meet her parents. Her mama made a mean everything she told him, showing off her teeth. They were neat and her gums were berrypink. Everything. What did he like the most? Her parents would love to meet him.

It sounded like an alright idea, until she started rubbing his thigh with hers.

And though Eddy was a rational human being, with a conscience, and a will, and self-control, Eddy was also a human being, and goddamn if the girl didn't give him a taxing of nature. She wasn't quite pretty but they never needed to be. She was young and vibrant, and showed her teeth, and she was firm in the right places and soft in others, and she smelled like something that Eddy couldn't remember but knew was good.

"I didn't really understand the assignment today, Mr. Burcher." He felt her seizing him up: tracing the curtness of the ass in his slacks, the liquid anger of the posture of his spine, the pulleys in his neck. "You thought about dinner, any? You think you could help me out with it over dinner?"

Quickly she added "With my parents. They'd love to meet you." Her teeth were neat and her gums were berrypink.

Smiles weren't smiles for Eddy, though. They didn't put him at ease with people. Smiles were just bared teeth, smiles were a display of weaponry, and that was because of his grandaddy's horses. They smiled, too. They smiled when their manes and tails were tugged too hard.

Eddy remembered watching them, the redandwhite pintos and piebalds on his grandpa's little sharecropper slice of land, in Georgia maybe. He remembered ducking under the gate, remembered his nose stung by the horse smell and hay smell and also dirt. He would sit back and wait for the horses to see him. And they would turn their big fire engine bodies broadside, would flip their ears and watch, would twitch their skins while Eddy came up on them to play a devil with their manes and tails.

One of the big mares though, a swaggery, jittery, kidneycolored nag, she turned to face him head-on. He was maybe eight. And even though Eddy had never seen a horse turn head-on like that, had only seen them turn broadside or else saunter away and leave him be, something small and quiet yanked Eddy's wires to make him stop dead and back away. Once he was far enough the mare went back to grazing.

His grandaddy and a friend had been watching by the gate. They were gossiping and sucking on sugarcubes because they had used up the cigarettes. When Eddy stopped dead and backed away, the friend laughed, loud, one time, and slapped his thigh.

"You see that?" The friend pointed a finger that wouldn't quite straighten. "That, right there? That boy got a good head."

"Good common sense." Eddy's grandaddy never smiled much when he talked. He waved Eddy over and scrubbed his head. "Where they teach you horse sense in the city, huh?"

Eddy didn't know what to say to that. He asked for a sugarcube.

"Little man with horse sense deserves a sugarcube, I think." The friend grinned and offered one. Eddy ate it slowly. "You get a boy with good horse sense, he do alright."

Then the men watched the mare for a little while. Eddy wasn't sure what they meant, or what the mare had done, but the sugarcube tasted nice.

He tried to make like that mare, just then. In the classroom. He turned his body full-on at the girl and looked at her hard. His jaw swelled. His spine unfurled and his shoulders appeared, and his nostrils flared and his chin rose up to show the Roman column of his throat, and Eddy tried very very hard to make himself into a bigger thing.

She was coming up on him and maybe if he said something she would have stopped. He didn't, though. Next time he would.

"If you could explain," she told the buttons on his shirt. Her hand was cooking him, was burning holes in his slacks. "I just didn't really understand, is all." She smelled like something that Eddy couldn't remember.

I could never be vegetarian

2010-10-02T10:15:00.000-07:00

because I would begin to salivate like a stormdrain each time I passed a mirror. I would stain my shirt. I would turn cannibal. My friends and family and lovers would be sat in the center of their own crosshairs, made by the shallow crux of their collarbones and sternums and the gumdrop hollows of their throats, and my tablemanners are shameful to begin with. Life must end somewhere. If not on my plate, by my hands and by my mouth, then by someone else's. Blame must end somewhere. And if my plate and my hands and my mouth were left empty for too long, with no friends and no family and no lovers handy, then the weaselcolored penitentiary of my teeth would turn on its own tongue and then I would be not only a murderer but a mute. I suppose words, too, must end somewhere.

In school they told us A place for everything, and everything in its place and I have always liked that. The phrase is smooth, smooth and even, even in its weight and its sound and its dishonesty, a creamy tincan cobra, and I have always liked that. That a pale child slick with illness or a grating scraping bank account or a working father's shattered spine, or the would-be moral lighthouse on the corner of everystreet, whose soapbox has left with a mouthful of foam and a voice like a 21-gun Salute, or crows, or malaria - I have always liked the idea that these things have a place. That they can be neatly sorted, and shelved, like books in a library. I am almost certain that words must end somewhere.

They taught poorly with their freshwatervoices while we perched like canaries in our tumblefurnace classrooms, but I learned. Am still learning.

I am learning that even confidence is a kind of resignation

((I'm pretty sure this is some sort of quasi-sequel to the wannabe Parisian from a few months back. Stuff like "I suppose" and "salivate" aren't things that I use a whole lot.

It's weird, tapping into a voice more than once!))

droolingheart

2010-09-22T03:05:00.000-07:00

I have lately been visited at night by an enormous Russian man: forty or fifty years old, richly bearded, whose mother had him finish all of his vegetables and all of his milk. At least I think he is Russian. I can't get much from his accent, because he speaks very rarely, and even then with a mind-boiling softness.

He is focused on his work: he sweats. The skin around his eyes and mouth is pinched, is flushed and rigid. The expression he wears is the expression a razor would wear. I am splayed on a table, mostly nude, and he is tattooing my skin.

I ask What are you drawing? or at least that's what I want to ask. The words don't come. They turn into syrup, and they make the room darker.

He says nothing but glances up, like he has noticed a mosquito in the room, and clears the gutter of his throat and keeps working. His hands are chewed, and ribbed. They are wrinkled from ropeburn and effort and maybe hooks. I can smell him: sour wood and salt, and distance, and patience.

I ask A fisherman? or at least that's what I want to ask. You were a fisherman, weren't you?

And now I realize this is a dream: awake, I not only overlook details of people such as ropeburn, and patience, and maybe hooks, but also fail to piece them together into people.

He looks up again and I wish I could see what he is drawing. He is so focused. It must be something beautiful. But now the needle is gone and he is holding a knife - is wiping it on his pantsleg, is cleaning it - and tenderly he unzips me, and slowly he spills me, and gently he shows me the wires of me.

Ah, I say, or at least I want to say. My heart is a dazed thing in his hand: is gasping aloud: is drooling between his fingers. A surgeon, then.

[COM][plex]

2010-09-10T04:38:00.000-07:00

Dinner was 35 mg of Concerta crushed in a fivedollarbill and taken up the nose with a Hardee's straw. It looked like Pixie Stick surgery. That's what Robbie thought, anyway. He must have messed up and missed, or something, because motherfucker the whole time it stuck and stung like habanero salt. He grunted and scrubbed his face with his hand while Laurel's shook-up sodapop laugh came from the bathroom.

"I think I cut my nose." He sulked back into the sofa and dropped his heels on her coffeetable. The straw was suddenly a fascinating thing. "You said trim it, didn't you?"

"The straw?"

"Mm-hm."

"Mm-hmmm."

Laurel had a magician's way of pulling sound along on some friendly, flirty, sing-songy string. Robbie loved when she did that. It struck him as cozy. Not grandma's quilt and lemon cake, no, not even close - more playground, Kool-Aid, lunchtable barter system domestic. Little Debbie for ham-on-white for Gummi Bears. Band-Aid barely-hanging-on-elbow. Cozy, in its own right.

Robbie smiled and listened to the pocketchange clicks of her makeup.

"How far up did you go?" she asked, sometime after his gears were good and going.

"Dunno. Didn't wanna see pink stuff coming out the other end, you know?" Robbie found himself double-checking both sides of the straw for just such pink stuff - just to check, just to see - and then again with his other hand. Weird things, straws. Hardee's straws. Robbie could bend and twist it all over the place. "I can kinda taste it. It's kinda sweet. In my throat, you know? I can kinda taste it. Not like normal, though - only back in my throat." The straw cracked splintery wintery all down one side and Robbie tossed it to the carpet. "It tastes sweet."

Except straws didn't really have sides, did they? "Why do they make it sweet?"

The cabinet confetticracked closed. "So they can hook 'em young, baby." It sounded like a purr. Like she was purring. Robbie could watch - was watching, looking at the scraps of her silhouette on the side of the wall. A dark warm tumble of pinwheel applejack, straight down the movieprojector hallway. Opening night for her finishing-touched hair. "You'll start seeing them in gumball machines, soon. Quarter apiece."

The bathroom lightswitch snapped into black and Laurel materialized: dressed like a themepark. Maybe just to tease him, or the both of them, or just herself, she splayed slow: like a licorice gymnast, up against the woodenframe of the hallway: melted ragdoll tabbycat, arched molasses back, jellybean skirt riding up lappingly.

Robbie loved her terrible then. Would do terrible things for her, then.

Then she wilted and made a face. "Hey, c'mon. Feet off the table."

He did her one better - he stood. Stood at full, starched, left-left-right-left attention. His hands itched. He wanted to grab her, to grab her, and then - then - well - Robbie wasn't completely sure what, then. He had an idea, sure, but he wasn't completely sure. He wanted to grab her.

"You look nice," he said eventually, and she laughed her laugh all fizz and aluminum. She showed her teeth and her neck when she did it.

"God. You're strung up, baby." Her eyes ate him whole. "You look like some sweaty little boy on his first date."

Did he? Robbie didn't think so. His hands weren't sweaty - just itchy. He wiped them on his pants.

She stepped around and turned her chin, sharp and birdy, dipping for the best angle of his pupils. "It hit you hard, didn't it? I told you to start slow. It's miles off from popping."

"Yeah."

"Triple the bioavailability, I think it is."

"Yeah." Robbie's hands itched.

"Guess I'm driving." Her arm came up and around his, darkly warmly tumble pinwheel applejack, keys jingling. She smiled and eskimo kissed him. "I've got some candy in my van, little boy..."

He slammed the door behind them, hard, once he managed to find the knob. Whatever was hanging on the back of it fell and shattered against the floor like a delinquent's Black Cat, right over Jacklyn's head, halfway through a sentence about the developmental patterns of glandular disorders throughout adolescence. She wanted to scream.

"Are you serious?" The textbook started to slip from her lap and she hastily grabbed it, crinkling some pages in her binder. She evil-eyed the ceiling like God had wronged her. "No, I mean really. Are you serious."

Outlining four chapters of bio would have been no-sweat, normally. Typically. If Jacklyn had had more than a single night to knock it out. If she had passed up on that ten-page tumor of an Ayn Rand essay. If it had been the five-page tumor of an essay, instead.

If if or if, then Jacklyn would have actual time for her actual schoolwork. As in, her work for school. As in, the comparatively dopey, plug and chug, only-takes-a-teaspoon-of-brains work. As in, say, outlines.

All that bullcrap was every kind of cake and pie and easy-peasy. Normally.

That extra essay, though - ten pages. Ten pages of Ayn Rand. Not that Jacklyn --

-- there was an obnoxious buzzing and she almost threw her alarm clock at the ceiling, ready to scream the building's policy on noise violations, but then realized it was just her cellphone, buried somewhere under her backpack on her desk, and sighed, and tried to settle back into trying to settle back into bio --

-- Jacklyn regretted it, no. At least not really. Another stab at another scholarship could never be a bad move. So for the Ten-Grand-Ayn-Rand essay? Show her the dotted line and she would sign it in blood. Actually scratch that. For ten grand, she would take a stab at her own kidneys.

Still, though.

Jacklyn pulled air in through her nose and - as slowly as possible, as smoothly as possible - let it out, out through her teeth, out around the plastic of her mechanical pencil. She had chewed through two already. "I don't even like Ayn Rand."

The phone tittered twice, warning of a low battery. Or voicemail? Something. Jacklyn took it as some divine cue for a break. Ten minutes, tops. She could pop some ginger tea in the microwave for three, and get dinner started in as much time. It would probably be cool enough to drink when she got back from checking the mail --

"Oh Chriiiiist," groaned something dead, or dying, from the bathroom.

"Mom?" Her textbook and binder tumbled to the floor as Jacklyn slipped off the bed. "Mom, you okay?"

Beatrice had gotten a nasty stomach bug from work. The past couple days could be summed up in the kitchen trash: 7-Up, saltines, a couple issues of Cosmo. It made perfect sense that Beatrice would catch something, considering the hours on her feet and all the dealing with sick people, but the idea still didn't quite take for Jacklyn. Even when Beatrice had pulled the thermometer from her own mouth, cold and damp and pale as fish at the kitchentable, shrugging - "Was bound to happen, I guess." - it simply did not fit together. It was one of those lopsided ironies that were only explored in sitcoms, in filler episodes. Like the mechanic with car trouble.

"Mom?" She tapped the bathroom door, gently. There was heavy breathing and cursing on the other side. "You okay? Mom? I'm coming in, okay?"

"Your funeral."

Jacklyn opened the door and gave herself a moment to ignore the salt slug shrivel of her insides. The big, watery, hornet's-nest smell of stomach acid was much stronger than she was expecting, but then she saw that vomit had gotten on the floor. "Oh, mom."

"'m fine. I'm okay." Beatrice was groping around for toilet paper blindly, with her forehead propped on the coralpink toiletseat. "Bit of a misfire. No problem."

"I'll get you a washcloth."

Beatrice mumbled something that might have been "don't bother," but Jacklyn was already back, already kneeling to wipe her mother's face clean. There was a bit of complaint but the job got done.

"This isn't so bad, from the other side." Beatrice sounded a little amused.

"Except for the whole puking-your-guts-out thing."

"Except for that."

And then she was cleaned up and being sent off to bed again.

"Can I at least sop up my own mess? Huh?" Her mother no longer sounded amused. She sounded a little embarrassed. When Beatrice was embarrassed she got angry, and so Jacklyn knew it was a good idea to be gentle about it.

"No. Go back to bed."

"Jackie --"

"I'll clean it up. Get some rest, okay?"

Her mother scowled at her. "You're gonna get ulcers like your aunt."

"I'm not going to get ulcers."

"Are you even done with your work? Aren't you busy?"

"I'm not busy. I got it." Jacklyn finished mopping up the vomit and flushed the toilet with her elbow. "No sweat."

The pipes gurgled and boiled when she did, Marcus scowled at his kitchenwall, at the sound of them. Just as he was headed for the faucet. It took the slightest things - just the tiniest, littlest thing - for the plumbing in this damn building to slack off into Chinese water torture. It took an hour to wash the dishes if someone even thought too hard.

He propped his hip against the sink, leaning, and wrung a hand over his new beard. He was getting fleecy. He was getting weak. Limping around an office and riding a desk and writing a pen was not what he liked, was not what he was used to. Every day his body was turning against him just a little more and Marcus could feel it.

Earlier he had studied the mirror and compared himself to himself. Six months back while under the badge: Polished leather panther, ripe bourbon sinew. This morning before his shower: Crooked cola alleycat, rotting on the bone.

The strings along his jaw flickered as Marcus watched himself. How did it get that bad? How did he let it? The shower behind him was finally running hot and wonderful but he ignored it, and traced himself like a stranger. The skin of his thigh was a good, smooth, milky coffee, healthy and rich, until the rip, until the hole, and there the skin was the skin of a burnt photograph: curled-up, curdled-in charcoal: ugly and fiendish.

By then the strings along his neck were flickering, too, his jaw clenched and pulling them along for the ride, and eventually by some unpunctual mercy the steam ate up the mirror.

Marcus leaned against the sink, and wrung a hand over his new beard.

"Daddy, I'm done."

He looked up to see his daughter again trying to squirm from her chair. Dinner had been served, to Janice's disgust, right in the middle of Coral Anna and the Sea, and because of this she spent most of it either stirring around her meatloaf and broccoli or staring at the television like it was a snakecharmer.

"Uh-uh." Marcus pulled up his chin and his eyebrows and looked at her. "You finish your plate."

"I'm done."

"Your plate clean?"

She said nothing, but kept watching the television like it took something from her.

Marcus scowled. The damn thing wasn't even turned on.

"You ain't even touched your broccoli. Wannem cut up?"

"I'm dooone..."

He moved behind her - limped behind her - and took his daughter's hands in his hands like a puppetmaster. "Cut 'em up."

"I'm done!"

"No you're not." They cut up her broccoli.

An ambulance started screaming, somewhere outside, and a dozen different windows slammed shut.

((One of my professors described writing as "a sort of neutered schizophrenia." That it involves "taking separate, neurotic pieces of oneself, constructing fleshy mouthpieces from them, and orchestrating one's own struggles and deceptions and death."

For a moment, we all reflected on that. Such things call for reflection - at least a little reflection. Reflection that I then shattered with: "I used to do that with Legos."

A few people cleared their throats uncomfortably. Then some guy in the back added "I still do that with Legos." IT WAS A GOOD DAY AND I WISH YOU'D BEEN THERE.

I enjoy neutered schizophrenia and I unearthed my mom's Raymond Carver book from my mattress and I am drinking ditchwater coffee from a Dixie cup and eating stretchy angel food cake with my fingers and I am thinking hard about Dali and life is not so terrible a thing.))

Slam Dunk, Man

2010-09-08T02:49:00.000-07:00

By the time they cut Alan loose and he was back at the house, none of his clothes fit right. He was too leggy. His feet were bigger. There were gaps between the buttons of the button-ups and slack in the waists of the pants. Even with that nice caramel-colored belt that they gave him at his graduation party, the jeans would bunch up and outwards like they were gagging.

He gave up after about twenty minutes. He sat on his bed, and looked around. There were clothes all over. If there was a mirror in there, Alan could at least see what looked the least ridiculous on him. Alan wished there was a mirror.

Well, no.

Alan wished that they had left his mirror alone. Where he had left it. Right to the left of the door - right over the loose floorboard that was there.

Well, no.

That used to be there. They had sealed it up. Instead of the mirror there was a slinky Michael Jordan poster: threebyfour, in full kaleidoscope color. It was scotch-taped and a little slanted. The room had smelled smooth and new when Alan had first walked in, and it took him awhile to realize that it was coming from the poster: MJ had just taken it straight to the hole with more game than the Parker Brothers, was sticking it out with some major hangtime like he was renting out a place up there, with the dustbunny crowd in the background going absolutely ballistic here tonight, ladies and gentlemen, just absolutely ape, and Alan thought about tearing it down to see the police-chalk rectangle that it was hiding.

"Alan?"

There was a single belch of a knock at the door which immediately opened, and Alan's smiling mother eased in. She looked him up and down very quickly. And then one more time, smiling.

Alan's mother could talk and hold a smile with no problems. No mumbling or stretching her mouth too much. It was a good talent. It made her wonderful with people. She looked Alan up and down again, very quickly, just a bit of a flit of the eyes, and kept smiling.

"What would you like for dinner?" Her lips were straining like fishingline.

Alan sat for a moment. On his bed, hands in his lap; he needed a little time to think the question over. It wasn't one that had come up in the last nine months. He licked his lips, still thinking, and turned. "Steak?"

Her smile tugged and dipped. "Oh, um, but sweetie..." She was peeling at a flake in the doorframe with her thumbnail. "Steak would be a little... with a knife and all, I don't -- oh, no, I just mean that..."

Alan turned back to look into his closet. "Hamburgers."

"Hamburgers?"

"Hamburgers would be great."

"Oh okay, you bet."

Her thumbnail snicked at the flake in doorframe.

"It's just, you know, steak takes so long to make, and then--"

"It's okay."

"-- we don't even -- your father's blood pressure, you know?" She laughed, or maybe she was clearing her throat. "We cut way back on red meat, since you've been -- oh --"

"Hamburgers would be wonderful."

"Oh okay." Her thumb snicked at the flake. "Anything else special you want? For dessert? I just got some bubblegum ice cream."

"They don't fit right." Alan had his hands in his lap and was staring into the closet.

"We could... what?"

"These clothes." The cuffs of the dress shirt were choked halfway up his fishgutted arms. "None of them fit right."

She said nothing for a moment. Neither of them said anything for a moment. Everything was quiet, for a moment.

But then it passed and her thumbnail went back to work. "You can just wear what you wore for the graduation party, right?" Alan's mother was still smiling. He could hear it, even staring into the closet. "Or just, you know. Just throw on whatever you're -- you're comfy with. Okay?" She laughed, or maybe it was a belch. "You're having dinner, not going to court!"

And she laughed again while Alan nodded.

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay."

"Great." Her smile was full-sail as she swept back into the hallway. There was the sound of the fridge opening, and then of someone humming jazz.

Alan listened, and laid back on his bed, and looked up at the ceiling. Then he reached over for the caramel-colored belt. It was smooth and new - it smelled smooth and new. It was really a very nice belt. Versatile. It fit Alan just right, in all the right places.

He wondered if the light fixture would hold his weight.

((Michelle was talking about her lamp in her room in her host mother's house and how it was dangling quite precariously from a thin wire. So thin was this wire, she claimed, that one could allegedly "fish with it." (The validity of this assertion is still pending the deepest scrutiny.)

But anyway that somehow turned into a "fishingline smile" and somehow that turned into this and I have absolutely no idea how, what, I mean, I don't even.

let's get a goddamn forensics team in here or something, man, i mean goddamn))

Sarcophagal

2010-09-01T17:22:00.000-07:00

Is that a word? I'd like it to be. The very utterance is getting my Spellcheck all flushed with indignity, but chalk that up to sour luck. I'm not letting sarcophagal, seductively useless little morsel that it is, be scratched out for the sake of form. No sir, no ma'am. Not after taking in a big drink of Emory this afternoon.

Maybe it's just the spoiled Surburbanite in me, but I can't help gawking at abandoned buildings as I pass them by. Abandoned houses in particular. I've spent most of my life in areas that - while they had some spat-up old gas stations lying around - were generally clear of them. Trimmed off neatly from the rest of the rest. They are quaint little artifacts to smile at while cruising over to Chick-Fil-A, tucked away on the side of the road, and not given much thought except by adolescents who need an avenue for adolescence.

Here, they are a necrosis. A fully-functioning one. An endearing one, even. Every minty-lawn sprinkler-system Volkswagen-veneer street has some weedchoked charity case: swaybacked, ramshackle, rundown. All Such Phrases Apply Within. There are literally dozens of gutted-out buildings within walking distance of campus. Barns and cabins and sheds and shacks - all perfectly preserved cripples. It's like God split a pouch of marbles over Emory, and just let them scatter.

But getting back to sarcophagal. (doesn't it just feel nice on the ears?) While staring down a ravaged pile of piles, glass and splinters and digested furniture, I had a very rare and very clear moment of conviction: "I'd pass on Giza. When I kick it, they should just kick me into one of these."

If the sun sticks around for the weekend, I'll try and charm a digital camera out of the IT center. Snap a pic or two for you, my beloved Internet, of these twisted little things. I swear that most of them would cave in the roof of your mouth.

"People walk by here all the time."

2010-08-19T21:02:00.000-07:00

Twenty minutes after the cafe closes, they are finally kicked out. All the lights are still on. She props open the door with her ballet flat, and tucks her arms into her arms, and looks over her shoulder. The street is gray and patient. When it doesn't get up and walk away before her eyes, she looks back inside.

He is taking his time: he stretches. Cracks his knuckles. Drags his feet, lets his sneakers chirp against the tile. He gathers their things over one arm, and as he walks to the door, he flips the bird from under the jackets. It's not hidden very well. The two cafe girls give them looks that could bleach clothing, and now the two cafe girls are flipping the chairs up on the tables.

She smiles at them. She smiles at them, and keeps the door propped open with her ballet flat, and he helps her into her jacket. All the lights are still on. 60 watt vanilla and cream is pouring out of the windows, out onto the sidewalk, and heat is pouring out of the door like Christmas cider. She keeps the door propped open with her ballet flat and they are greedily soaking it up.

When the door slams and locks from inside, she stops smiling. Their breaths are coming out as a cold cotton fog. All the lights are still on. The two cafe girls are still flipping chairs, leaving their legs sprawled-up and still, turning the tables into dead bugs.

I should've bought you another one, she says.
What?
Shit.

He straightens her jacket at the shoulders. Smooths the material down. It is a deep and anxious habit.

I should've bought another coffee, she says. To go.
You don't even like coffee.
For you. For your hands.
Oh, he says, and laughs. His hands are fine. It would be a waste of three dollars, he thinks.

She is still standing there, staring into the cookiejar windows of the honeypot cafe, until he loops his arm around her shoulders and starts walking.

You could sleep on the couch again tonight, she says. You need to. I mean it.
He says nothing and shakes his head.
I mean it. It's too cold out. The backdoor's new, so it doesn't make any noise.
Not worth it.
They just got back from some business trip. They're sleeping like corpses. I mean it.
He shakes his head and kisses her hair, and that seals the subject.

You want me to walk you home?

She doesn't answer for a moment. She is feeling around for his hand. When she finds it, she rubs it fast with her own, like she's starting a cavewoman's fire. She is trying to warm it. He doesn't have the heart to say that her hands are actually colder than his.

In a bit, she says. Let's walk some.

The street is grey and patient. And idle, and paved, and jaundiced with the hum of the matchhead streetlights. They are ugly but they are there. On the left they are passing by the park, and she tugs him towards it.

Let's stop here for a minute.
In the park?
Yeah. She is rubbing her hands again, slowly, and looking at him sideways. Her face is suspiciously still. She tells lies like eight-year-olds do.
Okay, he says. He was thinking of sleeping here anyway. It's nice for a park. The benches are comfortable and almost clean. At night, there's not much to worry about unless you have a purse to be snatched, and there are some trees.

She is still tugging him along. Still rubbing his hand between hers. When they come to a bench she turns and cups his face, and pulls him down to kiss.

Your lips are freezing, he says, teasing, once she lets him.
She doesn't respond. Instead she pulls him down again. And then further, until he is sitting on the bench and she is straddling his legs. She crosses her arms around the back of his neck, and moves to kiss the brassy shelf of his jaw. His stubble scrapes her cheek like candied sandpaper and she makes a small and happy sound. And now sweet magnetic heat is rushing to his groin.

But uh. But people...

His hands somehow find her hips and pulls them down. It is effortless and wonderful. She is warm potter's clay, shaping under his hands, around his erection. She is trapping the shell of his ear in her hardcandy teeth and lemon taffy lips.

His lungs have shrunk in the last minute, he thinks. They must have, he thinks.

... here. People, I mean.

He is breathing heavier, and it leaves precious patches of heat in her hair. She hates how quickly they disappear. She half-bites his ear, pressing downward with her teeth and upward with her tongue. The mineshaft rumble in his throat is exquisite. She tastes salt and dim sting of old cologne, from a week ago, maybe, and after a moment she pulls back.

Mhm, she says.
People can see.

She doesn't want to argue. She bends to kiss him but he won't.

People can see us.
No one's gonna see us.
People walk by here all the time.

She doesn't want to argue.

Yeah, they do.

She bends to kiss him again and this time he lets her. She's glad. There is electric icewater brewing in the belly of her belly, and it wants her closer to him, and it makes her hips shift. Very gently at first. Back and forth. After a moment he dips a thumb into the rim of her skirt, and strokes the skin of her hip, and she makes a small and happy sound at that. At feeling his hands.

She loves his hands. She would never say so, but she likes to think of them as cowboy hands. They look like cowboy hands would look, she thinks. They are calloused from a summer of mowing lawns and trimming hedges. They are knotted and rough and big, and powerful, and whenever the bus is late and he curls them into fists, the tendons pop and flare like Molotovs. She loves that. Loves how big and threatening they seem. She loves feeling them against the back of her neck, loves wondering if they are big and powerful enough to snap it. They could but they couldn't. She is sure of that. She loves feeling threatened by harmless things.

((Hello! Contrary to glaringly present evidence, I am not a basement-dwelling porn-writing voyeur! Pinky swearsies!

I'd love for a Freudian to explain why I associate sensuality with candy and celestial bodies.))

Doug's world

2010-08-15T18:04:00.000-07:00

is small. Every morning he wakes up in blue silk sheets and blue silk pajamas that were imported from Sweden. He sits up and he stretches. The phone next to his goosefeather mattress is a French antique. He picks it up and he calls downstairs for breakfast. The cook is a Haitian man named Philippe who is not particularly skilled with any one cuisine. Doug tells Philippe what he would like. Then he hangs up. Then he steps into his sheepskin slippers and walks ten feet to his Victorian roll-top desk and opens and reads and sends off mail from too many places. He does not leave the room for days at a time. He calls on his French antique to his Haitian cook and has his meals brought up, and he works. He arranges conferences between Japanese cities and Brazilian cities and German cities and American cities. He holds the telephone to his ear as machine-voices give him language options. When he smokes it is Turkish tobacco in his Italian pipe, but he does not smoke often. He masturbates to pornography from Korea and France. He was once married to a girl from his graduating class but she left. Doug's world is small.

I am, therefore I think I am

2010-08-11T13:53:00.000-07:00

I was starstruck on my first night in New York, completely rolled and bowled over and folded into a sunken newspaper sailboat. Everything was choked with life. Everything was behind schedule. Everything was a candycoated lightsocket of vulgarity and god was I charmed. I'm sure the four percocet that I parachuted in a coffeeshop bathroom helped, too.

In the peasoup lighting of eight p.m. I stopped on the sidewalk to watch a street band: a cellist and a drummer and a trumpeter. I couldn't say if they played well or not because I'm illiterate in every sense of that sense, but there were pearls of sweat on their hands and heads and grizzly chins from hours on their feet. The cello case they laid open had an acne smatter of coins inside. The sound of them was mongreled somewhere between jazz, and a hymn, and a eulogy, and gentle godlessness, and it hit me hard like a firingsquad when they snapped their cases and left.

Then I was in a barroom - the bar! - the bazaar, the smokysweet jawbreaker arcade where I watched a couple slowdance to Bette Midler. They were as stunning as a punch to the windpipe. He was broad and trim, with the tired handsomeness of old horses. His throat was a bold savory column that squirmed delectably when he laughed and bent to speak in her ear. It may have looked graceless and inintimate for anyone else to do, for anyone else with arms and legs that were too long and too restless for the rest of themselves, but not for him. He let them twitch with grace and fidget with intimacy up and down along her.

Her of course being her, her with the Ganymede gravitas, with the corrosive smile, with the curves like a Spanish guitar. Her hair was a brown that I had never seen before and have not seen since. A sick sienna, almost. The queasy copper of the sky before a tornado. It was a color that doesn't belong on humans, but she wore it like an oil painting.

And how well they fit together! How satisfying - like a warm meal! They split me sweetly down the middle and peeled me open. His hand along the curve of her back, her arm around the swell of his shoulders, chin on collarbone and chin on crown. Like some wonderful, foreign, pre-assembled furniture. I wanted to writhe and sigh right there - what a treat! Such a treat. I looked for the color of their weddingbands but only the man was wearing one.

I was paraplegic with the impact of them - everyone there - the whole room. Sitting so close felt like sacrilege. A girl in the back was using a papernapkin to dab vomit from the corner of her mouth, and there was such achingly tender vulnerability in the act that I was threatened with heartfailure. She was young, but her face was wrinkled. From sun or from smiling. I think she would have looked lovely with a smile - with no papernapkin to hide it - but she was lovely regardless. The cumstain on the side of her stormcloud dress was natural, and beautiful. She was natural and beautiful. I wanted to peel off the wrinkles around her mouth and put them in my pocket.

But more than that I wanted, and tried very very hard, to ignore the Vonnegut in the back of my head - in the back of the barroom - the Vonnegut telling me Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt. And how nice a thing I thought that that was when I read it, and it was a nice thing, until my professor praised him for that line of searing irony.

((I have never actually been to New York! I have taken shameless liberties with a city of eight million people!

Well, okay, I actually visited once, but I was too young to absorb anything of substance. I'd like to go again. And get on Cash Cab. holy crap that would be awesome.

Also Vonnegut you are a dick for occasionally taking a glorious piss all over my idealism.))

My life is devastatingly interesting and here is the proof

2010-08-09T17:40:00.000-07:00

I abandoned my phone, and debit card, and driver's license, and spearmint gum, and other items of a vital nature in a Kohl's dressing room yesterday. The tasty pastel shirts and denim skirt that I had tried on ($34! What the hell, skirt, why are you so comfortable and swooshy-feeling) served as an encouraging second wind to get me through trying on rainboots. They also served as a tall glass of morphine to turn me amnesiac towards my shit of a vital nature.

"FUCKKKK." Panic was instant. "I still had half a pack of gum left!" It was also prioritized.

I had used three different dressing rooms throughout the store, because I am simply that brilliant, and so picking the wrong one first could mean giving some well-timed stranger a slick opportunity. If I hadn't already, I mean. But rather than convulsing on the spot or berserking Vera Chang or whatever-the-shit off the racks, I turned on the spot and gave a lamely apologetic grin to an elderly couple walking by.

"Excuse me!" Sheepish gushing mode: activated. "Hey! Yeah, jeez, I'm so sorry, do you think I could borrow your cellphone for a half-second?" I'm great at sheepish gushing. And cringing and scraping. According to Jung, I'm an ENFP, and according to Jung, that means I gush like a Niagara firehydrant. "I dropped mine somewhere around here - I was hoping I could call it and hear it..."

They were an incredibly sweet old couple with accents as thick as grits. The woman 'blessed my heart' two or three times while her husband dug around for his Jitterbug. Success! I continued gushing while accepting the enormous phone.

They gave me concerned looks when I paused for a few seconds (I was trying to remember my number), but once dialed in, all was well.

I mean, sort of. I couldn't hear a trace of You spin me right round, baby, right round, like a record baby, right round round round or ROXAAAAAAAANE and so I knew my poor Scotch-taped phone was nowhere in earshot.

Just when I was about ready to sigh, thank the couple, give back their phone and ask an employee for the lost and found, someone on the other end of the line quavered "Um, hello?"

"... y- uh." Hmmm. "Hello?"

"Hello?"

This may have gone on for days.

Thankfully it did not! The husband beamed and curled a practiced arm around his wife. "Oh, good! Some'un foun it for ya?"

Indeed they had, Jitterbug guy. Yet another kindly old lady, in the middle of trying on business slacks, had noticed miscellaneous vitals squirreled away in one corner of her dressingroom.

"I was on my way to take it to the service desk, when you called." She smiled. "I wasn't tryin to snoop, answerin your phone like that! I just figured I'd ask the person 'whose number is this?' so I could get your name and get em desk people to call you up there." Goddamn, old people are smart.

Between very dignified mouthfuls of spearmint gum, I thanked her over and over over. Like instead of handing over my crappy phone and debit card she was donating a kidney. "If the wrong person had picked it up, I'd be in deep trouble, you know?"

"You never know folks, honey." She patted my shoulder just before walking off to the register. "Some'd rob as soon as look atcha!"

I nodded, slowly. Then discreetly counted my remaining gum. (her breath was simply too fresh and wonderful to be unsuspect)

Bedava sirke baldan tatlıdır

2010-08-04T20:16:00.000-07:00

Norman had a refugee uncle from Turkey who could read fortunes from a pack of playing cards. That was how he learned English so fast - from reading fortunes off of playing cards. If you brought him a carton of cigarettes or an apple pie then he would go into very happy detail for you, which is precisely what I did, right after I heard that Billy the Rainboy caught a Louisville Slugger square on the eyebrow while running dope in Cincinnati.

“Five wands!” It was actually a five of clubs. “Stay away from silly fight.” He squinted at me like it was something that I disobeyed on purpose and sucked on his cigarette three times, real fast, before taking a drag. Fuff-fuff-fuffffffff. I thought of telling him that he only needed to puff like that when lighting up, that American cigarettes wouldn’t just snuff out like Turkish ones, and so there was no need to fuff-fuff-fuffffffff every ten seconds and end up going through a whole goddamn pack in an hour.

But I’m not too familiar with the quality of Turkish cigarettes. It could have just been a habit of his.

“Too many swords.” Norman’s uncle kept right on flipping and fuffing and squinting. He had immaculate eyebrows. That’s not the type of thing I look for in people usually, but you tend to notice weird things when you get anxious. Look around at wallpaper, count ceiling tiles, scratch at cracks in the table. You know.

“What uh, what do swords mean?”

“Swords, not so good.”

I almost asked him “What about bats, huh?” but I thought better about it. He probably wouldn’t get it. And even if he did, I could see how it would sort of sound like a cheap shot, to somebody else. Saying something like that. What with Billy the Rainboy needing a closed casket just a couple days ago. I mean sure, he was king of the raging pricks, the crown-prince of fuck-you-up-the-ass, but I’m just not a cheap shot sort of guy.

"Stay away from silly fight." Norman's uncle had eaten through another cigarette and was glaring at me while rummaging for a fresh one. He stuffed it halfway in his cheek like he was saving it for later. "Also, your mother. You need to visit more."

"Ma's dead, man."

He nodded and reached for my hand. "Yes." Then pried it open. To read my palm, I guess. His fingers felt like a bricklayer's.

A limerick, in the limerickiest fashion available

2010-07-27T17:41:00.000-07:00

O'Conner was really quite dumb.

He drank a whole bottle of rum.

Then dreamt that Venus,

was licking his elbow,

and woke up, covered, in perspiration.

((oh man what is this even, seriously sista needsa get back in the damn saddle))

Fishhook, Picturebook

2010-07-20T08:01:00.000-07:00

“i think things are only as hard as people make them be.”

is that right?

“mhm.”

well isn’t that something. you’re a very clever little girl.

“thanks.”

i bet you’re top of your class. are you top of your class?

“i don’t know. maybe. even if i’m not i’m pretty smart though. my teacher says so.”

your teacher? hm, well, your teacher's wrong.

"huh?"

cause you’re more than pretty smart. you’re more than pretty, too.

[she giggles] “you’re weird.”

weird? weirdly wonderful, right?

[she giggles again, jesus christ, i should just rip her from the vine right now] “nope! just weird.”

weird, huh. well your parents are pretty weird too.

“yeah. they’re pretty weird too.”

you said they put on a movie for you yesterday? do they usually do that on weeknights?

“no. they made me watch it for like an hour, too.”

they did? that’s really weird.

“yeah.”

i think i know why they did that.

“why?”

i think maybe they were doing sex things upstairs.

“ewww!”

yup, ew. I thought it was ew too when i was a little tiny kid.

“i’m not a little kid.”

you’re not? but you said sex is ew.

“it is!”

well, it isn’t for grown-ups. grown-ups know more about it.

[a wrinkle in the forehead, a frown, so so very close to that alluring no-more-ice-cream pout] “i don’t like talking about this.”

why not?

“i don’t like it. i think they were both just wrapping my birthday presents, and they didn’t want me going upstairs. they do that stuff around christmas too.”

oh, well that could be it. you’re such a little smartie. how old are you going to be?

“nine.”

that’s a wonderful age. i remember when i was nine. a friend of mine taught me a lot of wonderful secrets.

“secrets?”

yup, secrets. grown-up secrets.

[anxious, teeth on lips, tut tut don’t tear them up just yet] “why are you telling me this?”

i just want to help you grow up. you want to grow up, right? [there it is, there's that fillet mignon pout, she wants it when she doesn't even know how good it is]

“um.”
this is stuff that grown-ups know. you’re going to have to learn it sometime. i could show you now. [fillet mignon, la fille mignonne]
“um.”
don’t worry, a smart girl like you will learn really fast. here. [a friendly touch, innocent, just on the shoulder]
that’s not so bad, right? [she looks ready to cry]
“u-um” don’t cry.

Old black water, keep on rolling

2010-07-15T13:05:00.000-07:00

The patchwork boy that I tried pot with for the second time was convinced that I had drowned in a past life. To him, this explained years of my childhood - the ones spent barefoot in a creek near my house. Shorts rolled way up past my knees, and soaked regardless.

“Those things sort of things stick with you,” he said, sober as a hearse driver beneath his Incredible Hulk beanie. We were right over a river, propped against the railing of its ailing footbridge. It had a terminal case of unoccupied youths. One of them had taken the time to graffiti a Keats poem - with meticulous, agonizing care - in the shape of a six-foot penis. It was in the middle of ejaculating the likeness of a man’s face. I can only assume it to be Keats.

And apparently, I wasn’t the only one drawn to the spot. The patchwork boy flagged me down on my way out of a psychology lecture, and said he saw me around that bridge all the time, and haha, was I out there scoping the place for trolls or something like that? Haha, yeah, something like that. I swear to you the blueprint of his hands was sketched by Da Vinci.

A few weeks later and there we were, at around two in the morning, smoking on a bridge and swapping thoughts.

“Well, I’m not phobic of the stuff, or anything like that. As evidence would show.” I gave a little ‘ta-da’ wave to the river, more curtly than I’m in the habit of being. My eyes were gritty and prickly-warm. And my head felt heavy, and hollow, like a helmet. This would be my last time smoking. “I’m not even, you know, fixated, either... I just think it’s nice.”

“Like... comforting, like?” He was an ex-English major.

“... hmmm, yeah. Kinda.”

“Maybe you drowned yourself.”

I wasn't sure how to respond to that. He had said it in all seriousness before frowning at my shoes and scratching his week-old beard. By the look of it, he realized he had kamikazed his buzz. The crickets clicked away for a long moment at either end of the bridge before he looked back up, sheepish, and then frowned again.

“What, what’s so funny?”

I saw the Seine when I was twelve. From the fishtank window of a foreign car, in a seat with no seatbelt, but it was lovely. I savaged the soles of my feet on the crocodile rocks of the American River, and minced around like a minesweeper for about a week after, but that was good too. I hear the Potomac is gorgeous.

Virginia Woolf just wouldn’t suit my style. I’d like to think I was Huck Finn, instead.

A scalpel blade laid beside my silver spoon

2010-07-14T15:02:00.000-07:00

In Geography he found a spot on his arm: Santa red and sore.
(“Probably just a mosquito bite. Try not to pick at it.”)
but it itched, and he did.

In the shower he found another one: near the soft bend of his elbow.
(“Hey twerp, c’mon in there! You’re gonna make us late!”)
and they were, but not after he scrubbed hard as he could with a washcloth.

In Algebra he was too busy scratching: his arm and his elbow, and his neck,
(“-- pages... be sure to follow the directions on... for numbers ten through --”)
and he forgot, and was given his first check minus.

At a birthday party he brought a gift: a model airplane kit.
(“Oh man too cool! Thanks! I’m gonna make some like those jets at, at the parade, that -- oops --”)
and it slipped, because there were bloodspots on the wrapping paper.

At dinner there was a phonecall: his English teacher.
(“-- yes sir, I -- no sir, I will talk to him. I’m very sorry. It won’t happen again. Yes, thank you.”)
but he didn’t hear, he was sitting behind his untouched casserole scratch-atch-itching.

At the bus stop something in his shoulder ripped: his anterior deltoid.
(“Kid, you gettin on or what?”)
and he did, with a dead arm and his backpack hanging crooked.

In English he got his paper back: (“See me after class.”)
the ink was red, and so was the caked-on blood and hair and fingernails.
He put his head down on his desk and scraped a steely Jack-o-Lantern protractor against the deli meat of his thigh.

In gym he was given detention: Refusal to Participate.
(“Wouldn’t even pick up the ball!”)
His right arm was gone.

On the weekend his parents talked to him.
(“We’re just concerned, champ.” “You know we love you.”)
He nodded. But very slowly: most of his trapezius muscles had been peeled away. And his quadriceps, and hamstrings, and abdominals, and an ear. One cheek was gone. His throat caved inwards like a second mouth. His scalp was wet and pink.
(“You just seem so different now.”)

At clarinet practice she found a spot on her wrist: Santa red and sore.

(I've been reading Haruki Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. No, it has nothing to do with this post. But it is so sprawlingly wonderful that I would feel compelled to mention it even if I was writing about Dullard McBorington's Adventures at the DMV.)

Oh, Sinnerman,

2010-07-12T05:14:00.000-07:00

The burial was brief and clean. And sudden, but Clark’s brother had been such a well-liked young man, that it was no bother for folks to drop everything and attend.

After the ceremony an uncle from Topeka muttered: “So damn young.” and when his wife scolded him, said: “What? He can’t hear me from here.”

It took a moment for Clark to realize they were talking about the priest. At first, he thought the man had meant Eugene. He snorted. On his way back to the house, Clark passed the parked cars and the men propped up against them. They were smoking and cursing and gossiping.

“Goddamn railroads.”

“Goddamn railroads.”

“-- too cheap to put up some -- some signs, or fences, or something like --”

“Not even fourteen, you know that?”

"Lemme get one of them Marlboros, Lou."

“You wanna feel sorry? Boy. You feel sorry for the brother. He was right there when it happened.”

“Christ. I heard that too. Tried pulling him out of there, and just couldn't.”

"Lord."

Clark went inside.

There had been mourners in the den, earlier, and so he took care to be silent as he passed in the hallway. But it was empty. So Clark relaxed, and reached his room, and felt himself tighten up again when he saw the door was open.

Roy was sitting on Clark’s bed. His back was facing the doorway, so Clark could not see his face, but Roy was the only boy in five counties that had the body of a man, at only fourteen, and a back that fearsome and shoulders that broad and hardened. At the moment they were trembling like a child’s.

Clark stood cautiously in the doorway, watching. “Parents are waitin on you, Roy.”

Roy was quiet.

The wood beneath Clark’s hand was turning warm by the time he bit the bullet and said “Roy? Why’re you in my room?” Then he frowned, thinking that maybe he should have said that to begin with. “Parents’re waitin out front.”

“Eugene’s too.” The man-boy’s voice cracked for the first time in years. “It's Eugene’s room, too.”

“Yeah, well you’re parked on my bed.”

Roy went quiet again. His shoulders were shaking and caving, slowly, like steel girders. Clark decided it would be wise to clear him out.

“We all had a rough day, Roy.” His dress shoes clacked against the hardwood as he walked over, and patted the older boy on the back. “Go on, parents’re wai--”

In Roy’s big monster hands - all crumpled, and dirty - was the train schedule. His shoulders rose and fell a little faster under Clark’s palm until Clark took it away, slowly.

They sat quiet.

“What’s...” Roy’s throat backfired like a truck as he cleared it. “What’s this doin under your pillow.”

Clark’s mouth would not work right for him. It squirmed. He took a breath, to try and steady it. “Roy--”

Then his nose exploded into the parade glitter-and-gold of fresh pain, and his sight went liquid and useless as he crumpled back on the floor. It was like Roy had driven a railroad spike through his head.

“You killed him, didn’t you!”

The shriek sent another guncrack of pain through Clark. He had been clutching his face, shielding it, on raw, panicked instinct, but then pulled his hands away in time to watch the creature of a boy pounce and throttle his collar.

“You’re a murderer. A goddamn murderer.” Roy’s grizzly arm cocked back, way up high, glossy tears smeared across his cheeks and the backs of his fists. “Your own brother, your own brother and you murd--”

Roy flinched and reeled when the other boy spat full-on in his face.

His arm wilted.

Clark had just spat at him, spat full-on in his face.

He sat back and stared.

“Prove it,” Clark whispered, and licked his lips. They were wet with his own blood. “Prove it, you dumb son of a bitch.”

Roy looked down at the little brother of his best friend. There were a few family traits that they carried. A sharp nose. Rounded ears. But the most of him, most of Clark, did nothing to resemble Eugene. Absolutely nothing. Looking down at him, Roy thought that he did nothing to resemble even a person. His eyes were sharp and flat and plastic like fishing lures.

They sat quiet.

“Get off me, Roy.”

He did. Slowly. Clark found his feet and stood, watching the boy who was watching him. They sat quiet.

The younger boy uncrumpled himself, squaring his shoulders. His chin was high and red and his eyes were hard and oily. He licked his lips again.

“Parents’re waitin on you, Roy.”

The train schedule was still sitting on the bed. Clark glanced at it, and then looked back at Roy with a silent dare.

“I’m gonna go wash up, now.”

But he stayed for a moment. Still watching Roy. Still daring him to try and make a sound story from such a wild, whirlaway tale, to try and sound believable as the grief-addled best friend. He stared hard at Roy.

Then Clark turned and he left. He was not there to see Roy’s wet face, shaking back-and-forth-and-back, his lips curling up and mumbling “Won’t do you no good.”

((Okay, this is a strange one. Last October I scraped up a ~5000 word story detailing all the events up to this point, and left it alone at the end of Clark’s shoving his brother in front of a train. I thought "Hey, the ending's only gonna be 300 words or so. I can mop that up later." And I did!... just... with an extra 700 words or so. But I still did!... just... nine months later. Ahem.

Still, I really think it's better as a stand-alone, flash-fiction type deal. It’s pretty much the whole story run through a compactor. And therefore tastier. I was gonna take a pair of shears to those 5000, anyway.))

Laaaast night

2010-07-04T10:37:00.000-07:00

I dreamed that I was dreaming of you. You are not a man or a woman or a girl or a boy, or even a person, really, but the underdone meatmachine of my brain that has lately been nothing but trimmings has seen fit to fumble with its loveletter to you. (That is a lie. I call it a loveletter only because it would not fit on a gravestone.) It starts off:

Dear you - that is, dear Ursa Major, dear poppy tea, dear works of Ozymandias, dear sandalwood, dear Thursday in a foreign city, dear deceit, dear lovers, dear crust of bread, dear corpse of Christ, dear teeth of tigers, dear yellowfurnace stitch dug deep into the side of the man in the panic of becoming prey, dear kerosene, dear masochist, dear toolbox of the witchdoctor, dear spice of spring, dear oil of autumn, dear satin patch of sunlight in the flowerbanquet courtyard, dear cat lounging languid as a molasses pharaoh in the satin patch of sunlight in the flowerbanquet courtyard, dear vinegar, dear plague, dear boy on the swing at sunset with only anger to come home to, dear stumble in the gravel on the way to school, dear wideeyed girls graverobbing mother’s makeup box, dear cold cradle, dear draining heart, dear knotted mouth, dear empty house, dear boy and dear girl and dear boy and dear boy and dear girl and dear girl and dear twisted sheets, dear safety, dear ache, dear safecracker’s candied coaxing, dear rip in the hole in the wound of the surgeon’s helpless masterpiece, dear murder, dear gunman, dear hungry warclub scepter, dear tyrant’s baby rattle, dear red on the matador’s cape, dear bull on the matador’s sword, dear manic napalm hound staggering rabid in the spinal column streets of a city as dim and deep and strangling as the bastard sea, dear hound with lungs running short and hard like diseased engines, dear hound with eyes hot and small and coarse like pennies on a sidewalk, dear hound with litfuse tongue dangling like an honored guest of the gallows (because even in the bastard sea there is the cruel guerrilla gauntlet of a Cairo funeral pyre in your belly and such dazzling wondrous worldbreaking thirstiness

That is as far as I got.

Perhaps another medium would be better understood. I have shameful little skill with loveletters; I am much better with words.

("Last night I dreamed I was dreaming of you" is all Tom Waits but sweet Jesus can you blame me for stealing it)

"I'm in a GLASS CASE OF EMOTION."

2010-06-27T16:03:00.000-07:00

My uncle had a collection of butterflies in his study. He seemed flattered that I would abandon the fourth or fifth game of Horse to look at them, even when my older cousins were playing, and so he would always take the time to point them out and name them for me.

That’s a Mallow Skipper, he said, clicking his flinty little nail against the glass.

This was a buckeye. That one was an Orange Tiger. This one, the Duke of Burgundy. His favorite was the Painted Lady.

They aren’t moving. Are they sleeping?

No, they’re not sleeping. They’re not living either.

Huh?

They’re dead.

They looked very alive to me. They looked more than alive. Their wings were still neat, and flat, still beautiful tiny churchwindows. They were the most alive things that I had ever seen.

Oh, I said. But I didn’t believe him. I had decided that they were asleep.

(I had trouble with this as a kid! One day I think I came to the conclusion that, as long as it wasn't crushed or crumpled, a butterfly was still technically alive.

Yes, I am terrible at biology.)

"Follow me," the wiseman said, but he walked behind.

2010-06-25T23:56:00.000-07:00

“You’re gonna be here when I get back, right?”

fuck you old man his inside parts screamed, like glass on a glacier on a newborn. fuck you and your questions, fuck you and your answers, fuck you and the ego autofellatio that you dress up so keen and clean and pretty as fucking compassion, fuck your God or your Self or your Peddling of Either and fuck your merchandising of purpose and your optimist’s reality kaleidoscope and your circumstantial pie-in-the-sky spin-cycle and your shit mosaic and y“Right?”

Harold looked up from his seat on the stone bench. The old man had been talking to him since three o’clock in the morning, when he had found Harold springloaded like a trackstar on the cinderblock underbite of the bridge. He had talked him down and then kept on talking, and Harold had calmed. It was now sunrise.

But it was also cold and foggy, and Harold had thought coffee sounded nice.

“Hey-yeah, no problem man. I’ll be right here.”

“Ya promise?”

i’m jumping off this bridge the minute you walk away you narcissist fuck

“Promise.”

In with the old...

2010-06-25T19:29:00.000-07:00

It didn’t matter that his tongue and his head had rusted over, and been swallowed up in a glowing opiumquilt in his seat behind the counter - nothing had changed. Not really. The knuckles were still evil and warped in the belly of his fist, all radiatorbite and wirehum with remember Jacey and his hammer, Jacey and his and plucking the muscles and the sinews to thrum ginger ache all up and down his arm.

Not the rotted meringue of the streetlamps, or the gravel of the radio, or the scarecrow burlap of his overwashed jeans. Not the beggar who had perched like a relic in the groin of 21st and Harrington and grinned up at him with a mouthful of caramel decay and quoted Caesar Octavius. O, Antony! The sound deephooked in his mouth, so unlike the Houdini rainbow trout at Camp Knocknaree, and left a taste that might have been bile or ambrosia or black tar heroin.

Not the guillotine windowsills of his nursery or snowsoft kindling of boyhood lies or the spiderugly scar beneath the dragonfly lips of his first porcelain fuck. Slow dogs would still be clots of fur and gristle, and crop up richly in the underskeletons of immaculate Chevys. And would still abandon the carnivorewet smell of themselves in the ribbed grilles until the slurring mercy of a hot rain, or garden hose. O, Antony!

He sank his molars into the velvet of his cheek.

The round world should have shook lions into civil streets, And citizens to their dens!

This was worse than all the rest.

Hear me, good friends -

(Actually a pretty old thing from like, January, but I just blundered across it and kinda wanna prod at it and do somethin with it and that would be fairly difficult if I were to forget its sprawling 229-word existence.

Fancy-Nancy lines ripped straight from Antony and Cleopatra. BILLY SHAKES, BRO, I OWE YOU ONE. )

BADHOUSE

2010-06-23T16:19:00.000-07:00

Chiles had seen vultures in upstate New York, nine years ago, on the way to his uncle’s geriatric lakeshack. A fox or cat or something brown had been snagged in a trap or fence or fight, and managed to scrape away through a field only to end up in a puddle of itself. Its sides flapped up and down, quick as quick was quick, and Chiles found it desperately funny because he did not know what it meant. He was six. And found it even funnier when in flew the big pigheaded birds: with their hooked mouths and poodley necks and raggedy everything else, because they looked so silly, and why in the heck would a bunch of poodleybirds want to play with a huffy puffy foxcat?

That’s what we look like now, thought Chiles. A hive of goddamn vultures.

A stranger would have disagreed, and with a clear head. The couple that was due that afternoon would say the same. Whether it was the husband’s or the wife’s plumbing that had sprung a leak was irrelevant. If they wanted a mouth to feed, or a feather in their cap - a nice Well Look How He Started Out And Look How He Came Up - they would get it, all wrapped up in a tidy boy-shaped package.

And they were all such beautiful boys. Bright, strong, clean and groomed boys. But lean-eyed and dead with an identical hungriness. None of them looked around, because none of them wanted to see their own.

The only one trying to talk or hold eyes with the boys was Mr. Rigley. He patted one on the shoulder.

“Doin' good, Hathers?”

“Yeah.”

“Looking sharp, pal.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

Chiles gambled and glanced over. Hathers looked ready to vomit.

“How’re you today, Samson?”

“Just fine, Rigley.”

“Mr. Rigley.”

“Mr. Rigley. Sir. Sorry.”

A car was droning somewhere nearby, and Chiles watched his eyes ratchet onto the window.

“Chiles, how'saboy?”

There was a blackbird outside, picking and flittering around on the razorwire fence.

“Chiles? Chiles, you in there?”

There was a clatter of laughter that died off quickly.

The blackbird dropped out of sight, onto the ground. Chiles wondered if there was a foxcat down there.

The seat next to him lurched as it was suddenly filled. “Chiles, you havin’ a problem with Houston, pal?”

More laughter this time, more relaxed.

There was now little to watch outside of the window, except for the fence. Chiles had seen plenty of that but did not look away. “Sir?”

“I said, how are you feeling today, son.”

“Like an ant in the fucking sugarpot.”

Every head turned, every sick pair of bright strong clean eyes snapped onto the boy and the man next to him.

Chiles recoiled just slightly, as if recalling his manners. He pulled his face from the window and looked at Mr. Rigley. “‘Sir.’”

(Wow I have no idea if any disciplinary centers operate as orphanages on the side, but dammit, it just happened.)

What is this I don't even

2010-06-19T20:42:00.000-07:00

Maddy was on her third cup of chamomile tea and page thirty-five of Thais of Athens when her daughter’s bedroom door groaned open and sleepy feet pattered out. Her teacup clinked against its saucer, crashingly loud in the quiet house, as Maddy cut a glance to the granddaddy clock:

3:43. She licked her thumb to turn the page.

“Muh -” There was the high, cottony sound of a little girl’s yawn from the hall. “Mom?” A tousled head poked into the den, dim and squinting. The woman smiled.

Theresa had taken mostly after her father, in looks and in mind and in temperament, something that Maddy found herself crushingly grateful for each and every day. Very dark, very sober features. No excess of warmth to be taken as gullible, no ease of expression to be seen as exploitable. Which was a blessing, in and of itself - the girl had inherited not a shred of her mother’s ruthlessness.

Maddy closed her book.

“What’re you doing up, sweetheart?”

The girl shoved a blunt fist around her eye. “‘m sorry,” she mumbled. “‘d I wake youup?”

“It’s alright, baby.” Maddy had not slept in years. “What’s wrong? You thirsty?”

Theresa shook her head, making a bleary beeline to her mother.

“Too hot? You know you can turn on the fan.”

She shook her head again, and made to climb into Maddy’s lap. Thais of Athens was forgotten and dropped alongside the chair as concern tickled the back of Maddy’s throat.

“What’s wrong, baby?” Theresa had never been the type to seek security this way. Not since she could talk, at least. “You can tell me.”

Theresa squirmed. She seemed uncomfortable with being comforted.

“The house wake you up? Hm? You know that it likes to move around, sometime. Remember that all you got to do is upturn the horseshoe we got over the door, to give the rascal a little rattle, and it’ll settle down pretty --”

“There’s a monster in my room.”

The grandaddy clock groaned, just once. It was a quarter to four.

Maddy frowned. “Oh, sweetie...” Imagination had never gotten the run of Theresa, even when she was small - it seemed strange for it to flare up only now. “Sounds like you had a bad dream.”

Theresa shook her head and grimaced, but said nothing.

“Why don’t you tell me what happened? Hm? You can tell me.”

The girl was busy shooting cold looks, over her shoulder, at the innocent hallway. When she finally turned back Maddy’s breath caught at how much of her husband she saw. “I was at the lake again --”

-- at the lake again, with the cattails and the lilypads and the crumbled windmill and the telephone booth and the headless Nike of Samothrace, and other things, lots of things, lots of lots of other things that had been lost or left or taken, pieces of art and pieces of garbage and pieces of pieces of things, some floating in the water and some sitting on the shore and almost all of the lake covered in woolly fog except for the little bit where Theresa was standing.

She had taken off her shoes, if she had had them to begin with, and let just a littlelittlelittle bit of the water splash against her toes, and dreamygiggled at the maybe-there maybe-not feeling of it. Theresa knew this was a dream. And a good one, and why wouldn’t it be, because look how nice and quiet and calm it was, and look how many interesting things?

But she had made a strict rule for herself to stay out of the water. It was a very important rule. Theresa could hold her breath for a long time, and Theresa could swim like the sharpest shark, but she knewknewknew that this was not the type of water to do it in.

She was back on the shore and pulling and prodding at a glittering slot machine that was half-eaten by the soil (bar bar cherry) when she heard something warm and musical and beautiful, something alive and fresh and honeyed, somewhere out in the fog.

Theresa froze. There had never been music before. Had there been? She sat still and quiet and looked around to see if there was a musicbox or record player or radio.

And there were, there were a lot of them, but none that were on, and so the beautiful brassy daybreak sounds had to be coming from somewhere else.

Something moved - Theresa should have been nervous, she thought, maybe, but she wasn’t - and she saw that it was a chain, a very fine tiny little chain like the kind on a necklace. It wriggled just a little bit, like a worm, and Theresa smiled, because who had ever heard of a little bitty chain squiggling around on the ground? And without really thinking why, she reached for it.

The itty bitty necklace chain was an itty bitty necklace chain, but further down it was also a thicker chain like the kind that people hang pictures with, but further down it was also a thicker chain like the kind people walk their dogs on, but further down it was also a thicker chain like the kind people use to lock other people out, but further down it was a also thicker chain that Theresa couldn’t see much of because it was in the fog.

The chain went tight in her hand, and Theresa wondered why, and then Theresa panicked because she dreamyrealized that her arm had started pulling all by itself. It had started pulling and she saw the the chain got thicker and bigger and meaner and the wonderful beautiful sounds were getting closer, but she dreamyrealized that there was something scary about it too, and now she was pulling the chain with both arms and her legs were walking her closer to the fog and the chain dreamyfelt greasy and strange and it was wriggling again and she kept pulling and pulling and the sounds were so loud, because the fog could only cover up so much, and then it covered up even less, because Theresa could see a head coming closer to her while she was pulling and then she saw a face, too, one that was almost a face but too big and too heavy on the bottom and she looked for a body, too, but she couldn’t see one, maybe because it was still too foggy or maybe it was under the big bumpy lump that was moving, too, and then the music stopped and something rushed up and pushed a windy bundle of air in her eyes and something went cli-chunk! and Theresa --

“-- and then I woke up,” she finished, muffled by the crook of Maddy’s neck.

The deeper Theresa had gone into recounting the nightmare, the further she had curled into her mother’s lap, and the more anxiously Maddy had tried comforting her. She was rubbing circles on the girl’s back, even - Theresa had not tolerated such treatment in years.

“Oh, sweetheart. That sounds like a terrible dream.” Would she be okay sleeping out here, in the den? Maddy was certain she could make one of the armchairs comfortable enough. There was a lovely quilt in the closet, assuming the house had not moved it. “But it was just a dream... okay? Lots of people have bad dreams, baby. It’s okay. You just have to--”

“It’s in my room,” Theresa whispered. The cold certainty in her voice pulled down hard on Maddy’s frown. “I could hear it, a little.”

“Baby... listen.” Maddy hugged her daughter closer. How to explain it? “Sometimes our minds pull up scary things, while we’re sleeping. And they can be very, very scary to us. But it can’t hurt us any. Cause it’s just our minds being restless, and just for a little b --”

There was a little unk sound as Maddy’s throat cinched up into nothing, and she stared down at her daughter. The cuffs of Theresa’s pajamas had been bitten off.

“... m?”

Theresa was still so young.

“Mom?”

She blinked, and looked hard at her daughter. First in the left eye, then the right. Theresa quailed at the intensity and Maddy looked away and inwardly scolded herself.

“Baby -” She gave Theresa a peck on the forehead and nudged her back to the floor, easily. Then steered the girl’s shoulders to level eyes with her again. Much more gently. “You remember that big thing mama used on those pests, awhile back?”

“The...” She bit her own mouth - pulled the insides of her lips between her teeth and pressed down. Names were hard, for her. “... the ox?”

“Mm-hm, the Ax, baby. I’m gonna need it. Can you find it for me?”

The girl’s eyes slid sideways as her face stiffened, lips moving silently. Maddy watched her, smiling faintly and patiently, but each inch and every shred of her nerves and her ears and her mind was crosshaired onto the hall, onto her daughter’s bedroom.

“Broom closet,” the girl blurted. She blinked, and looked surprised. “It’s on the top shelf, in the broom closet.”

Maddy smiled, inwardly terrified. So fast. When had she gotten that fast? “You’re so good at that, now. What a sharp little girl I got.”

Theresa giggled, bouncing on her heels.

A floorboard somewhere creaked.

“Now, then...” Maddy rose slowly and stretched. “You do your mama a favor, and keep her seat warm. And don't let my tea go to waste. I’ll be right back.”

The hinges of the broom closet chirped as Maddy pulled it open. There it was, the sturdy thing: right where she hadn’t left it. She would have to talk with someone about the house and its mischief.

“Um... back from what?”

Maddy’s hand closed hungrily around the familiar haft, and her lips pulled upward at the wonderful weight, and her heart swelled at the growl of steel on wood.

“From getting rid of bad dreams, sunshine.”

(man I can’t wait to be a mom and make my kids find all my murder weapons for me)

We are neckdeep in the evening

2010-06-12T20:49:00.000-07:00

and I am moonsick and ugly. There is a sparrowscattered corpse in the milkgleam of the hotel mirror, and perhaps if I am quiet and if I am lucky they will wander away. The ashtray is choked with splinters and sulphur and saliva and my matchbox is empty. At sundown, I drained the gardenmud of my marrow into crystal dinnerware that was stolen from an Easter banquet, and if the gunshot metronome of these carnivore streets sounds off once more then I will drink it down like a woman who needs it. Until then, I will lay trainwrecked in this arthritic chair, that has splinters, but no sulphur, but maybe saliva, and has in good chance aided someone in hanging themselves.

The windows are wide open. I wish there were more.

The ceiling fan is shuddering like a whirligig reaper and makes me squirmingly anxious, and I would have shut it off long ago if this room were not a tropical hotbox of wetdream sweat and the thick humanstew of dopamine and adrenaline and drool. It is my own. And overripe and needly, and unfamiliar. I blame completely the trillion watt chandelier that was crumbled up into a confetti warship whose maiden voyage savaged the hymen of my jugular, and my carotid, and my renal and my femoral and then wedded them and then remolded them into glittering Venetian canals that spasmed with a goldmine Morse code, and laid me on the bed like a bride and tugged the drawstrings of my stomach to make me writhe and the harpstrings of my throat to make me giggle and moan and the puppetstrings of my mouth to make me smile and snarl and bite my pillow and my blanket and my arms, and I found that they all tasted of identical saltwaterjoy and morning and mourning, but first and above all else it was a bonemelting supernova caramelfuck with each and every crippled&blinded&maddened branch of an entire goddamned Pantheon, or maybe two, and if that is what is meant by a religious experience then I shall be baptized within the hour.

(there is a businessman in the room next to mine with the most beautiful lioncolored hair and the most gorgeous crooked hip who will approach me in the morning and ask that i keep it down at night

“I’m a light sleeper,” he will say

i will apologize

“It’s not a problem,” he will say “Sounded like fun.”

i will agree, mostly to be polite)

I have shrugged and slouched out of my skin like a naked snake, and I have stretched it tight between the posts of this hateful bed that sometimes dangles me above the toecurling delicacy of Sleep with a technicolor sadism, and though I have made it into an easel for my snakeskin canvas I have nothing to paint with, nothing but bad wine and stardust and gristle.

And if I could, I would piece together the afterbirthwreckage of myself and climb out an open window or walk out the bolted door to find something to make something from, whatever way lying around: a child’s watercolors, or a calligrapher’s pen, or a gangrenous box of chalk left outside in the pissing rain, but cannot, because I am moonsick and ugly, and dogmean and sour, and if I wander away I may strangle an angel or boil my loyal or wind up downwind of my own devilraw butcherperfume that drowns out the boys’ smell of sunshine morphine and the girls’ smell of candyshop diesel and the women’s smell of dangerous fruit and the men’s smell of the ditches of Eden and I can never do that because I could cry, I love them so awful, I could cry, I could drop right then onto the bonechip gutterdust street and weep like an open wound.

And by then the sun would break, and make a brilliant cannibal candle.

Words about words, Cont.

2010-06-10T08:19:00.000-07:00

“You spend a lot of time talking about fear and anguish,” is what one of my English professors told me. She flipped curtly to the next page of my scrawls and almost knocked over her gargoyle statuette. “Your characters are all defined by what’s hurt them, or what scares them. Especially what hurt or scared them as children.”

I don’t think she meant it quite the way that I first took it - which is to say, evisceratingly - or at least not completely. Her wit was watertight and a challenge to keep a track of, even much later on in the semester, so there was a fair amount of give-and-take between her critiques and her... well. She was keeping her eyes on the words, at least. “Very aggressive imagery. Your sense of tone is good. A little unorthodox in places. But it suits your style well... somehow.”

By the end of the conference I was somewhere between The Self-Conscious Artist and The Dog Whose Owner Keeps Pretending to Throw a Ball.

Sure enough, after picking through a pile of my old stuff with a fresh(ly wept) eye, everything was about suffering. Murder, or abuse, or deceit, or mutilation, or grisly and long-winded thoughts thereof. Sometimes I hadn’t even had the patience to get through the exposition to start monkeywrenching the reader’s guts around. Was it really that difficult to wait, just a bit? Hammer some stakes, and get the lay of things? It’s like not I type on a cheesegrater.

“... It... was... a... dark... and... stormy... aw fuck it, thus began the beatings.”

Which, I mean... I guess the... enthusiasm is good. Right? Enthusiasm? I’m calling it enthusiasm. (Does wonders for Palahniuk.)

Still. That doesn’t give me any shape of excuse to be a mean kid with a magnifyingglass, and saunter over to Word like it's an anthill. The Greeks absolutely drooled over tragedy, but as I understand it, that just means that the protagonist’s terrible end is a foregone conclusion. The process of their arriving to the end of the road - that’s the real sticking point, as it is with a lot of fiction. With that, the audience is yanked through the emotional heart-wringer known as catharsis.( Also: hubris, and ampitheater, and Euripedes, and other vocabulary words that I had a quiz over in senior English.) It's cleansing, so they say. And I agree completely. The key difference between this and what I do is that, in tragedies, most of the tasty misery is preserved and saved for last. Anticipation mounts. Hearts tighten. And only after a painstakingly crafted chain of events, and weave of people, and ebb of emotion, does the downfall come to be.

Me? Fuck that. I want my dessert first. I like to pour it all on right here right now, right out of the gate, which makes for a little structural warping. So, sadly, I don’t think that I quite hit “Tragedian” grade. Probably stuck right around “Sadomasochist,” or “Middleclass Preteen,” or “Dick.”

And/or, it could be a ham-fisted attempt to drag the sympathetic reader in, kicking and screaming. (Ah, so “Attention Beggar,” then.)

Screaming’s good. Screaming’s enthusiasm.

(oh my god did I seriously just write about writing)

Don't trifle with no rifle

2010-06-05T19:43:00.000-07:00

Dear Pop

Sorry I didnt write you until just now. They keep us way to busy here and there is no time for a poor body to stop and breath much less write home. If we arent cleaning something then they got us running and doing pushups or getting all our hair cut off like sheep in the summer time. You should see me now. I look like fish bowl with a body. Not a single thing they give me to wear fits right and my boots have made my feet very cruel and ugly with blissters. It is hard times for me but I hope everyone at home is fine. Please make sure Dottie is going to school every day because it is hard to be dumb in this world. Also please mail my true berth date here because my sergent thinks that I am really 18. This was a bad idea and no mistake of that. It is hard and I am always worn out even

with 8 hours of bed. Lights are out by 9 oclock and we are up before it is day and the sheets and pillows here are just awful for sleeping. I think farm animals are better off then us. Some of the rougher fellows will whisper nasty things and pull at themselfs under the covers, and then it is just to noisy and nasty to go to sleep. Thats not all that is noisy thogh. There are panthers and all shapes of night critters that squawl and from very close to the camp. Its awful for sleeping. If you was here Pop you would maybe feel it to. Even in a hot crowded room full of other people its like your the only one there and you feel like some dumb lump of meat shut up in a oven. It can get lonesome very easy in a place like that Pop. Sometimes its so lonesome you could just die. Pop please send up my birth cert

ificate so they will let me home. They do not beleive that I am 15 because I am too tall and I have to shave every morning. The first time I said it they were very decent and told me that it was allright to be scared, and that I was doing a wonderfull thing. I told them again and again and they got crabby and said if I keep being yelow they will tell the other men and then bet your bottom doller I am dead meat. There is a fellow here by the name of Pine with a missing finger who is old and is very decent to me. He says that theres nothing doing for nothing doing and thats the way things go. I think it is a good idea to stay away from any body who trys to tell you “the way things go” because they always seem to forget to put “I think” in the middle. Pine is a decent man but I think I will forget the things like that that he says. I will write again when I can. Remember my ceriticate and keep Dottie in school.

Love

Lewis

(Mmkay, nice had a nice juicy sabbatical to adjust to working full-time. (the pay is absolute tripe, and the job itself is absolute tripe, but it’s full-time tripe!) I will now talk about words.

GODDD THIS WAS HARD. Granite-hard. Triathlon-hard. Cookie-dough-or-cheesecake-ice-cream-hard. Loved shaping and working it up, but man. Tough. My surprise over the fact that it was so tough might have made it even tougher. I mean, I try my hand at a couple different voices - to personal satisfaction, if I may say - and it’s the adolescent, self-alienated young boy whose is the toughest for me? Me? What the hell.

One of my friends can flip through voices like she’s trying on hats. I’m dead jealous. I’m also convinced that she’s some kind of voice-Rubix Cube.)

Re: You

2010-05-30T18:08:00.000-07:00

Slanted writing, stuffed into the index of a history textbook:

You: you: are something I can only make scratch-and-scrape attempts to mimic in the margins of my notebooks, you: are flutesweet and candlebright, you: are windchimelovely and --

Slanted writing, on a biology worksheet, crammed against a diagram of a pig:

-- and there is no peeling-iron-scrap of doubt in my aching tanglebrain or my sluggish droolingheart that you: are a gilded crook, that you: are a pearly thief, are the crown jewel criminal who surely framed Prometheus, and you: are a plaited barbwire garland grown in --

In the margins of The Odyssey:

-- in the caviar corner of a Nirvana gardenmaze, in labyrinthine soil, you: are a Sphinx, who has crafted and carved a magnificent starvation into the corduroy lining of my lips and lungs and the soles of my feet, what is left of them, and you: have sparked a March hare’s craving in the belly of my belly to --

In the cover of a Sunday school folder, crossed out and rewritten several times:

-- to bend, to kneel, and give grace to the --

Delirious in the cover of a spiral notebook:

-- the commands of this lunatic lieutenant, this toybox ringmaster, to salute and attend the dragon’s-hoard feasts of Shangri-la with all their jangling brambles and brilliance and Bacchanalia, and you: would be there, and I would pucker and run my tongue around the gaps of my teeth and suck out the sugars of the moment to greed myself on every last splinter of lacquer and licorice, and you: could watch as I was driven, like numb cattle, to dance like a dynamite marionette, to prowl like a Trojan lion, to stomp and thrash and wail like a Cherokee warchief, and we: --

The rest, scrawled on the back of a spelling test: turned in and forgotten.

(One of my weirder things. But I like. AND OHOHO WHAT'S THIS, KYLIE, AN OBLIQUE STATEMENT ABOUT ADOLESCENT INFATUATION?)

Six-word stories

2010-05-29T19:02:00.000-07:00

"For Sale: Baby shoes never worn." - Hemingway. AUGHHH BRILLIANT.

"I do." And I did, then.

A locked door would have helped.

"How's he lookin', there, Doc? ... Doc?"

"Quit crying." He didn't. It hurt.

Somehow, the cat was back. "Goddammit."

He stopped bleeding. We stopped working.

"I'll go," but I shouldn't have.

The gavel cracked. So did she.

I don't really like the curtness, but damn if they aren't fun.

The air was wet with sound: the faraway yelping of a wounded dog

2010-05-27T09:03:00.000-07:00

Little August caught fire last night, and everyone got out alive.

The bowl that Corinne’s daughter had made for her in art class was as pretty as a teahouse, but it was massacred against the kitchen tile when the sirens fired and she dropped it like bad meat.

The bracken old lady who stood by a firehydrant every morning and sold poinsettias from a basket tried looting her neighbor’s jewelry box.

Douglas Harvey was a champion marksman from Maine, whose bedroom lock was tangled with age and dandruffy with rust, and while he was boiling with saline panic it decided to fall asleep. He instead cannoned through the window and two stories later his leg folded up and back and around with an icy musket crunch.

A coltish boy named Travis was working a double shift at Hank’s Grocery, and picked the wrong aisle to be restocking when the store turned circus. He would be a fruitbasket of bruises for weeks.

The white-toothed schoolmaster charged through the other churchgoers like he was hauling freight, eyes horsewild and blind. He collided with one of his students and sprawled them mouthfirst into a cedar pew. The whole time he shrieked, like a teakettle was crawling up his throat.

A stone was thrown and the stained-glass Joseph caved away.

A young wife tore into Dr. Merrier’s face with a bearheaded hatred, and dragged him onto the bone marrow pavement, and squealed off in his car.

A boy who had tossed a cigarette into the alley behind the florist’s was racking his brains on how to best break into the candystore.

Little August caught fire last night, and everyone got out alive.

I waste hours of my life wishing I lived near a barn

2010-05-26T17:12:00.000-07:00

When the red nag snapped her trotter
and couldn’t plow, and couldn’t run,
Mother took her by the creek
and we had meat each night for months (it was filling but it reeked.)

This left the barn a skeleton
with the yellow relic smell (and rust)
We nailed horseshoes up to keep the devil out,
but forgot about the ghosts (one got in and wouldn’t hush.)

He upset the bales when it suited him
and let the pitchfork bite and clang,
and howled for the Beauchamps’ girl, and the Harrisons’,
and we told him to shut his damn noise (he kept asking us their names.)

It wasn’t long before he left the barn,
and tried to settle in our shed
So we nailed crosses on our doors, and on the headboards of our beds
Across the mantel, around the pantry, and right above the kitchen sink.
Twice along our Mother’s windows (til our hands were raw and pink.)

He boiled and frothed and stripped our shutters,
and flung them at the door,
And spiderwebbed the windows with blue bricks and gardenstones
and crippled the gate, and stripped the field, and spooked the cattle out
And the tools were thrown and the shingles torn and all the time he bayed and moaned
to please, please let him in - that he didn’t mean us harm,
but we were turning him to skin and bone, trying to keep him in the barn.

(I have two settings: prose, and prose crumbled up into stanzas.)

I should never

2010-05-25T08:54:00.001-07:00

have left Paris. The sawed-off vinegar fuck at the Dijon trainstation was right: I have too much little in me. Not enough enough. Wandering someplace happens only once, and once there I should never have left. The gunmetal bomber’s jacket that I stole from a veteran still feels like the thorny net of some Hun invader, and with meatcleaver cleverness was it fashioned into something that I would be willingly snared by. Will of want. Not choice. Were I asked to return it, I may tell a lie and say it was lost or I may tell the truth and say it was ruined. There is a rip in the neck that hemorrhages cotton, after all. I was spidering up a park fence after hours and it snagged and tore open. The fence was iron lattice, and gunmetal.

Marseille was cruel to me but I loved it. Loved it. The autobiography that I vomited onto the sidewalk in front of the burlesque theater was brief but well understood by passersby. They moved so goddamn fast. It was like watching machineguns walk. A boy who was too young for his face was pawing around in the gutter and throwing stones at cars, and when he inevitably groped a cracked bottle he offered his bleeding hand to his mother. She grabbed it, and clucked when he howled. “Eh, vois-tu? C'est une aide-memoire!” is what she said, which as far as I can tell means “Quit throwing fucking rocks.” Simple lessons are the ones that stick with us the longest, I think.

In gorgeous Bordeaux I fucked a young black man who had greasefire scars sunk into his midsection like quartz leaked in marble, and I was fucked by a Latina woman who had no calluses and an Italian-sounding name. There was music, each time. Beethoven said that princes were princes by the accident of birth, and that Beethoven was Beethoven by the miracle of Beethoven, but the cello spoke more clearly for him. Little else is as divine as the sugary growl of a cello. The greatest of orators and poets and tyrants fall mute, and upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that the miracle of Beethoven had very little to do with Beethoven.

And I loved it all but nothing compared to Paris. Oh Christ, Paris. It rolls my catacomb heart like a die, sets it tantrumming off its ribs like an inmate, has it whining like some mutt shut in a kennel. The sour opium carnival. It was a lover that cradled me like a python, and I was happy prey. Gunpowder was the soup du jour, and I licked my bowl clean.

Royal oil is a wicked liquid with a gallant talent for drawing handsome ransom

2010-05-24T04:44:00.000-07:00

“You smell like death,” she told the apartment door as it opened. Even through the hot cut of her wet nail polish, she could smell him. Something low and harsh and meaty. It happened, she supposed. “Destination: shower, babe.”

The glossy page of the magazine snagged against her sweater, and made a scraping sound as she smoothed it down. Halfway through a paragraph about skin cancer she realized she could still smell him.

“Babe?”

She shifted around on the couch and turned.

“Oh. Oh, what the fuck.”

He had been uncobbled, by the looks of it. The ripe swell of jaw that she had kissed goodbye and playfully pinched that morning was gone. Instead there was a loaf of underdone mutton, with the makings of a mouth. It was opening and closing in slow, shallow bites, and crooked ones. The molars seemed to no longer line up correctly. He was still dressed for work, dapper and sharp in his pressed white oxford and half-price chinos, the ancient worn-away stained-in-spots pair that she had been begging him for weeks to let her replace. All down his front and side was a lush gush of red, and dark red, and dark brown, and crusts and flakes and patches and clots. His dress shoes were still neatly tied.

He shifted towards her, and something made a noise like a bubble and a sigh, and she realized with abrupt sadness that it was his throat. Sound could not quite find its way out. He had never been very good at shaving, never, would come out of the bathroom with a scowl and nicks all up and around his face and neck. After a good giggle at his expense, she would offer graciously to kiss them all better.

Her lips trembled.

“Oh, baby. Oh, sweetheart.”

At some point between the seeing and the speaking she had stood and edged away, slowly, mindfully, but still she had the magazine in hand. It clattered to the floor like a bird as she reached gently around for her duffel bag.

“Oh, sweetie, this isn’t right. I’m so sorry.”

He gurgled, lurching. The couch clipped his hip and he stumbled. She watched, ripping the zipper slowly open and reaching inside.

“We should have stayed in, today. Both of us. We could have watched a movie.”

The coffee table barked his shin and he doubled over painlessly. Then kept moving. She pulled out the tennis racket, almost every bit as shiny and new as it had been that last Christmas.

“You could have picked this time. I know you don’t like the old black-and-white stuff, but I don’t mind comedies.” The racket came up for a moment, and quivered. Her face squirmed. “Oh, sweetheart.”

He reached out to her - still doubled drunkenly over the coffee table, working patiently to climb over - with his crooked molars opening and closing and opening and closing and opening, and he stretched his hand out and curled and uncurled his fingers into fangs and then she laid into his wicker-brittle skull over and over and over and sideways and across and over and over and then through it like a cavewoman. By the time she was done, her nails had smeared.

(despite my love of visceral description and violence in general, zombie stuff has never really fancied my tickle... Hmmmm.)

Hustling and Easterner, bringing out the beast in her

2010-05-23T15:02:00.000-07:00

Perry was a friendly and sweet-mannered little boy, but had never been very bright, and the hungry thing that lived in the creek knew that. Not the way that a person knows another person or a dog knows its foodbowl, but the way a rock knows what sort of itching clicking gristle is hidden beneath itself. Some dumb, blameless, wicked sense. Perry had sprained his ankle in teeball last year, after splitting his scalp wide open at the roller rink, after crying his heart out at the burial of the family Pyrenees, after chipping his tooth on an icecube in his lemonade. The hungry thing that lived in the creek knew all of this too. It didn’t know that it knew it, but it did.

And when Perry crouched down on the bank of the creek to look for frogs, soaking the toes of his hand-me-down sneakers, the thing began to drool.

“I don’t think you’ll find much down here, whatever it is you’re looking for.”

Perry flinched away from the sound, and slipped and fell. It was a just a man, though, standing tall on the other side of the creek. Maybe he was around his father’s age but maybe not. It was difficult to say. He seemed nice, though. His clothes made him appear neat and trim and orderly, but there was something strangely oily, too, and Perry simply could not get a hold of the look of him.

“You are lookin’ for something, aren’tcha?” the man asked, friendly enough, after a few moments of the little boy staring. “Me, I just lost my watch fob down here the other day... my dog, Shepherd, he got his slobbery chops all over where I left it on the table, and ran right out the door! The scamp! Neighbor said she saw him run down here, and I just now got the time to have a look-about.”

The thing gave a pleasant smile, one that widened when Perry showed the beginnings of a shy grin. What a ripe little mouth the boy had.

“So that’s what I’m looking for... what about you?” The man hunkered down on his heels in an imitation of Perry, and began peering into the lazy water. “You didn’t lose something, too?”

Perry had blunted his palms against the smooth wet creekstones when toppling over, and as he then straightened up he unthinkingly wiped them on his khakis. Wiping like that always gave him dirty clothes, and dirty clothes always got him in stomach-whirling trouble with mom and dad about cleanliness and Godliness, but it was a deep and comfortable habit. “... no, I was, uh... I was just looking for frogs.”

By then he was expecting a harsh word from this stranger, for wandering about on his own with such little reason. He wiped his already-dry little boy’s hands against his now-dirty little boy’s shorts with a precious, tender nervousness. The thing howled inside itself.

“Is that right? I did the same thing myself, when I was younger. If it wasn't frogs, it was turtles or minnows or crayfish. Though... hey, now!” He wobbled back on his heels as if struck by thought, his eyes wide in comic realization. “I look something like a frog right now, don’t I? All eyes and knees and elbows!”

Perry’s laugh was quiet, but cheery and clear. He nodded and hunkered down, too, sticking out his elbows like a frog.

“Well, now, don’t we make a fine pair.”

Perry grinned timidly. The chip in his tooth was visible when his ripe little boy lips pulled back and oh the thing boiled and throbbed to shred them to morsels.

“Say, now, I got an idea,” the man said. “Let’s give each other a hand, hey? I’ll bet I can remember all the best frog-spots around here, once I’m not all distracted. You help me find that ol’ watch fob and we can go look for where all them frogs are hiding.”

The boy’s smile faltered, and the man hurried to explain.

“You’ve got younger eyes, is all... and that watch fob, it’s not as shiny as it used to be. My father gave it to me, he did - so it’s plenty old.” The man frowned, and completed to look of a frog by swelling and deflating with a sigh. “Don’t have a clue what I’d do, if it’s lost for good! I’d sure hate that.”

He collapsed his elbows and propped them on his knees, leaned forward, and aimed an imploring look directly at Perry. “Won’t take a minute to find! Shepherd can’t swim worth a lick, so it’s no doubt right over here. On this side, here. Won’t take a minute. Whatcha say, hm?”

Perry hesitated. He was unsure if this was the type of stranger he was supposed to watch out for, but in all honesty, he was unsure if he wanted to look for a watch fob, either. He just wanted to find some frogs. “We’ll look for frogs right after?”

“Cross my heart,” said the thing.

The boy waited only long enough to wipe his hands on his khakis, before stepping out onto a stone to cross the water. Then something roared and swallowed and grabbed at him with a damp stinking coliseum of teeth, and he kicked and kicked to get to the surface and screamed and cold wet pocketknife shrapnel filled up his mouth, and he kicked and his shoes were gone and his back was naked and shredded up against a rock and full of tiny scrapes and cuts that stung like cigarettes, and he grabbed around for anything at all and his fingers dug into something soft like gristle and soil, and he wanted to breathe and cry and go home, and he grabbed harder and he pulled, and something came away in his fingers and there was a roar again and the cold went slack and then Perry could breathe again, and he was on the bank, and there was air, he was up and he was breathing and Perry was running home in the wrong direction.

Perry was crying and bloody and his shirt was missing and his stomach-whirling-trouble-dirty khakis were even dirtier. His shoes were gone. He cut up his feet looking for the road.

(Ghost story? Allegory of pedophilia? Propaganda against watch fobs? You make the call.)

VONNEBE.

2010-05-20T09:11:00.000-07:00

There is no dignity in the smell of old blood. You would think so: blood has feuds and baths and money. Blood makes oaths. And sparks lust, and curdles in the victim and beats cold in the killer, and I am told it is thicker than water. But then it ages and the velvet goes. And in its place there are brittle pipes, and mongrels, and the afternoon kiln of the classroom in August, and cheap bread.

I am told by holymen that blood can be pure or be tainted. I am told by poets that blood can sing. I am told by doctors that blood grows brighter, more vicious in color, when it comes into contact with oxygen. That blood becomes more alive when it leaves a body, I find sad. I find it wasteful. So there is justice in time then turning it to dregs.

When I tell her these things, Claire puffs air through her nose quietly and fixes me with a patient look. “You work too hard is all.” She sets a four-egg omelet and orange juice in front of me, gently.

Such a considerate person. I think I may marry her, one day.

“That’ll be six fifty-eight,” she says.

I have been told that omelets are a poor choice of breakfast for a man in my line of work. That nausea, and fatigue, and intestinal gas are sure to follow. But the truth of it is that eggs are the only meat I can stomach. And breakfast the only meal that I can stomach it for, because it would be very silly to order an omelet for lunch or for dinner. Brunch is not so silly a time to order eggs, but it would be quite silly to order brunch.

“And your change,” she says.

Coins, also. Old blood smells slightly like coins. But mostly not. I am told that blood leaves a taste like pennies in people’s mouths, when they bite their tongue or when they bite their lip or when they swallow their nosebleed. I have done none of these things. I am told that it leaves a taste like pennies and so a taste like copper, but I do not think this is correct, because blood and coins have only iron in common.

The quarter in my palm is from twenty-three years ago. Two of the pennies and a nickel are even older. I cannot imagine the godlessness of blood at such an age.

I work in a slaughterhouse. I clean out the blood. My mother, she wanted me to be a surgeon.

(oh what's that Vonnegut? You say I'm not allowed to attempt an imitation of your voice for a plotless blurb, since I'm too aggressive with imagery and heavy-handed with characterization? WELL HEY GUESS WHAT YOU'RE DEAD)