She waited until his video game character died, and acted quickly enough to snare his attention before he could select "Continue."
"What if ..." she bit her lip, a nervous trait she'd developed, but also an effort to amplify her cuteness, here, "I told you that ... I dunno ... I've kind of got Baby Fever?"
He stared quizzically back at her, glossy, narrowed red eyes numbly scanning her as if searching for the remainder of her statement, and then burst out laughing in the manner only a stoned person can.
In their three years together, on-and-off, he had never hurt her feelings so much as he did now, making her cheeks blossom so hotly she felt that she might melt and sink into the futon cushion.
He caught a breath, finally, sliding his finger across soggy eyes, "I'm sorry, I'm just picturing you being bitten by a baby; it's funny."
She passed on each of the several statements that came to her mind in the ensuing fury of seconds, realizing that none was even worth the effort, except for, "Don't worry, I think it's breaking."
Short stories and flash fiction ranging from romance to science fiction to downright creepy.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Monday, May 16, 2011
Almost Never
His breath today is noisier than he remembers it ever being before, and he notes this with all due significance. The crackling wheeze feels like it's rolling in a ball between his nasal cavity and throat.
His daughter's first day of school; her standing at the bottom of the stairs, big yellow bow covering her head as fully as her smile does her face. Years later (or the blink of an eye), he opens the envelope and sees the pictures of her daughter's first day. Just like her mother.
He leans against one of the six small trees lining the walkway, his chest drawing into one spot in an agonizing crunch. His scant white hair vanishes as every inch of his pale bust reddens and sprouts beads of sweat. His car isn't far, his office just as close, but distance is relative. Everyone else has been gone for at least an hour. He shouldn't have even been here today. He should've been retired years ago; this is exactly why everyone has been telling him so for better than a decade now. He thinks quickly of the OnStar commercials, that blue button above his windshield is his beacon.
He's been on the football team for four years before his first snap. It's the last play of the last game of his senior year and all he does is run into some other kid from Troy High, but it feels -- so -- good.
Two steps and he stumbles, his breaths now come in skin-crawling gulps only. He pushes up from his knees as well as he can.
Christmas Eve 1964, he's Santa for the first time. He hasn't giggled like this since he was a boy.
His car is maybe ten feet away. He stares at the panel hanging above his dash, thinks of that button. Tries to see it. His vision fails him. Everything is black.
Grits, just cool enough that they start to harden, mixed with sausage gravy.
Lying on his back, he consciously accepts this is the last time he'll do so, and parts his eyelids.
The way the shoreline sand disintegrates between your toes as the waves wash over your feet.
The night isn't here yet but the stars have made an early appearance just for him, and in concert with the waning sunset and swaying treetops, they seem to sing him on his way.
His first wife. She is so sweet, so exciting, so perfect as she stares out the window, sipping a root-beer float on a Saturday morning in their booth at Hannigan's.
It's all there. In him, around him. There was no purpose to seek, the seeking was the purpose; his elusive goal achieved all along. He realizes it now. "Better late than never," he thinks with the same satisfied smirk he has worn in every posed picture since he can remember. In the same way one nods off in front of the television, a sort of trance sneaking over him, the picture fades as the sky sings its last note.
You'd have to see it to believe it.
His daughter's first day of school; her standing at the bottom of the stairs, big yellow bow covering her head as fully as her smile does her face. Years later (or the blink of an eye), he opens the envelope and sees the pictures of her daughter's first day. Just like her mother.
He leans against one of the six small trees lining the walkway, his chest drawing into one spot in an agonizing crunch. His scant white hair vanishes as every inch of his pale bust reddens and sprouts beads of sweat. His car isn't far, his office just as close, but distance is relative. Everyone else has been gone for at least an hour. He shouldn't have even been here today. He should've been retired years ago; this is exactly why everyone has been telling him so for better than a decade now. He thinks quickly of the OnStar commercials, that blue button above his windshield is his beacon.
He's been on the football team for four years before his first snap. It's the last play of the last game of his senior year and all he does is run into some other kid from Troy High, but it feels -- so -- good.
Two steps and he stumbles, his breaths now come in skin-crawling gulps only. He pushes up from his knees as well as he can.
Christmas Eve 1964, he's Santa for the first time. He hasn't giggled like this since he was a boy.
His car is maybe ten feet away. He stares at the panel hanging above his dash, thinks of that button. Tries to see it. His vision fails him. Everything is black.
Grits, just cool enough that they start to harden, mixed with sausage gravy.
Lying on his back, he consciously accepts this is the last time he'll do so, and parts his eyelids.
The way the shoreline sand disintegrates between your toes as the waves wash over your feet.
The night isn't here yet but the stars have made an early appearance just for him, and in concert with the waning sunset and swaying treetops, they seem to sing him on his way.
His first wife. She is so sweet, so exciting, so perfect as she stares out the window, sipping a root-beer float on a Saturday morning in their booth at Hannigan's.
It's all there. In him, around him. There was no purpose to seek, the seeking was the purpose; his elusive goal achieved all along. He realizes it now. "Better late than never," he thinks with the same satisfied smirk he has worn in every posed picture since he can remember. In the same way one nods off in front of the television, a sort of trance sneaking over him, the picture fades as the sky sings its last note.
You'd have to see it to believe it.
Monday, May 9, 2011
Sway
A stagecoach was parked not far from where he stood, his left hand shadowing squinted eyes against the midday sun and the sharp desert sand riding a constant gale. He looked over at it every few minutes, regarding with somehow removed fascination the two women who sat just inside the shade on the driver's box, talking. The whole time, talking, never looking up.
He wondered if he could do it; just stand in attendance as all decent folks did, but not watch the man being led to the noose, to simply not look as his legs went rigid, tossed abruptly, then swung whichever way the wind may will."You just have to look at the family of his victims," he'd heard in whispers when the bottle had brought him to admit his uneasiness, and so now he did. He could understand their satisfaction, and hell he could completely accept their delight, but be that as it may, jubilation at death just made his stomach do a strange little dance, each and every time.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Six Things I've Learned
One should be careful not to confuse another's failure with his own victory.
Everyone else is just as scared and confused as you are, and the less they seem to be, the more they are.
A sly smile and good manners will take you anywhere you want to go.
If you can laugh off insults, you win.
All rules are made up, laws are just opinions of how to keep safe, and theories are bandages to help curious people sleep at night; they are just imaginary things and, while we must respect them for the sake of peace, they should be applied with that in mind.
You can't prove a damn thing to someone who doesn't want to be convinced.
Monday, April 18, 2011
Simply Magic
Brave King Marcus felt an alien twitch in his chest at the sight before him; the storied knight trembling ever so slightly, a convicting jingle emanating from his armor.
"What have you to report, Sir Liam?" the king's words sounded more patient than was to be expected.
The knight, who had watched the floor since entering the room, faced his king, though not so courageous as to meet eyes, and unable to find the words dropped his head once more, like a man on a noose. Perhaps he was rehearsing his inevitable reward for failing King Marcus.
Slowly, but lacking any patience now, King Marcus persisted, "What have you to report of the blasphemer? Have you found him?"
Sir Liam answered to the stones at his feet, "Yes, my Lord."
Like thunder from a clear sky, "You will look at me when I ask you to address me!" King Marcus demanded.
"Yes, my Lord," he replied. One who did not know of his greatness might have believed those to be tears swelling in the eyes of Sir Liam the Bold. Impossible.
"I believe there was to be a pike with his head when you returned to me. Where is the head of the blasphemer?"
"It is here your majesty." He thought better of whatever he had considered saying after this, and closed up tightly with a resonating gulp.
"I am not a man with time for puzzles, Sir Liam. I believe you to be wise enough to know that. So I will give you one last chance; bring me his head." He stared through Sir Liam's eyes into the softest spot within him, and squeezed it as though wringing its juices. The room had fallen so silent that it seemed to shake the walls as the king whispered, his words sizzling like a cannon fuse, "Now!"
The knight trotted quickly from the chamber like a guilty puppy, and moments later returned, the blasphemer leading the way, his still-attached head held high. He was an old man with a long grey beard, and soft hazel eyes. He looked pious, dignified, and above all, unnervingly calm.
King Marcus swelled to his feet, roaring, "How dare you bring this villain into my chamber! Knights! Seize him!"
The knights, some dozen posted about the room like tapestries, did not move.
"Your majesty, if I may..." spoke the old man.
"You may NOT!" The king's eyes could have lit torches.
"Tell him!" shouted one of the faceless knights, safely behind the visor of his full set of armor.
Sir Liam spoke reluctantly, "Your majesty, he is no blasphemer. What he says is true: he is a sorcerer."
The king forgot every word in his vocabulary in the wake of being contradicted, for what he was convinced was the first time in his life.
"We found him in the tavern, had him surrounded. He didn't even flinch, sire. He looked in my face as calm as I've ever seen a man and he says 'No need for that,' and he pushed away my blade. It was like I couldn't control my own body anymore. And he says to me, 'Have a drink at my courtesy.' Then ..." the knight looked to the ground once more, scanning to see if maybe that's where he had dropped his courage. Not one scrap anywhere to be found, he looked up, his eyes apologizing for what he was about to say, "Your majesty, he ... He reached up and ... he pulled a gold coin out of my ear. As I live and breathe your highness, I've not seen a sight like it in all my days."
The king looked about the room for any sign of sanity, but every person stood still. No outrage at the preposterous statement. No objection from any of these knights, each a member of a swift channel of gossip by which the story no doubt had already traveled in great detail.
"If you are," the king challenged, and then continued as though vomiting the words, "some sort of sorcerer..." He spread his hands, presenting the floor to his unwelcome guest.
The strange man took several casual steps toward the king, as though on a stretch of his evening constitutional. As he reached in his robe, the chink of swords flying from sheaths poured over the room. But none was so brave as to step toward the reputed wizard.
He withdrew his hand slowly, as if he'd not heard the blades calling for his blood, and revealed a thick stack of stiff squares of parchment, bound by a small ribbon. He tugged one end of the string and let it fall to the floor, looked the fearful king in the eyes and spoke with a mystic lightness, "Pick a card. Any card."
"What have you to report, Sir Liam?" the king's words sounded more patient than was to be expected.
The knight, who had watched the floor since entering the room, faced his king, though not so courageous as to meet eyes, and unable to find the words dropped his head once more, like a man on a noose. Perhaps he was rehearsing his inevitable reward for failing King Marcus.
Slowly, but lacking any patience now, King Marcus persisted, "What have you to report of the blasphemer? Have you found him?"
Sir Liam answered to the stones at his feet, "Yes, my Lord."
Like thunder from a clear sky, "You will look at me when I ask you to address me!" King Marcus demanded.
"Yes, my Lord," he replied. One who did not know of his greatness might have believed those to be tears swelling in the eyes of Sir Liam the Bold. Impossible.
"I believe there was to be a pike with his head when you returned to me. Where is the head of the blasphemer?"
"It is here your majesty." He thought better of whatever he had considered saying after this, and closed up tightly with a resonating gulp.
"I am not a man with time for puzzles, Sir Liam. I believe you to be wise enough to know that. So I will give you one last chance; bring me his head." He stared through Sir Liam's eyes into the softest spot within him, and squeezed it as though wringing its juices. The room had fallen so silent that it seemed to shake the walls as the king whispered, his words sizzling like a cannon fuse, "Now!"
The knight trotted quickly from the chamber like a guilty puppy, and moments later returned, the blasphemer leading the way, his still-attached head held high. He was an old man with a long grey beard, and soft hazel eyes. He looked pious, dignified, and above all, unnervingly calm.
King Marcus swelled to his feet, roaring, "How dare you bring this villain into my chamber! Knights! Seize him!"
The knights, some dozen posted about the room like tapestries, did not move.
"Your majesty, if I may..." spoke the old man.
"You may NOT!" The king's eyes could have lit torches.
"Tell him!" shouted one of the faceless knights, safely behind the visor of his full set of armor.
Sir Liam spoke reluctantly, "Your majesty, he is no blasphemer. What he says is true: he is a sorcerer."
The king forgot every word in his vocabulary in the wake of being contradicted, for what he was convinced was the first time in his life.
"We found him in the tavern, had him surrounded. He didn't even flinch, sire. He looked in my face as calm as I've ever seen a man and he says 'No need for that,' and he pushed away my blade. It was like I couldn't control my own body anymore. And he says to me, 'Have a drink at my courtesy.' Then ..." the knight looked to the ground once more, scanning to see if maybe that's where he had dropped his courage. Not one scrap anywhere to be found, he looked up, his eyes apologizing for what he was about to say, "Your majesty, he ... He reached up and ... he pulled a gold coin out of my ear. As I live and breathe your highness, I've not seen a sight like it in all my days."
The king looked about the room for any sign of sanity, but every person stood still. No outrage at the preposterous statement. No objection from any of these knights, each a member of a swift channel of gossip by which the story no doubt had already traveled in great detail.
"If you are," the king challenged, and then continued as though vomiting the words, "some sort of sorcerer..." He spread his hands, presenting the floor to his unwelcome guest.
The strange man took several casual steps toward the king, as though on a stretch of his evening constitutional. As he reached in his robe, the chink of swords flying from sheaths poured over the room. But none was so brave as to step toward the reputed wizard.
He withdrew his hand slowly, as if he'd not heard the blades calling for his blood, and revealed a thick stack of stiff squares of parchment, bound by a small ribbon. He tugged one end of the string and let it fall to the floor, looked the fearful king in the eyes and spoke with a mystic lightness, "Pick a card. Any card."
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Pure as the Driven Snow
Why do we do the things that we do? I don't know that there exists a lazier legitimate question.
It would be easy enough for me to say, "Well, it was snowing for God's sake!" Or, I could say, "I would have picked up anyone," or "How could I know who she was?" That's ridiculous of course, to not know who she was, professionally speaking. And, while the other two attempts might be honest, let's face it, anyone knows why I picked her up. Anyone but me, I suppose
Farrel, she told me was her name. I'd seen her on the billboard out near the airport. You know, the one with the lady in a top hat, lying lengthwise so that the dimples of her lower back stop midway off the right side of the board? If you'd seen it you'd know it.
I'd never been to that particular establishment. But, even if I hadn't seen that sign before, I could have ventured a guess at who--I just don't feel comfortable saying "what"--she was; there just aren't too many ladies going down that street who aren't visiting one of the intimate apparel shops or... well, working. And--I figure this was the kicker--she was wearing a latex naughty nurse uniform. A white little number that didn't completely cover her rump and a top that didn't completely cover anything, and of course a nurse's hat that read "Head Nurse." Cute.
So, I pulled alongside the snow-banked curb, rolled down the passenger window and asked if she needed a ride. She hurriedly accepted.
"What the hell is your problem?" my wife nearly bit my ear off as I leaned over her to offer; a rather uncharitable nature, I thought.
"Wha-at?" I defended feebly. "There's room... right kids?"
It would be easy enough for me to say, "Well, it was snowing for God's sake!" Or, I could say, "I would have picked up anyone," or "How could I know who she was?" That's ridiculous of course, to not know who she was, professionally speaking. And, while the other two attempts might be honest, let's face it, anyone knows why I picked her up. Anyone but me, I suppose
Farrel, she told me was her name. I'd seen her on the billboard out near the airport. You know, the one with the lady in a top hat, lying lengthwise so that the dimples of her lower back stop midway off the right side of the board? If you'd seen it you'd know it.
I'd never been to that particular establishment. But, even if I hadn't seen that sign before, I could have ventured a guess at who--I just don't feel comfortable saying "what"--she was; there just aren't too many ladies going down that street who aren't visiting one of the intimate apparel shops or... well, working. And--I figure this was the kicker--she was wearing a latex naughty nurse uniform. A white little number that didn't completely cover her rump and a top that didn't completely cover anything, and of course a nurse's hat that read "Head Nurse." Cute.
So, I pulled alongside the snow-banked curb, rolled down the passenger window and asked if she needed a ride. She hurriedly accepted.
"What the hell is your problem?" my wife nearly bit my ear off as I leaned over her to offer; a rather uncharitable nature, I thought.
"Wha-at?" I defended feebly. "There's room... right kids?"
Saturday, April 2, 2011
It Was Not a Fart
"Forty-eight years is a life time, and this company, Mr. Holderman, will forever be reflective of that life you gave it." I had been petrified when they asked me to conduct Mr. Holderman's retirement presentation, but I was the only one with any real media editing knowledge, and not a body in the firm had ever been the stand-up-in-front-of -people type; that's why we lived in cubicles.
I wish so many things, given the advantage of retrospect, but chief among those is the simplest: pick any other moment in my entire life to turn around to face the screen instead of the audience.I had stepped beside him and placed my hand on his shoulder. Suddenly, possessed by the feeling that this was going so much better than anticipated -- a terrible, terrible mistake, every single time -- I paused after a solemn, crowd hushing remark, and faced the video montage projected on the wall.
Then a horrific little creature I remember vividly from my grade school days, bunched up behind my belly button and gave me a catastrophically resonant inner-raspberry, as my backside stared, dormant yet guilty looking, right over dear Mr. Holderman's shoulder.
Monday, March 28, 2011
The Six Stages of Ownership
First, there is the Idol stage where we recognize there is an item we want and unlike those before it, this is the possession which will finally make us whole.
Second, we bring home the Ornament, for that is what it will be; we will not use this thing, or not as much as it seemed to us we necessarily would upon taking ownership of such a jewel.
Third, it is The Damn item, for wherever it is, it is not in the right place and someone needs to retrieve The Damn item before it is thrown away.
Fourth it has become a seasoned veteran of our home and now becomes the Chameleon, as it will suddenly be able to blend so perfectly that each member of the household can stare at it without finding it, so as to return it to its home.
Fifth, it is Clutter, and we must throw clutter away, however on the way to the garbage can it undergoes instantaneous metamorphosis for its last stage.
You see, it is no longer Clutter which might become Trash, because en route to the trash we have realized that this irreplaceable member of the family is now an Artifact, and must be stored (likely in my closet) until we all return to dust no thicker than that which coats our other Artifacts.
Friday, February 25, 2011
In-Tro-Duce-Iiiiiing...
"You may know him from the glass encased cubicle behind customer service, or the slanted, dusty photograph on the wall by the exit. Standing five-foot-nine and weighing in at 193, he is the Manager of Mayhem, the Retail Rapscallion, the John Wayne of the Checkout Lane. The man who's so bad that when he blows out the candles on his birthday cake, or sees the first star at night, he wishes a motha fucka would."
He flips the light switch with his right hand after holding for just the right moment, meanwhile echoing an airy hiss from his throat that reverberating from his hand somewhat resembles the white noise of a roaring crowd. He looks himself over, red-vested and dressed for work, in the bathroom mirror and inhales enough air to displace the stress.
He wonders, until he can stop himself, when this ritual became necessity more than game and more parody than boast.
He flips the light switch with his right hand after holding for just the right moment, meanwhile echoing an airy hiss from his throat that reverberating from his hand somewhat resembles the white noise of a roaring crowd. He looks himself over, red-vested and dressed for work, in the bathroom mirror and inhales enough air to displace the stress.
He wonders, until he can stop himself, when this ritual became necessity more than game and more parody than boast.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
The Great Impasse
"Sweetie," he begins in a voice he hopes will entice his five-year-old daughter's sense of reason, but the skepticism on her face holds up against his words like a concrete slab, "you'll like this, I promise you. When I was a kid this was one of my favorite dinners."
She looks at her plate and gags audibly, her eyelids fluttering as though the mere sight of the dish is strangling her. She looks back at her father and realizes that he truly believes what he's saying, but this is the man who tells her that "gh" can make the "f" sound, the "h" sound, or no sound sound at all; sometimes it's just there for decoration. He is a man who believes very silly things: "who", he claims, begins with a "w."
Time passes and veins emerge in his forehead, red-faced shouts about starving children in far-off lands, and his daughter is now thoroughly convinced this man is absolutely insane; a credibility deficit he will never restore.
She looks at her plate and gags audibly, her eyelids fluttering as though the mere sight of the dish is strangling her. She looks back at her father and realizes that he truly believes what he's saying, but this is the man who tells her that "gh" can make the "f" sound, the "h" sound, or no sound sound at all; sometimes it's just there for decoration. He is a man who believes very silly things: "who", he claims, begins with a "w."
Time passes and veins emerge in his forehead, red-faced shouts about starving children in far-off lands, and his daughter is now thoroughly convinced this man is absolutely insane; a credibility deficit he will never restore.
Monday, September 20, 2010
GOON
"Hands on the wall, now!" the officer demanded, the heel of his left hand burying the side of my face into the scathing red bricks of the alleyway. I slung my left elbow through the air about where I'd expected his ribcage to be. No go.
I was sixteen at the time but my baby face could have convinced you I hadn't sprouted a single hair below my eyelashes yet. By the time they got me into booking you couldn't even tell I had eyelashes. The glare on the finger printing screen cast the reflection of a monster where normally my irritatingly cherubic features would peer back. Made sense. I wasn't a cherub anymore. I was a monster. Bloody and swollen, cracked teeth with intermittent empty spaces. That's the way I should have looked. I smiled at my reflection, flattered to be such a creature, and an ogre grinned back.
-----
"You couldn'a paid four-hundred on the bond, Ma!" I screamed in the late night air after being released three months later, as I kicked at the locked back door to my mother's house. I banged and shouted over and over, spiting the neighboring houses that squeezed the privacy from my childhood home.
"Coulda!" she shrieked from her upstairs window. Her bedside lamplight was the only glimmer in the house. From its uninterrupted cast, I could tell she hadn't even gotten out of bed to respond. "I'm done wasting money on shitty investments, Carl. Get out of here before I send you back there!"
"Jesus Christ A’mighty, Ma!" I gave up my knocking, but shouted even louder. A chipped brown Hush Puppy pump careened from my shoulder. "The Hell!"
"Don't you do dat! Don't you take da Lowd's name in vain, y’understand me?" That got her off her ass. Nothing but a shadow stabbing from her window, a finger prodding toward me with every syllable she cast upon me, but I could feel her angry face--you'd know the one if you'd seen it--tearing me to shreds.
"Yeah, yeah. The Lord. Good ol' Lord. Be sure to thank Him next time you talk, Ma! We got so much to thank him for!"
"You get out of my yard!"
"You ain't got a yard, Ma!"
"I'm callin' the cops!"
"Call the fuckin' cops, I don't care."
"Why don't the both yous shut up before I call the cops, huh?" blasted some wannabe tough guy from one of the darkened windows staring down at me from the confines of their secret troubles.
"Why don't you come down here and I'll give ya’ reason, ya bitch?" I shouted toward the man, and anyone else. But I was already moving down the street, faster than my pride would admit.
-----
"The hell happened to ya' voice, Gary?" I asked, with an asinine smirk, lighting a cigarette in a living room where such was clearly not allowed.
My older brother Gary was every bit the diamond everyone had made him out to be, opening the door to his convict little brother at three o' clock that morning. He went to the window overlooking a convocation of garbage surrounding the cans where it should have been. He opened and jerked his head toward it, pulling me from my seat with his inherent authority. "Do that out the window, at least, you little good-for-nothing," he said without a tinge of disrespect.
"Out the window at least," I mimicked in the most highfalutin, proper tone I could muster.
"See, you too could learn to talk right if you tried," he teased with a smile I probably didn't deserve. "Why are you here anyway? Ma kick you out?"
"Na, didn't have to. She just wouldn't let me back in." I hocked a loogie into the street, loudly gathering it in my throat with a crescendo blast that echoed nastily.
"Mmhm," he said returning with a glass of water I hadn't requested, extending it toward me and insisting with a nod that I take it. I did. "Second chances aren't guaranteed, Carl. You shouldn't have expected to get a--what, fourth, fifth chance?"
"Yeah, yeah. I know. The first guy to ever fuck up, right?"
"You're a kid, Carl. You've got time to change." I turned to protest, but the sincerity and compassion in his eyes took me by such surprise, I went dumb. He cared. I could see it in his eyes, he actually cared. Holy shit, how long had it been since I'd seen that look? "You need to change."
-----
When the governor had instituted the "Supers" the scouts had gone after only the tip of the top. Trained officers with athletic background, such as Gary, were the ideal fit for the new outfit. For them, landing a college linebacker with a 3.8 GPA and a degree in criminal justice was like finding the Holy Grail.
Gary never had my sense of individuality, I think he would admit that, so finding himself in a position to become a valued, guided part of a greater whole was every bit as valuable a find for him as it was for the government. So he thought, at least. Guy like that would've been just fine any way he sliced it. The truth is, the only reason they started that program was because the governor was scared to death by the influx of costumed vigilantes running around thinking they were in a damned comic book. Worried people were going to cause more harm than good.
"I wanna see ya costume!" I garbled around a bite of cereal one morning that next summer. "What's it like? Ya wear the nut-huggers?" He glared at me from above his laptop, and tilted the screen even lower. He must've been working on some official business.
"You dooooo don'tcha?" I chuckled.
"Now as two words, please," he said with the patient irritation of a veteran grammar tutor.
"Don't you?" I reiterated with exaggerated enunciation and a hint of a British accent.
"Lovely," he glanced up with a pinched smile momentarily, then back down, "we'll make a lady out of you yet, Eliza." I had to work to not laugh at that, though I wanted to badly. Ever since I'd moved in, those moments when I could see him as a brother, not as some painfully righteous arm of the law, were so few. Even so, I wasn't going to laugh at a diss. He checked his watch, grunted, and closed up shop, crossing to the door in a flash. "
Time fo' ya--for your real life?" I taunted him once more for good measure.
"Mmhm. And you?" he asked, trying to resist the accusatory tone which belonged--and surfaced--in his voice.
"Gonna rob a bank or somethin' prob'ly."
He swung around and blasted me with his eyes. For a moment I feared my joking had gone too far, especially since I wasn't really joking entirely.
"Go-ing to rob a bank or some-thing pro-bab-ly," he said striking each consonant, especially the end "g"s, and stretching each vowel, for illustrative purposes only.
-----
"Villains" loved the fact that they got an official title too. The city was booming with them just as soon as the Department of Super Tactical Operatives formed. For every fresh crop of do-gooders itching to live out a little boy's fantasy, there were three times as many lifetime criminals with much broader delusions of grandeur and the lack of scruples necessary to stretch for that brass ring as long as they needed to, no matter how many convictions and masked crusaders tried to stop them.
"Last crime you committed was almost a year ago," the brute made the computer screen between him and me look the size of a saltine. He was the kind of guy you expected to have out in the mess, doing the work, not sitting here auditioning Goons.
"Yeah, but I took out a cop," I lied. He ticked his eyes up at me, reminding me not to bullshit a bullshitter.
"Not what it says here." He twisted his lips, flared his nostrils, grunted, and tilted to the side as if maybe... Then, he shook his head, lips tightened against his top gum line. "You just ain't right for this outfit, ok kid. Come back once you've done some shit, arright? Actually done some shit."
-----
I felt the baton whip the back of my knee cap and crashed to the ground, crumbling like the plasma screens I'd been carrying under each arm. I was almost as thrilled as I was in pain. Almost.
Finally, I thought, I'd have something to show on my résumé; some relevant, recent material for my résumé. I knew who to call for bail, Marty Hadlock. Couple of Goons I'd met told me that was the way to go: get locked up, call Marty, and he'd let you work off the bond, with interest of course.
"They give you your papers?" Marty asked, a stony face that moved slowly and monumentally as tectonic plates.
"Yes, they are all here." From his grimace, I saw that my brother's dialect coaching had already gotten the better of me and my thug-speak was deteriorating despite my efforts. He checked my file, breathed deeply through his nose as if he was already having serious doubts, then exhaled with his eyebrows bowing to inevitability.
"Well, two felonies, six total arrests since age thirteen... Hmmm... If they say you gotta be registered, you gotta be registered. Congratulations kiddo, you're almost a Goon. You know where the Office of Judicial Status Certification is?" he rambled off with unexpected clarity.
"Yes, I've been there." With my brother once, a few months earlier. Marty glared at me suspiciously, eyes that looked like they were capable of kicking my ass without the aid of the rest of his massive body. "I tried to cheat on my Goon Cert the first time," I explained with the best save I could conjure on short notice.
He laughed and slid the papers back to me. "Awesome. That's freakin' awesome!"
-----
Gang, Outlaw, and Offender National Registry. GOON. They didn't include the R. Not because they couldn't afford to make the stamp one character longer or because the R wasn't an important part of the equation, but because they wanted to make good and damn well positive that you knew who you were to them.
Through the window to the next room I spotted Captain Righteous and Lady Lightning--no shit, that's how they were legally referred to--waiting in line, smiling, laughing, with their florescent spandex uniforms glistening beneath the steady glowing bulbs.
The dim light above my line, not forty yards from the beloved masked defenders, flickered wildly in the grimy casing, as if weeping over its dead counterpart, the dust of which hinted a not-so-recent demise.
“Next!”
Captain Righteous had been gone for about an hour when I reached the head of my line, and some kid with blond hair--a sidekick I’m sure--was grinning his way to the front of theirs. The hag behind the counter on my end of the glass checked my paperwork, stamped my page without looking at my face, and shouted, “Next!”
GOON, the large red imprint reminded me, as if I could ever forget. But it's what I wanted. Right?
-----
I folded the paper into a tiny triangle and headed down the hall. The brightness shining through the windowed doors from the street felt daunting and cold. It wasn't for me. Not anymore, I knew.
"Well, I'll be damned!" I turned to find a grinning titan in an orange Lycra onesie and a yellow cowl that covered everything above his upper lip. This, I recognized after the initial shock, was Crime Crusher--I don't make these up, ok--from the news. He was the cream of the cream, the man for the job, let me tell you. If a big Villain had come down, he'd been “Crushed.” End of subject.
"Well, brother man, aren't you full of surprises!" Crusher said crushing me with a bear hug.
Holy...
"Gary?" I felt my face scrunching around my eyes in disbelief, as if the bridge of my nose had been sucking on a lemon. I still have no idea what he was saying as he, essentially, carried me into the next office, nor do I know how my hand wound its way to my mouth, pressing the triangle of judgment in for safe keeping, as I managed to submit a few mumbled "Mmhm"s of confirmation to whatever he was talking about.
There was a line in the room. I mean, there was a line, but Captain Crusher didn't know the meaning of lines. The girls at this desk were beautiful. Go weak at the knees, crash your car just to get a better look, fall to genuflect and propose as you pass them on the street kind of beautiful. Nevertheless, they crowded around to fawn over Captain Crusher, submission of facial features not necessary for a stud like him.
The garble of his voice finally cleared as he repeated to my awe-stricken ears for the third time, "Where's your paper?"
"Huh?" I felt my heart kick into a fury as if it was trying to pump up the evidence of my evil. "I don-- I don-- I do not have them," I said, my words and voice coming out like a Muppet, odd-sounding and teacher-approved.
"Who needs 'em, right, ladies?" he grinned a pair of alpine ranges. They laughed as if he was the lovechild of Eddie Murphy and Robin Williams, and passed a page across to me, never tearing their eyes from him. I scribbled away, unsure of what else I might do. In a flurry of movements, the page was slid across, spun around, hammered with a stamp, and pushed back to me. No questions, no credentials, no need. For a Super like him, he could've brought in Al Capone and walked away with a Super Cert. I looked down.
"DSTO APPROVED" with the governor's signature below. I turned around--I don't know, to run, maybe?--and caught sight of my reflection in the pristine white floor below, clean enough you could wash with it.
That guy looking up to me didn't look like a two-time loser from the ghetto. He didn't look like a monster in the making. He looked like Carl. Gary's little brother, Donna and Eddie's little boy. The kid who won the science fair in fourth grade.
Who knew that all along he'd only been one stamp away?
I was sixteen at the time but my baby face could have convinced you I hadn't sprouted a single hair below my eyelashes yet. By the time they got me into booking you couldn't even tell I had eyelashes. The glare on the finger printing screen cast the reflection of a monster where normally my irritatingly cherubic features would peer back. Made sense. I wasn't a cherub anymore. I was a monster. Bloody and swollen, cracked teeth with intermittent empty spaces. That's the way I should have looked. I smiled at my reflection, flattered to be such a creature, and an ogre grinned back.
-----
"You couldn'a paid four-hundred on the bond, Ma!" I screamed in the late night air after being released three months later, as I kicked at the locked back door to my mother's house. I banged and shouted over and over, spiting the neighboring houses that squeezed the privacy from my childhood home.
"Coulda!" she shrieked from her upstairs window. Her bedside lamplight was the only glimmer in the house. From its uninterrupted cast, I could tell she hadn't even gotten out of bed to respond. "I'm done wasting money on shitty investments, Carl. Get out of here before I send you back there!"
"Jesus Christ A’mighty, Ma!" I gave up my knocking, but shouted even louder. A chipped brown Hush Puppy pump careened from my shoulder. "The Hell!"
"Don't you do dat! Don't you take da Lowd's name in vain, y’understand me?" That got her off her ass. Nothing but a shadow stabbing from her window, a finger prodding toward me with every syllable she cast upon me, but I could feel her angry face--you'd know the one if you'd seen it--tearing me to shreds.
"Yeah, yeah. The Lord. Good ol' Lord. Be sure to thank Him next time you talk, Ma! We got so much to thank him for!"
"You get out of my yard!"
"You ain't got a yard, Ma!"
"I'm callin' the cops!"
"Call the fuckin' cops, I don't care."
"Why don't the both yous shut up before I call the cops, huh?" blasted some wannabe tough guy from one of the darkened windows staring down at me from the confines of their secret troubles.
"Why don't you come down here and I'll give ya’ reason, ya bitch?" I shouted toward the man, and anyone else. But I was already moving down the street, faster than my pride would admit.
-----
"The hell happened to ya' voice, Gary?" I asked, with an asinine smirk, lighting a cigarette in a living room where such was clearly not allowed.
My older brother Gary was every bit the diamond everyone had made him out to be, opening the door to his convict little brother at three o' clock that morning. He went to the window overlooking a convocation of garbage surrounding the cans where it should have been. He opened and jerked his head toward it, pulling me from my seat with his inherent authority. "Do that out the window, at least, you little good-for-nothing," he said without a tinge of disrespect.
"Out the window at least," I mimicked in the most highfalutin, proper tone I could muster.
"See, you too could learn to talk right if you tried," he teased with a smile I probably didn't deserve. "Why are you here anyway? Ma kick you out?"
"Na, didn't have to. She just wouldn't let me back in." I hocked a loogie into the street, loudly gathering it in my throat with a crescendo blast that echoed nastily.
"Mmhm," he said returning with a glass of water I hadn't requested, extending it toward me and insisting with a nod that I take it. I did. "Second chances aren't guaranteed, Carl. You shouldn't have expected to get a--what, fourth, fifth chance?"
"Yeah, yeah. I know. The first guy to ever fuck up, right?"
"You're a kid, Carl. You've got time to change." I turned to protest, but the sincerity and compassion in his eyes took me by such surprise, I went dumb. He cared. I could see it in his eyes, he actually cared. Holy shit, how long had it been since I'd seen that look? "You need to change."
-----
When the governor had instituted the "Supers" the scouts had gone after only the tip of the top. Trained officers with athletic background, such as Gary, were the ideal fit for the new outfit. For them, landing a college linebacker with a 3.8 GPA and a degree in criminal justice was like finding the Holy Grail.
Gary never had my sense of individuality, I think he would admit that, so finding himself in a position to become a valued, guided part of a greater whole was every bit as valuable a find for him as it was for the government. So he thought, at least. Guy like that would've been just fine any way he sliced it. The truth is, the only reason they started that program was because the governor was scared to death by the influx of costumed vigilantes running around thinking they were in a damned comic book. Worried people were going to cause more harm than good.
"I wanna see ya costume!" I garbled around a bite of cereal one morning that next summer. "What's it like? Ya wear the nut-huggers?" He glared at me from above his laptop, and tilted the screen even lower. He must've been working on some official business.
"You dooooo don'tcha?" I chuckled.
"Now as two words, please," he said with the patient irritation of a veteran grammar tutor.
"Don't you?" I reiterated with exaggerated enunciation and a hint of a British accent.
"Lovely," he glanced up with a pinched smile momentarily, then back down, "we'll make a lady out of you yet, Eliza." I had to work to not laugh at that, though I wanted to badly. Ever since I'd moved in, those moments when I could see him as a brother, not as some painfully righteous arm of the law, were so few. Even so, I wasn't going to laugh at a diss. He checked his watch, grunted, and closed up shop, crossing to the door in a flash. "
Time fo' ya--for your real life?" I taunted him once more for good measure.
"Mmhm. And you?" he asked, trying to resist the accusatory tone which belonged--and surfaced--in his voice.
"Gonna rob a bank or somethin' prob'ly."
He swung around and blasted me with his eyes. For a moment I feared my joking had gone too far, especially since I wasn't really joking entirely.
"Go-ing to rob a bank or some-thing pro-bab-ly," he said striking each consonant, especially the end "g"s, and stretching each vowel, for illustrative purposes only.
-----
"Villains" loved the fact that they got an official title too. The city was booming with them just as soon as the Department of Super Tactical Operatives formed. For every fresh crop of do-gooders itching to live out a little boy's fantasy, there were three times as many lifetime criminals with much broader delusions of grandeur and the lack of scruples necessary to stretch for that brass ring as long as they needed to, no matter how many convictions and masked crusaders tried to stop them.
"Last crime you committed was almost a year ago," the brute made the computer screen between him and me look the size of a saltine. He was the kind of guy you expected to have out in the mess, doing the work, not sitting here auditioning Goons.
"Yeah, but I took out a cop," I lied. He ticked his eyes up at me, reminding me not to bullshit a bullshitter.
"Not what it says here." He twisted his lips, flared his nostrils, grunted, and tilted to the side as if maybe... Then, he shook his head, lips tightened against his top gum line. "You just ain't right for this outfit, ok kid. Come back once you've done some shit, arright? Actually done some shit."
-----
I felt the baton whip the back of my knee cap and crashed to the ground, crumbling like the plasma screens I'd been carrying under each arm. I was almost as thrilled as I was in pain. Almost.
Finally, I thought, I'd have something to show on my résumé; some relevant, recent material for my résumé. I knew who to call for bail, Marty Hadlock. Couple of Goons I'd met told me that was the way to go: get locked up, call Marty, and he'd let you work off the bond, with interest of course.
"They give you your papers?" Marty asked, a stony face that moved slowly and monumentally as tectonic plates.
"Yes, they are all here." From his grimace, I saw that my brother's dialect coaching had already gotten the better of me and my thug-speak was deteriorating despite my efforts. He checked my file, breathed deeply through his nose as if he was already having serious doubts, then exhaled with his eyebrows bowing to inevitability.
"Well, two felonies, six total arrests since age thirteen... Hmmm... If they say you gotta be registered, you gotta be registered. Congratulations kiddo, you're almost a Goon. You know where the Office of Judicial Status Certification is?" he rambled off with unexpected clarity.
"Yes, I've been there." With my brother once, a few months earlier. Marty glared at me suspiciously, eyes that looked like they were capable of kicking my ass without the aid of the rest of his massive body. "I tried to cheat on my Goon Cert the first time," I explained with the best save I could conjure on short notice.
He laughed and slid the papers back to me. "Awesome. That's freakin' awesome!"
-----
Gang, Outlaw, and Offender National Registry. GOON. They didn't include the R. Not because they couldn't afford to make the stamp one character longer or because the R wasn't an important part of the equation, but because they wanted to make good and damn well positive that you knew who you were to them.
Through the window to the next room I spotted Captain Righteous and Lady Lightning--no shit, that's how they were legally referred to--waiting in line, smiling, laughing, with their florescent spandex uniforms glistening beneath the steady glowing bulbs.
The dim light above my line, not forty yards from the beloved masked defenders, flickered wildly in the grimy casing, as if weeping over its dead counterpart, the dust of which hinted a not-so-recent demise.
“Next!”
Captain Righteous had been gone for about an hour when I reached the head of my line, and some kid with blond hair--a sidekick I’m sure--was grinning his way to the front of theirs. The hag behind the counter on my end of the glass checked my paperwork, stamped my page without looking at my face, and shouted, “Next!”
GOON, the large red imprint reminded me, as if I could ever forget. But it's what I wanted. Right?
-----
I folded the paper into a tiny triangle and headed down the hall. The brightness shining through the windowed doors from the street felt daunting and cold. It wasn't for me. Not anymore, I knew.
"Well, I'll be damned!" I turned to find a grinning titan in an orange Lycra onesie and a yellow cowl that covered everything above his upper lip. This, I recognized after the initial shock, was Crime Crusher--I don't make these up, ok--from the news. He was the cream of the cream, the man for the job, let me tell you. If a big Villain had come down, he'd been “Crushed.” End of subject.
"Well, brother man, aren't you full of surprises!" Crusher said crushing me with a bear hug.
Holy...
"Gary?" I felt my face scrunching around my eyes in disbelief, as if the bridge of my nose had been sucking on a lemon. I still have no idea what he was saying as he, essentially, carried me into the next office, nor do I know how my hand wound its way to my mouth, pressing the triangle of judgment in for safe keeping, as I managed to submit a few mumbled "Mmhm"s of confirmation to whatever he was talking about.
There was a line in the room. I mean, there was a line, but Captain Crusher didn't know the meaning of lines. The girls at this desk were beautiful. Go weak at the knees, crash your car just to get a better look, fall to genuflect and propose as you pass them on the street kind of beautiful. Nevertheless, they crowded around to fawn over Captain Crusher, submission of facial features not necessary for a stud like him.
The garble of his voice finally cleared as he repeated to my awe-stricken ears for the third time, "Where's your paper?"
"Huh?" I felt my heart kick into a fury as if it was trying to pump up the evidence of my evil. "I don-- I don-- I do not have them," I said, my words and voice coming out like a Muppet, odd-sounding and teacher-approved.
"Who needs 'em, right, ladies?" he grinned a pair of alpine ranges. They laughed as if he was the lovechild of Eddie Murphy and Robin Williams, and passed a page across to me, never tearing their eyes from him. I scribbled away, unsure of what else I might do. In a flurry of movements, the page was slid across, spun around, hammered with a stamp, and pushed back to me. No questions, no credentials, no need. For a Super like him, he could've brought in Al Capone and walked away with a Super Cert. I looked down.
"DSTO APPROVED" with the governor's signature below. I turned around--I don't know, to run, maybe?--and caught sight of my reflection in the pristine white floor below, clean enough you could wash with it.
That guy looking up to me didn't look like a two-time loser from the ghetto. He didn't look like a monster in the making. He looked like Carl. Gary's little brother, Donna and Eddie's little boy. The kid who won the science fair in fourth grade.
Who knew that all along he'd only been one stamp away?
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
To Remember the Truth
Curtis stopped typing, much to his own surprise. Every other set of fingers around him, cubicle by cubicle, proceeded in the cacophony of clicking, bounding noisily from key to key so that the song reverberated against the concrete walls like a heavy hailstorm as the letters and numbers dropped onto their screens, etched into an intangible slate, existing nowhere but in the lights before them.
He rubbed his fingers, moist enough to squeak softly, against the polyurethane coat of his narrow desk space, reminding himself of actuality. His tie felt tight around his collar and the room began to shrink around him as his chest grew with anxiety until he burst, ripped free; from his clothes, from the room, from the whole damn performance.
So, I always stop for a few when Curtis asks me for change, not just because his stories are interesting or because he manages a certain intelligibility atypical of underpass dwellers, but because every now and then when he whispers wildly about the Machine and the Trap and the System, backward as it may be, I start to feel a little less crazy.
He rubbed his fingers, moist enough to squeak softly, against the polyurethane coat of his narrow desk space, reminding himself of actuality. His tie felt tight around his collar and the room began to shrink around him as his chest grew with anxiety until he burst, ripped free; from his clothes, from the room, from the whole damn performance.
So, I always stop for a few when Curtis asks me for change, not just because his stories are interesting or because he manages a certain intelligibility atypical of underpass dwellers, but because every now and then when he whispers wildly about the Machine and the Trap and the System, backward as it may be, I start to feel a little less crazy.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Bummer
Liliana’s eyelashes beat together like a feathered gavel before her mahogany eyes, sentencing me to “Piss off, Heremy…”--I loved how she said Heremy instead of Jeremy and the way she rolled the r, so of course it made me smile, which she acknowledged with a displeased tilt of one eyebrow, but steady as a dancer kept stride--“…because I got two good waitresses, a sussessful res’rant, an’ I don’ wanna loose none ‘ose tings porque uno pinche cabrón can’ keep his nassy lil’ hans to 'imself.”
I’ll bet she was twice my age, but like any twenty-year-old beach bum worth his saltwater, I was all about the ladies and if there was any reason I shouldn’t be with them--perhaps a generational gap--then, mo’ betta’, I figured.
Like the kind of guy I’d punch nowadays, I leaned over the counter with a smile they might picture next to “cocky ass” in Webster’s, and said, “Or maybe, you should forget what you know about my involvement with said waitresses, and find out for yourself what all the fuss is about.”
She craned down toward me, her intensity pressing me back nearly off the stool, and she reached down to my crotch, encircling the area with her fingertips, whispering, “But then, I’d wanchu never to leave, an’ you know how to keep a dog from runnin’ away? Shop off ‘is lil’ balls.”
I miss that place--missed it ever since that afternoon--but not nearly as much as I miss that woman.
I’ll bet she was twice my age, but like any twenty-year-old beach bum worth his saltwater, I was all about the ladies and if there was any reason I shouldn’t be with them--perhaps a generational gap--then, mo’ betta’, I figured.
Like the kind of guy I’d punch nowadays, I leaned over the counter with a smile they might picture next to “cocky ass” in Webster’s, and said, “Or maybe, you should forget what you know about my involvement with said waitresses, and find out for yourself what all the fuss is about.”
She craned down toward me, her intensity pressing me back nearly off the stool, and she reached down to my crotch, encircling the area with her fingertips, whispering, “But then, I’d wanchu never to leave, an’ you know how to keep a dog from runnin’ away? Shop off ‘is lil’ balls.”
I miss that place--missed it ever since that afternoon--but not nearly as much as I miss that woman.
Where You Lie
A breathy mumble came from her lips; a name. She tried again, after a few crackling inhales, “Where is… where’s…”
He looked all around, wreckage in each direction, then back at the stranger. “Fine… he’s… she's... they’re fine. Everybody’s fine,” he lied.
She smiled, and then was gone.
Originally posted at 6S
He looked all around, wreckage in each direction, then back at the stranger. “Fine… he’s… she's... they’re fine. Everybody’s fine,” he lied.
She smiled, and then was gone.
Originally posted at 6S
Monday, June 28, 2010
The Mysterious Dr. Ramsey
Ramsey Michelle Helton wore matching ruffled pigtails which looked as though they might have come prepackaged with the galaxies of freckles on her tiny cheeks. Her smile revealed two front teeth as absent as the shoes I assumed she wore, at least on occasion. A frog chirp from her overalls pocket convinced me that if I looked hard enough I would find a hidden camera somewhere in the double-wide trailer.
She skipped across the small room and looked in my eyes curiously for several moments before whispering, "You don't wanna hear them voices no more, huh?"
I'd driven nineteen-hundred miles to witness the "Mysterious Doctor Ramsey", as the tabloids had dubbed her, but not even that leap of faith could prepare me for the chill that her words issued to my tired, crazy soul, eager once more to surrender to what a wiser man might call "blind faith." Then, she kissed my head, freed me from my hell, and proved to me at last that there is no faith a man can ever have which may fairly be ruled unjustified.
She skipped across the small room and looked in my eyes curiously for several moments before whispering, "You don't wanna hear them voices no more, huh?"
I'd driven nineteen-hundred miles to witness the "Mysterious Doctor Ramsey", as the tabloids had dubbed her, but not even that leap of faith could prepare me for the chill that her words issued to my tired, crazy soul, eager once more to surrender to what a wiser man might call "blind faith." Then, she kissed my head, freed me from my hell, and proved to me at last that there is no faith a man can ever have which may fairly be ruled unjustified.
Monday, May 3, 2010
The Terribly Gifted Terry Gordan Chapter 1: Stuck
Thin rows of sunlight outlined the inner walls of the warehouse through aging fractures, one of its least substantial structural flaws. The rickety door screamed from the pain of being forced open against its rusty disuse, shoved into the ceiling, stilled gears scraping against the defunct track.
Were a living person, with the good sense to know what they were seeing, watching from within as the door went up, that living person may well have ceased to be such instantly. True, people aren’t frequently startled to death, but it happens. And, in such a circumstance it would’ve been the more favorable of two options. If a person sees Rex Proper walking into the room flanked by three men in suits, it is most likely that person never sees another pleasant thing for the rest of their (short, horrible) life.
Terry Gordan was lucky enough to be watching from behind the quartet, the scene playing out faintly beyond the red screen of the bandanna around his eyes. The door yelped as its parts lodged irreparably from the brute force of one of Rex’s nameless hulks. As the four men stepped into the darkness of the building, the shadows swallowed the dim picture and left Terry to imagine the scene, his heart beating slow and hard like the stroke of a sledgehammer, his knees kneading nervously at the dirt, wrists wringing sorely against the cuffs.
There was a merciless silence following the eerie echo of the door’s last stand, as the dirt where a floor once had been muffled the men’s steps. Terry felt like he was drowning, the sound of his breath resounding like the wind and the waves, and pressing harder against him than either natural force was capable.
A rumbling groan akin to a low-speed blender hummed from within. And Terry’s shoulder muscles tightened until they cramped, and then some. They'd found her. The sound swelled until it broke, shooting furious roar after furious roar from wall to wall. Birds evacuated the storm, the sound of their shrieks and their furious launch from the tin roof underscored Rex’s raging screams aptly; the horn and percussion sections of his animalistic melody.
“Don’t fucking touch anything!” Rex hollered, his voice raspy over the sound of him punching one of his subordinates, a jab for every word.
“You want to just leave it here?” The question was simple, impulsive, and rational. And for the man who spoke it, the last.
“It?” Rex hissed. A gunshot. “It, motherfucker?” Two more gunshots. Rex coughed up another chain of beastly roars. Violent and braying enough to freeze the veins, his outbursts simultaneously bled a portion of pain that almost forgave such a hateful tirade.
“Hey, Rexy, come on, she’s…” A gunshot; and another employee was relieved of his duty.
“No, please, Rex, no.” Three more shots.
Terry hadn’t been so naïve as to expect a positive outcome, but he’d been honest, led them to the place, done everything he could to save his life. Somewhere deep down, he’d wondered if there was a chance he could survive another day. But this man had just killed his own, just to blow off some steam. The future was less clear than Terry was accustomed. Far less clear, and that was a terror unrivaled in his experience.
Terry’s feet shuffled in place like the running start of a Merry-Melodies character. Finally he found traction and began straining himself upright, shaky knees combating his effort. Rocking back on his heels he wobbled, wrestling to press his toes to the ground. As he very nearly accomplished the move, Rex entered Terry’s grainy, amber sight, open barrel leading the way in b-line for his skull. Terry’s senses overcame him and he fell to the ground like a burlap sack.
Rex stood with his feet on either side of Terry’s ribcage. He stooped forward with the pistol and tugged the bandanna up with the pistol, the barrel scratching the flesh between Terry’s nose and left eye. Terry’s tears readied for the flood, but they were damned by the onslaught of every emotion conceivable, as if the man’s soul was going for one last spin, courtesy of a life of memories taken for granted. Each in full feature, these moments played out in the stage of his mind, time nonexistent.
The final fleeting flashes of those he loved most, and the dam began to groan, tears surfacing around the edges. Then, as his grimaced brow awaited the swift burn to take him away, the heat and smell of the barrel seemed to fade. One eyelid surrendered fear in favor of curiosity, sliding open just as a drop splashed onto his hairline. The other eye opened and within the brightness of the summer sky, the shadow of a broken man quivered slightly above him, drops beginning to storm from his eyes as his trembling intensified.
Rex held the pistol undecidedly, almost as if forgotten. Finally, it fell to his side and hung by his pocket. Rex stepped over Terry and stumbled back to the warehouse, toward his fallen love. He stopped at the door and collapsed, the killer of killers fading into a sobbing contradiction.
Terry worked his forearms into position and propped himself, slightly, on his elbows. He watched Rex for several seconds, perhaps a minute or more. He battled conflicting sentiments, sympathy and fear. He had to do something, to react, and unfortunately those were the only two stimuli he could summon. Terry was no tough guy, but damned if he’d go out in fear.
Terry waited until Rex had finished weeping and crawled onto his knees, staring into the darkness of the warehouse. Then he said, softly, “I can help you find the person who did this.”
Rex turned his head gradually to his left, and then stopped, refusing his interest in the claim. His shoulders took three passes up and down as his chest heaved, his own inner turmoil bubbling. He sprung to his feet, stripped the water from his face, and stalked toward Terry, his pistol again in the lead.
“How?” He stabbed the pistol forward.
“Same way I found your... this place, man. Same way I find anyone.” Terry had to fight to stifle his enthusiasm, darkly tinted as it might have been; he’d bought some time, but this wasn’t over. Not by a far cry. He didn’t have to be psychic to see that. Unfortunately, he was a psychic. And a fairly inadequate one at that.
Were a living person, with the good sense to know what they were seeing, watching from within as the door went up, that living person may well have ceased to be such instantly. True, people aren’t frequently startled to death, but it happens. And, in such a circumstance it would’ve been the more favorable of two options. If a person sees Rex Proper walking into the room flanked by three men in suits, it is most likely that person never sees another pleasant thing for the rest of their (short, horrible) life.
Terry Gordan was lucky enough to be watching from behind the quartet, the scene playing out faintly beyond the red screen of the bandanna around his eyes. The door yelped as its parts lodged irreparably from the brute force of one of Rex’s nameless hulks. As the four men stepped into the darkness of the building, the shadows swallowed the dim picture and left Terry to imagine the scene, his heart beating slow and hard like the stroke of a sledgehammer, his knees kneading nervously at the dirt, wrists wringing sorely against the cuffs.
There was a merciless silence following the eerie echo of the door’s last stand, as the dirt where a floor once had been muffled the men’s steps. Terry felt like he was drowning, the sound of his breath resounding like the wind and the waves, and pressing harder against him than either natural force was capable.
A rumbling groan akin to a low-speed blender hummed from within. And Terry’s shoulder muscles tightened until they cramped, and then some. They'd found her. The sound swelled until it broke, shooting furious roar after furious roar from wall to wall. Birds evacuated the storm, the sound of their shrieks and their furious launch from the tin roof underscored Rex’s raging screams aptly; the horn and percussion sections of his animalistic melody.
“Don’t fucking touch anything!” Rex hollered, his voice raspy over the sound of him punching one of his subordinates, a jab for every word.
“You want to just leave it here?” The question was simple, impulsive, and rational. And for the man who spoke it, the last.
“It?” Rex hissed. A gunshot. “It, motherfucker?” Two more gunshots. Rex coughed up another chain of beastly roars. Violent and braying enough to freeze the veins, his outbursts simultaneously bled a portion of pain that almost forgave such a hateful tirade.
“Hey, Rexy, come on, she’s…” A gunshot; and another employee was relieved of his duty.
“No, please, Rex, no.” Three more shots.
Terry hadn’t been so naïve as to expect a positive outcome, but he’d been honest, led them to the place, done everything he could to save his life. Somewhere deep down, he’d wondered if there was a chance he could survive another day. But this man had just killed his own, just to blow off some steam. The future was less clear than Terry was accustomed. Far less clear, and that was a terror unrivaled in his experience.
Terry’s feet shuffled in place like the running start of a Merry-Melodies character. Finally he found traction and began straining himself upright, shaky knees combating his effort. Rocking back on his heels he wobbled, wrestling to press his toes to the ground. As he very nearly accomplished the move, Rex entered Terry’s grainy, amber sight, open barrel leading the way in b-line for his skull. Terry’s senses overcame him and he fell to the ground like a burlap sack.
Rex stood with his feet on either side of Terry’s ribcage. He stooped forward with the pistol and tugged the bandanna up with the pistol, the barrel scratching the flesh between Terry’s nose and left eye. Terry’s tears readied for the flood, but they were damned by the onslaught of every emotion conceivable, as if the man’s soul was going for one last spin, courtesy of a life of memories taken for granted. Each in full feature, these moments played out in the stage of his mind, time nonexistent.
The final fleeting flashes of those he loved most, and the dam began to groan, tears surfacing around the edges. Then, as his grimaced brow awaited the swift burn to take him away, the heat and smell of the barrel seemed to fade. One eyelid surrendered fear in favor of curiosity, sliding open just as a drop splashed onto his hairline. The other eye opened and within the brightness of the summer sky, the shadow of a broken man quivered slightly above him, drops beginning to storm from his eyes as his trembling intensified.
Rex held the pistol undecidedly, almost as if forgotten. Finally, it fell to his side and hung by his pocket. Rex stepped over Terry and stumbled back to the warehouse, toward his fallen love. He stopped at the door and collapsed, the killer of killers fading into a sobbing contradiction.
Terry worked his forearms into position and propped himself, slightly, on his elbows. He watched Rex for several seconds, perhaps a minute or more. He battled conflicting sentiments, sympathy and fear. He had to do something, to react, and unfortunately those were the only two stimuli he could summon. Terry was no tough guy, but damned if he’d go out in fear.
Terry waited until Rex had finished weeping and crawled onto his knees, staring into the darkness of the warehouse. Then he said, softly, “I can help you find the person who did this.”
Rex turned his head gradually to his left, and then stopped, refusing his interest in the claim. His shoulders took three passes up and down as his chest heaved, his own inner turmoil bubbling. He sprung to his feet, stripped the water from his face, and stalked toward Terry, his pistol again in the lead.
“How?” He stabbed the pistol forward.
“Same way I found your... this place, man. Same way I find anyone.” Terry had to fight to stifle his enthusiasm, darkly tinted as it might have been; he’d bought some time, but this wasn’t over. Not by a far cry. He didn’t have to be psychic to see that. Unfortunately, he was a psychic. And a fairly inadequate one at that.
Friday, April 2, 2010
How to Reply to the Nigerian Prince -- A 6S Challenge
Deer Prints Narmeen,
I to have looking for to put into my money some place safe for getting later and to share with my new friends, like have you done hear. I tell so much new friends with the emails to please can have some of my very much money, my father have dies and I will be kings inheritance but must not make the money in a bank heer in Namibia.
Why the friends do not want to have some moenys like for them I have offered? You certain have a big talent on the emails, Narmeen, and I no your very good with what you due. Please extablish an account in the bank nearest your heart, and I like your new friend will give access to my money as you will me yours to also as well, my friend!1!!`
His Royal Majesty,
Dukuv Erl
The above is my reply to the challenge: How to Reply to the Nigerian Prince
From Gita Smith
After being contacted by an email scammer claiming to be (or represent) a Nigerian Prince, you respond with six well chosen sentences.
Do you scam him back? Slam him or Scram him? How clever will your answer be? Which of us will fall for YOUR email and send money to you? Let's see....
Sign up and enter your 6 sentence response: here
I to have looking for to put into my money some place safe for getting later and to share with my new friends, like have you done hear. I tell so much new friends with the emails to please can have some of my very much money, my father have dies and I will be kings inheritance but must not make the money in a bank heer in Namibia.
Why the friends do not want to have some moenys like for them I have offered? You certain have a big talent on the emails, Narmeen, and I no your very good with what you due. Please extablish an account in the bank nearest your heart, and I like your new friend will give access to my money as you will me yours to also as well, my friend!1!!`
His Royal Majesty,
Dukuv Erl
The above is my reply to the challenge: How to Reply to the Nigerian Prince
From Gita Smith
After being contacted by an email scammer claiming to be (or represent) a Nigerian Prince, you respond with six well chosen sentences.
Do you scam him back? Slam him or Scram him? How clever will your answer be? Which of us will fall for YOUR email and send money to you? Let's see....
Sign up and enter your 6 sentence response: here
Carpe Damned
With the sort of self-propagation normally found only in lengthily-Latin-named creatures my Biology teacher used to hum about, the strata of irony frolic before my mind’s disbelieving eye, webbed together like a Mobius strip.
Some of the best years of my life were sipped away alongside a procrastinating posse of fellow ne’er-do-well would-be artists, on the back porch of a coffee shop named Carpe Diem; or if you’ve not seen Dead Poets’ Society: "seize the day." And, while we played chess or cards or did anything else to distract ourselves from the craving to create, we debated over what we considered life’s great ironies.
Yes, take it all in: at “Seize the Day” coffee shop my friends and I would distract each other from developing the abilities we were afraid we might actually have, as we bitched and moaned about the lack of opportunities available, and how ironic it was to have the passion and drive but no outlet.
And eight years later, as I grasped about for inspiration to help me write something during this tiny window of solitude I have today, I found it right where I left it. I can see the lot of us now, as if walking upon our ghosts: everyone’s tilting back in those plastic green chairs, wearing cigarettes as surely as arms, and as I pass by I see pride in their ear-to-ear smiles, as if they’re all thankful to finally see proof that the door can be opened--even if it wasn't large enough for us to all go through together.
Also posted at: http://sixsentences.ning.com/profiles/blogs/carpe-damned?xg_source=activity
Some of the best years of my life were sipped away alongside a procrastinating posse of fellow ne’er-do-well would-be artists, on the back porch of a coffee shop named Carpe Diem; or if you’ve not seen Dead Poets’ Society: "seize the day." And, while we played chess or cards or did anything else to distract ourselves from the craving to create, we debated over what we considered life’s great ironies.
Yes, take it all in: at “Seize the Day” coffee shop my friends and I would distract each other from developing the abilities we were afraid we might actually have, as we bitched and moaned about the lack of opportunities available, and how ironic it was to have the passion and drive but no outlet.
And eight years later, as I grasped about for inspiration to help me write something during this tiny window of solitude I have today, I found it right where I left it. I can see the lot of us now, as if walking upon our ghosts: everyone’s tilting back in those plastic green chairs, wearing cigarettes as surely as arms, and as I pass by I see pride in their ear-to-ear smiles, as if they’re all thankful to finally see proof that the door can be opened--even if it wasn't large enough for us to all go through together.
Also posted at: http://sixsentences.ning.com/profiles/blogs/carpe-damned?xg_source=activity
Friday, March 26, 2010
The Fool and the Full
Inspired by the quote: "A bore is a man who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company." Gian Vincenzo Gravina
Perhaps the nicest thing I could say about Harper was that the foolish young bastard was simply an inherent bore and that there was little, or perhaps not a thing at all he could ever have done to better himself to such a degree that he might have become a passably desirable human being.
Before we began our excursion into this nameless jungle, Harper was a wet-behind-the-ears lab assistant. Apparently young Harper had paid his way through grad school as a farmhand. How very dignified of him.
How in the hell a bumpkin straight out of grad school had been placed on a mission like this, the type of mission for which even a scientist with my experience must spend thirty-odd years trying to earn a spot, I cannot tell you, but there he was. Maybe our mission’s backers thought we might do some farming if we discovered a new species in this forgotten place.
Sarcasm aside, the farmhand story was perfect; it fit him more snugly than his irritatingly white undershirt, which he had worn every day and washed in a stream every night, making it look at all times as if he’d just stumbled across the wreckage moments earlier. It was as if he believed that if he looked like everything was fine, he could feel like everything was, rather than accepting the facts.
The evidence it provided in support of my initial evaluation, when I first shook his hammy hand--that he was an out-of-place buffoon who could make a nice sacrifice if the jungle should demand--might have made the farmhand story more tolerable had it not been repeated more than five times in the three weeks we were together before I decided to kill him.
I don’t do myself justice there; I realized that I must kill him.
“Cold-hearted” is an imaginary characterization. It is but a term our society has applied to those we secretly envy most, those who need not bother with the trifling preordinations allotted by man’s fickle laws and non sequitur dogmas to remedy a particular set of circumstances. One finds quickly that desolation in the anonymity of the unforgiving wilderness offers freedom in many ways, not the least of which is the gift of a cold heart.
Harper’s incessant droning made me feel more alone than did the swirling orchestra of cackles and caws from the ominous night air. During one such concert, struggling to sleep after another hungry day, I came to my realization about Harper’s fate. The taunting, screeching calls of the darkness that night rapped my nerves like bullwhips, so that I might have gone mad had I not found the wherewithal to focus on my bane, and the elation of freeing myself from his nuisance. I hung from the thought like a lifesaver floating in a tempest of loathsome awareness. That, I realized was the issue: I could not help but be aware of him until he was dead, and that was his fault and no one else’s.
The day we crashed, he’d begged that I help him with CPR. He actually wanted to waste our precious little energy on attempting to resuscitate a man who’d been impaled with a branch; I think now that I hated him immediately. Even at the exact moment we realized the other two passengers were dead, I knew he was no one I cared to associate with, regardless of whether he was the only sentient being I would ever see again. I’d tried to shake him but he longed for association with a parasitic passion.
I sat up from my blanket of leaves that night and contemplated the execution of the task at hand. My stomach growled, offering its own angry call into the cacophony of night. I knew the time had come, there could be no hesitation.
He outweighed me by a great deal, so I would have to be careful not to wake him. He would certainly overpower me if I allowed it, but I would not. Brains over brawn, they say. My stomach grumbled again and the hunger pains drove me even stronger.
I blamed him for my hunger on several accounts. He was so massive that my only reasonable recourse upon discovering the emergency food supply in the jungle near the chopper was to bury it and keep it from him. He’d clearly not eaten responsibly back home; I wouldn’t trust him to learn the skill when my life depended on it. If I’d let him slap his gluttonous meat hooks on that box, we’d both have died of starvation. No sense in that.
Furthermore, he had been a hunter--trust me, he probably told a dozen such stories--and it had been five days since he’d killed anything. He told me the animals must have grown aware of us and decided to avoid the area. I suggested he travel farther the next time, but I don’t know that he ever really did.
The hunger struck me once more, louder than before. That’s how I knew for certain it was time. It wasn’t a pretty notion, but I was growing exceedingly weary of crackers and peanut butter, and after all it would be easier to salvage him than bury him. I wondered suddenly if he had already begun envisioning me as a nutritional source as well.
It didn’t matter. He was asleep, so I had the upper hand. But if he hadn’t been I’d still have had the advantage, I reasoned; he hadn’t had as much food as I’d had in the past several days, frequently went on daylong hunts, and even when sedentary a man his size would have necessitated nearly double my daily caloric intake. The way I saw it, I could have woken him up and tortured him a bit first, if I’d wanted to be completely cold hearted.
I quietly picked through a heap of burned metal until I found a favorable shard from the propeller. Serendipitous nature in all its deplorable majesty brought the thought to my mind, “I’ve managed to never come over to his personal area a single time, though he’s encroached mine every day.”
I thought it was a root when first I stepped on the crossbeam of the trap. I don’t know what I thought after that, as I went unconscious after falling into the pit he’d camouflaged with a lid of brush.
When I awoke, vines binding my body against a tree so that my feet could not touch ground, I couldn’t place the pain, oddly enough. But when I saw him chewing the last bit of meat from the bone, I became sharply lucid of the throbbing soreness where my right shoulder should have sat. I vomited impulsively, though I wish I’d not given him the satisfaction.
He turned and broke into some goddamned tirade. “I didn’t care that I was out hunting all day and you were here sitting on your ass. I didn’t care when I saw cracker crumbs all over your clothes. I didn’t even care when I followed your tracks and found your food stash.” Even on a full stomach he was as whiny as an infant crying for a teat. “All I wanted was someone to talk to. But I guess I’ll get over that.” He looked at me like I was the disgusting reprobate from BillyBobsville, then he amended. “… in time.” Then he chopped off my left arm.
God help me, I know it’s a compliment, but the lummox actually did a fair job of patching the nubs. I apparently never lost much blood as, even after three days of consuming only rain water, I am still alive and fairly well aware… for the moment.
It was good luck. All of it. I wouldn’t have had the courage to kill myself, but they’ll never find us. They probably aren’t even looking. But the sweetness of my victory has made this dying day so very delectable. He ranted again about his Neanderthalithic sentiments; fortune drained my consciousness enough that his words were nothing but a garbled bunch of noises pouring from his untutored tongue. Naturally, he continued talking as he harvested another serving from me.
The pain from him cutting off my lower leg, believe it or not, revitalized me. As if drawing together for one final march, my blood gathered in my brain and tuned in as he continued preaching, the flesh of my flame-broiled limbs puffing out his cheeks.
“Show some dignity,” I snarled with great effort. “Don’t talk with your mouth…” I couldn’t get the rest out, but I could tell from his expression, he’d heard the phrase. He leapt up, indignant, stung, and vacant of any response. And with the same glory typically reserved for the choirs of Heaven, he chortled abruptly. My eyelids grew heavy but I found the strength to peel them apart.
Harper panicked; otherwise he might have found a way to dislodge the meat from his trachea. Flailing about for answers or intervention, he tripped and landed in the same fire where he had just cooked, well, me.
It can’t be long now. His body is already smoldering and he never got around to tying off my leg. So, here I wait in the beautiful silence I have striven to achieve for so long, confident I've indeed escaped with a tremendous bargain in the exchange.
Perhaps the nicest thing I could say about Harper was that the foolish young bastard was simply an inherent bore and that there was little, or perhaps not a thing at all he could ever have done to better himself to such a degree that he might have become a passably desirable human being.
Before we began our excursion into this nameless jungle, Harper was a wet-behind-the-ears lab assistant. Apparently young Harper had paid his way through grad school as a farmhand. How very dignified of him.
How in the hell a bumpkin straight out of grad school had been placed on a mission like this, the type of mission for which even a scientist with my experience must spend thirty-odd years trying to earn a spot, I cannot tell you, but there he was. Maybe our mission’s backers thought we might do some farming if we discovered a new species in this forgotten place.
Sarcasm aside, the farmhand story was perfect; it fit him more snugly than his irritatingly white undershirt, which he had worn every day and washed in a stream every night, making it look at all times as if he’d just stumbled across the wreckage moments earlier. It was as if he believed that if he looked like everything was fine, he could feel like everything was, rather than accepting the facts.
The evidence it provided in support of my initial evaluation, when I first shook his hammy hand--that he was an out-of-place buffoon who could make a nice sacrifice if the jungle should demand--might have made the farmhand story more tolerable had it not been repeated more than five times in the three weeks we were together before I decided to kill him.
I don’t do myself justice there; I realized that I must kill him.
“Cold-hearted” is an imaginary characterization. It is but a term our society has applied to those we secretly envy most, those who need not bother with the trifling preordinations allotted by man’s fickle laws and non sequitur dogmas to remedy a particular set of circumstances. One finds quickly that desolation in the anonymity of the unforgiving wilderness offers freedom in many ways, not the least of which is the gift of a cold heart.
Harper’s incessant droning made me feel more alone than did the swirling orchestra of cackles and caws from the ominous night air. During one such concert, struggling to sleep after another hungry day, I came to my realization about Harper’s fate. The taunting, screeching calls of the darkness that night rapped my nerves like bullwhips, so that I might have gone mad had I not found the wherewithal to focus on my bane, and the elation of freeing myself from his nuisance. I hung from the thought like a lifesaver floating in a tempest of loathsome awareness. That, I realized was the issue: I could not help but be aware of him until he was dead, and that was his fault and no one else’s.
The day we crashed, he’d begged that I help him with CPR. He actually wanted to waste our precious little energy on attempting to resuscitate a man who’d been impaled with a branch; I think now that I hated him immediately. Even at the exact moment we realized the other two passengers were dead, I knew he was no one I cared to associate with, regardless of whether he was the only sentient being I would ever see again. I’d tried to shake him but he longed for association with a parasitic passion.
I sat up from my blanket of leaves that night and contemplated the execution of the task at hand. My stomach growled, offering its own angry call into the cacophony of night. I knew the time had come, there could be no hesitation.
He outweighed me by a great deal, so I would have to be careful not to wake him. He would certainly overpower me if I allowed it, but I would not. Brains over brawn, they say. My stomach grumbled again and the hunger pains drove me even stronger.
I blamed him for my hunger on several accounts. He was so massive that my only reasonable recourse upon discovering the emergency food supply in the jungle near the chopper was to bury it and keep it from him. He’d clearly not eaten responsibly back home; I wouldn’t trust him to learn the skill when my life depended on it. If I’d let him slap his gluttonous meat hooks on that box, we’d both have died of starvation. No sense in that.
Furthermore, he had been a hunter--trust me, he probably told a dozen such stories--and it had been five days since he’d killed anything. He told me the animals must have grown aware of us and decided to avoid the area. I suggested he travel farther the next time, but I don’t know that he ever really did.
The hunger struck me once more, louder than before. That’s how I knew for certain it was time. It wasn’t a pretty notion, but I was growing exceedingly weary of crackers and peanut butter, and after all it would be easier to salvage him than bury him. I wondered suddenly if he had already begun envisioning me as a nutritional source as well.
It didn’t matter. He was asleep, so I had the upper hand. But if he hadn’t been I’d still have had the advantage, I reasoned; he hadn’t had as much food as I’d had in the past several days, frequently went on daylong hunts, and even when sedentary a man his size would have necessitated nearly double my daily caloric intake. The way I saw it, I could have woken him up and tortured him a bit first, if I’d wanted to be completely cold hearted.
I quietly picked through a heap of burned metal until I found a favorable shard from the propeller. Serendipitous nature in all its deplorable majesty brought the thought to my mind, “I’ve managed to never come over to his personal area a single time, though he’s encroached mine every day.”
I thought it was a root when first I stepped on the crossbeam of the trap. I don’t know what I thought after that, as I went unconscious after falling into the pit he’d camouflaged with a lid of brush.
When I awoke, vines binding my body against a tree so that my feet could not touch ground, I couldn’t place the pain, oddly enough. But when I saw him chewing the last bit of meat from the bone, I became sharply lucid of the throbbing soreness where my right shoulder should have sat. I vomited impulsively, though I wish I’d not given him the satisfaction.
He turned and broke into some goddamned tirade. “I didn’t care that I was out hunting all day and you were here sitting on your ass. I didn’t care when I saw cracker crumbs all over your clothes. I didn’t even care when I followed your tracks and found your food stash.” Even on a full stomach he was as whiny as an infant crying for a teat. “All I wanted was someone to talk to. But I guess I’ll get over that.” He looked at me like I was the disgusting reprobate from BillyBobsville, then he amended. “… in time.” Then he chopped off my left arm.
God help me, I know it’s a compliment, but the lummox actually did a fair job of patching the nubs. I apparently never lost much blood as, even after three days of consuming only rain water, I am still alive and fairly well aware… for the moment.
It was good luck. All of it. I wouldn’t have had the courage to kill myself, but they’ll never find us. They probably aren’t even looking. But the sweetness of my victory has made this dying day so very delectable. He ranted again about his Neanderthalithic sentiments; fortune drained my consciousness enough that his words were nothing but a garbled bunch of noises pouring from his untutored tongue. Naturally, he continued talking as he harvested another serving from me.
The pain from him cutting off my lower leg, believe it or not, revitalized me. As if drawing together for one final march, my blood gathered in my brain and tuned in as he continued preaching, the flesh of my flame-broiled limbs puffing out his cheeks.
“Show some dignity,” I snarled with great effort. “Don’t talk with your mouth…” I couldn’t get the rest out, but I could tell from his expression, he’d heard the phrase. He leapt up, indignant, stung, and vacant of any response. And with the same glory typically reserved for the choirs of Heaven, he chortled abruptly. My eyelids grew heavy but I found the strength to peel them apart.
Harper panicked; otherwise he might have found a way to dislodge the meat from his trachea. Flailing about for answers or intervention, he tripped and landed in the same fire where he had just cooked, well, me.
It can’t be long now. His body is already smoldering and he never got around to tying off my leg. So, here I wait in the beautiful silence I have striven to achieve for so long, confident I've indeed escaped with a tremendous bargain in the exchange.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
And Sin No More
“Forgive me Father, for I have sinned.” The man sat across from me his arms on his knees and head dropped so that I could see the barest spot of his head like a bulls’ eye.
Eight years since his last Confession--I rolled that nugget around, testing it in the flame of my mind, and finally decided, there was promise here.
An affair some time back, impure thoughts of course, lying, stealing, and then he started to cry, but only for a moment.
“It’s like… like a doctor, right,” he collected himself, “you can’t repeat this?”
I smiled and suggested he come to the font with me, that the church was empty and perhaps the sensation of the water washing over him would serve as a catalyst in seeking true, penitent reconciliation.
I could see he was scared and so I said, “You’re not the only one who makes mistakes, there is always a second chance.”
“I killed a girl,” he sobbed, “six years ago.”
“Shhh,” I comforted him and helped him to the water, “I know, I know, now shhhh.” His nose touched the water and I said, “But you forgot her boyfriend, huh, dipshit?”
Eight years since his last Confession--I rolled that nugget around, testing it in the flame of my mind, and finally decided, there was promise here.
An affair some time back, impure thoughts of course, lying, stealing, and then he started to cry, but only for a moment.
“It’s like… like a doctor, right,” he collected himself, “you can’t repeat this?”
I smiled and suggested he come to the font with me, that the church was empty and perhaps the sensation of the water washing over him would serve as a catalyst in seeking true, penitent reconciliation.
I could see he was scared and so I said, “You’re not the only one who makes mistakes, there is always a second chance.”
“I killed a girl,” he sobbed, “six years ago.”
“Shhh,” I comforted him and helped him to the water, “I know, I know, now shhhh.” His nose touched the water and I said, “But you forgot her boyfriend, huh, dipshit?”
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