yup, i’ll admit, dialogue has always been an issue for me. i’m a very introverted person and i’m sure you can tell from reading this that im much better at dealing with intrapersonal experience rather than interpersonal. i tried to focus on my strengths and i went about this with a ‘less is more’ attitude towards dialogue. since a lot of this was reconstructed out of personal experience, i tried to recollect what people actually said (years ago) because i felt it would be more true to the characters i was building based on real life people. in other words even at the time i heard those words spoken i felt like there was some sort of mystery, some sort of infused meaning that i might never be able to place that somehow contributed to the invisible fabric of the plight we all shared. it really brought to light internal characteristics of these people that i think in the end adds realism to the dialogue. the one thing i find most unique about this is that thinking over these events lead me to realize why people said or did the things they did though i didn’t understand it at the time. indeed, part of the reason i handled it this way was because i was going through psychoanalysis and this was my way of sorting through my past and getting a better sense of who i am. for this reason i felt it would be good for other people to read as well, though i doubt anyone could possibly enjoy reading it as much as i enjoyed writing it. i thought the weakness of the dialogue was humorous in so many places, because the crescendo of emotion would end in some anticlimactic under-statement (pun intended) which although accidental, reveals the limitations of language as a means of emotional expression and my own personal frustration at finding the words to explain how i feel. the thing that irked me the most about my dialogues was that often times, when i found it difficult to word things i would wax poetic as if to make up for words themselves with an embellishment of the way i felt when i spoke them. its kind of awkward, but i think it serves the purpose. also… yes, i did mean to say middle-middle age. i tend to put in a lot of things that attract attention because they look like typos, sometimes because it adds meaning, sometimes because cheap puns make me laugh and other times just cos i like the way it sounds :P. its my way of trying to get the reader to loosen up, to use their imagination, to find a sense of grace in dealing with things that appear to be flaws until you look at them in a new light. if it weren’t for this sense of playful irony i wouldn’t have been able to cope with the cynicism, skepticism, depression and outright insanity that i’m still being ‘treated’ for to this day. that’s the essence of black comedy. another thing i’ve noticed is that this odd form of third-person omniscient has some interesting side effects. alot of these tense shifts indicate the prosaic equivalent of an ‘aside’ in drama where the narrator (who simulaneously is the character) directly addresses the reader with side notes and extra-personal observations after the fact. for instance, the part where the character was ‘witnessing’ the robbery was actually the narrator observing from third person himself committing the robbery : P. in this way, what would appear in a newspaper tabloid to be a malicious and selfish attempt to commit an injustice was revealed to be nothing more than someone trying to lay claim to his own freedom, to jump the tracks he felt were laid before him by society and in the process to make a spectacle of his own predicament in order to lay himself open to the judgements of others. it was a desperate attempt to fortify his amour de soi at the expense of his amour de propre. the narrator at this point speaks through the voice of the mentioned ‘super-sentient jokester’ who, from the safety of his removal from the situation dares the character to do things he ordinarily would never even consider. as far as run-on sentences go, i think it’s a direct result of my childhood appreciation of ‘alexander and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day’ and later of jack kerouac. grammar be sacrificed on the altar of flow and effect!! i’ll have to look back to page 14… i dont really remember what i wrote there. at any rate, this comment is looking like a story in and of itself and i really need to shut my mouth before i fall victim to the dreaded text limit, but before i do i want to thank you for your review. everything you’ve said has helped me to re-evaluate my work and weigh the consequences of some of the weird devices that i’ve used. im glad that you enjoyed it, but it kind of bums me out that you only read about half of the first section. i guess i have a tendency to anticipate being overlooked but now that i’ve been getting more reviews, i’m beginning to realize that i need to stop being lazy, reread this for the umpteenth time and repost in more palateable segments. i’ll get to that soon. thanx again!
Short Story / the eldest son
The Eldest Son By Charlie W. Emrich Presently, pebbles popped off between the pressure of the rubber tires and the pavement and bounced haphazard across the parking lot as the scarab green automobile wheeled snugly between two shining yellow slashes in the pavement. The four wings folded open from its sides and the family filed out with their blankets, bottled water, books, towels and sunscreen. Father and son gripped the cooler and lugged it to a picnic table where they laid out sandwich stuff. Everyone began to eat and talk and laugh except for the boy who lit a cigarette and sat in the shade in the grass. It was long since he had quit hiding his habits, plus, he thought, “Some secrets aren’t worth keeping.” They didn’t notice too much. Soon, he would join them at the table and talk and laugh like he used to, and he did, but it was not like it used to be. They noticed, he noticed, but they were a family and he was a part of it. They would tell stories to fill in the space where the memories used to be. Sister coughed overtly. “Ugh, you smell like smoke” she complained. “That’s because I just smoked a cigarette” was his reply. There was a cool, fragrant breeze radiating from the palisades of contented palmettos and the whole place was saturated in the buttery afternoon sun. The family thumped down the petrified boardwalk as stiff blades of beachgrass swayed slightly back and forth on both sides. Their bare feet sank and squeaked in the snowy sand which blazed like plaster against the horizon like a Grecian relief, depicting the exploits of fat grey men in sunglasses and hot pink tank tops and their be-visored freckled wives in one-piece bathing suits languishing in umbrella shade as thousands of children exulted in the summer heat, milled about in the sea foam and like sand fleas dug in the clay with their hands and feet under the moist freshly frescoed clouds. The family padded down to where the grains stuck together firm, like unhardened mortar and laid down their blankets and cooler and towels and set about dabbing sunscreen on one another’s skin. It felt like there was some stranger standing behind you and their ice-cream cone was dribbling down the back of your neck. The eldest son didn’t like the feeling of the slime and grit. When he tanned, he did so by exposure. His skin was resilient and would toast to a sensitive red like a well done marshmallow and a few days later cool into an ivory-olive hue. This time, he opted instead for his favorite navy blue cotton knit hooded sweater. It was thin and porous, suitable for warm or cool weather and the hood would flex loosely over his scalp making him look like a relic of the gypsy Arabian magi. He also wore a floppy, faded green soldier cap that had a vertical slit on each side so it would still fit even though it had shrunk in the wash. His brother and sister tore off like torpedoes into the ocean, scattering gulls like feathery ten-pins as their feet slapped against the gleaming earth. He stripped himself of all this and sprinted after them with equal zeal, each step sinking deeper and deeper into the oily ocean until he was suspended fully in the giggling arms of a concourse of nereids pushing and pullulating hand in hand in a frothing powwow. Sister and brother smiled and squealed to see him stomping and swimming towards them. Brother splashed brother and brother hoisted sister high above the waves. After a short time, he left his siblings to play and rejoined his mother and father on the gritty beach blanket. As he drew his rough sweater over his bare shoulders, he glanced expressionlessly at the coarse hair that crept from his father’s chest to his spine. When he was very young, he thought nothing of this, but as he grew up, he realized that in the ten commandments of social aesthetics, this genetic sin was as deadly as murder. He became conscious of a malady that was latent in his DNA to blot out his youthful innocence. It already had even before it took effect. Could it have been any other way? What if his parents had married elsewhere? His current two halves would be contained in different wholes, and so even now, he was only one possibility of a limitless variety, surrounded by shuffled up shards of the hands he could’ve been dealt. He had mystical inclinations ever since he was taught the Revelation and he could swear that there were angels and devils crashing around in the rafters while he was lying alone on dark, virulent nights. The devils would almost always win, though it was exhilarating to think that his efforts would sometimes give an angel the upper hand in the battle for his soul. He would fall on his knees and bitterly beg forgiveness. His body was dead to him except for one weakness. He wanted so badly to love someone. If he felt ugly, he would never be able to take off his clothes. If she liked this trait, it would make him uncomfortable. The clock was ticking. The day would come any time when he was hideous and lonely. Not for anything that was bad in and of itself, but only in the eye of the beholder. He could never countenance the idea of kissing a girl that he couldn’t forgive of her faults, but accepting this from someone else was another matter entirely. He misunderstood himself from someone else’s point of view. “They have lasers now,” he thought, “but at what point do you stop? You might as well purge yourself of skin and muscle and blood and bone and be an invisible ghost with no body to call a home.” This was a maxim: all good things on earth are only there long enough for you to get to love them before they are cruelly wrenched from your feeble fingers. If this was true, what was left? Nothing but an everlasting vague sense of loss and regret with nothing of what was lost and what was regretted. There had to be something else. There was nothing else to do but look for it. Since then, every so often a smile would glance across his face like a wayward shred of sunlight through the grasping shadows of trees. He folded his legs beneath him and quietly read Dante with his headphones lulling in his ears. Mother dusted off the luminous white over-shirt she wore over her florid two-piece and said that she and father were going for a walk. He waved his hand goodbye and leaned over on the blanket, pulled his cap over his eyes and as he was slipping off into a dream he was a single thin ribbony ripple rising up the arching back of a breaking wave.
The forest green Mazda minivan slowly climbed along the dusty park road bisecting the marshlands towards the beach like a beetle crawling cautiously up a thin branch suspended in thinner air. Inside the steel and glass exoskeleton of the vehicle were a father and mother, an older son and younger twins, brother and sister. The father was encroaching on middle-middle age and he was good natured, though he had a simplicity that bore some semblance to naivety. This would account for his felicity, but the way he clenched the steering wheel and delicately balanced the endless succession of pennies in the checkbook caused a small, barely perceptible bald spot the size of a quarter to appear periodically on the crown of his head, and then once again lose itself in the meticulously groomed salt and peppered hair. Christian pop radio was playing unobtrusively in the background as he related a story about how they used to be able to wade out into the coastal marshes and pluck crusty oysters straight from the brine, ready to eat with a little Texas Pete. The water was too polluted now, and on one occasion, the fathers’ father contracted food poisoning and was laid up for two days in a hospital bed, all red and swollen like a puffer fish. Mother used to come here often as a child, before they had paved roads, Malibu Barbie beach houses and a visitors center. She grew up on a farm in Spoonesville and she and her brother would draw Woody Woodpecker and Roadrunner in the blonde country driveway. She wanted to draw for Walt Disney when she grew up, but instead she met her husband in college, got married, had kids. She, like her husband, developed a soft smile and a sweet sigh and they thanked the good Lord for their house, their spaghetti and banana pudding, the two cars in the driveway, their television, and the children whom they loved. The younger ones were bouncing around in the two middle seats, jabbing and jawing as if after thirteen years they were still learning how to use their mouths. They were two peas in a pod, though they had long left the pod, and although the boy was more sociable in school and in town, the girl was only a chatterbox with her brother around. The eldest brother and son lounged silently in the back seat with his headphones on. He was not excited to be at the beach, but he consented to the will of the wind and wheels. During the last few years after his mysterious disappearance from a small rural town in New England, he had grown sullen and schizothymic. His friends wondered if he was running from the CIA and made bets as to when he would return. Three years later when visiting his hometown, he saw a kid at the Country Grocer who said he won twenty bucks. He was two weeks off. He hovered in the stiff wooden seats of the ancient opera house balcony as his former class filed forward in their gowns and tassels and mortarboards and received their diplomas. A silence and a vacuum formed where his name and he would’ve been but he was the only one who noticed. The days had long past when he would ride his bike into the pond or do karate kicks by the arcade in the mall. He had burned down into a single livid coal. Since he had dropped out of college he had an implacable serenity which made everyone else uncomfortable. He no longer saw the world or the people around him, only lurid slides projected on the opposite wall of a dark room. People would often say that he looked old or young for his age. The contours of his face and his lithe Mediterranean curls made him look younger than his years, but there was something in a glance, in a movement, the way he held a cigarette like a needle and thread, a placid intensity and existential nonchalance that lent him a leniency by custom reserved only for small children or the elderly. Floating by the shoulder of the van was a silhouetted shape of an alligator on a quadrangular yellow sign. Mother chimed gleefully, “look out the window and see if you see an alligator!” They leaned and pointed and groaned at the logs. Turning toward the cool glass pane the road itself was horned on either side like the calcified back of a primordial reptile, slithering imminently through the hot Carolina mud. Its tail tapered off indeterminately somewhere off in the sweaty rearview mirror.
‘We were all standing moveless and intent Upon his notes, when lo! The just old man, Crying: “What is this, ye spirits indolent? What negligence is this? What ill-timed rest? Run to the mountain, and cast off the slough Which lets not God to you be manifest.” As, when gathering wheat or darnel seed, Quiet, without display of wonted pride, A flock of doves assembled at its feed, If aught appears at which they take affright, All, overmastered by the greater care, Abandoning their food, take sudden flight- So I beheld that band there newly found Desert the song, and toward the hillside scurry, As one who goes, yet knows not whither bound. Nor in our leaving was there less of hurry.’
In what seemed a moments time, the dazzling sunlight meandered around the drab brim and threw open the shuttered eyes to the mercy of a light so much brighter than the pupils could contain that it sizzled in the brain like the infrared beam reading the rainbow foil in the blue compact disc playing machine. He sat up, a bit startled at his own lack of consciousness. Was it a minute? An hour? His parents hadn’t come back yet and his brother and sister were playing in the sand. He strode up next to them suddenly and said ‘I’m going for a walk.’ He slipped on his leather sandals, turned up Belle and Sebastian and looked around with a strange new curiosity as he plodded away. The film reels were rolling by in golden panorama. While he was admiring the scintillating froth leaping into the air and hanging there for one instant particularly longer than the rest; as if it were trying to catch its breath before melding into the depths once again, he hears a chorus of seabirds as they skip along crazily grazing their feathery fins against the current of the rarified tide stealing away to places far beyond the glossy blue plane. There is a rhythm here that is not set by the beat of the headphones cuffed around his neck, but the dune grass is painted with canny xylophone tones, the shadows electric guitar and the voices of children creak in the thorny branches that reach their stony fingers round to scoop up every grain of sand that makes a beach, every droplet that makes a sea and every scuttling crab in between, fiddling in a pore in the flesh of the earth. Every wrinkle that makes the slightest sound builds in force and in one tremendous roar thunders down at once upon one common, eager shore. A cigarette crackled as the weeds received the flame and he thrust his heels as if counting beats, in the fourth and eighth shells of the feet of the young and old that gaggled along this way before him, as if they were famous traces of the stars on Hollywood boulevard, he looked straight ahead. The coastline formed a parabolic arc retreating inland and then swerving into the point of a scythe, a pier, plunging to where the earth and sky collide. The sandal straps pinched his toes and his trunks were too big so he had to pull them up as they started to slide since they didn’t have a string. The others wouldn’t be ready to go for quite a while yet and he was in the mood to go exploring. He chugged along like a train leaving puffs of vanishing vapor in his wake. It appeared as though the pier stood firmly in its place, only more ground sprouted to fill the space of every step he takes. Beach houses cropped up on the inland side, pastel jewels moulded in stucco and driftwood. Skeletal slats painted like sharks and crabs clacked out a tattoo against a wall and he, the last dutiful trooper of a traitor brigade marched on. The sun blushed faintly in the sky. She had just drunk her last glass of dinner wine and was heading home to bed. He trotted along lightly. The sandals contorted, feverishly resisting the pressure of his footsteps, and finally refused to go any further. In short order he was out of breath. His toes were blistering and his ankles crackled. He removed the griping sandals and as they dangled from one hand, he kept the other in his pocket as if clutching one precious final secret though he was actually only trying to keep his trousers from falling down round his knees. As he waded out into the shallows, water skirted over his ankles like fire across a pool of gasoline. It scorched the grime from his calves and he felt clean. The sand beneath his eyes slid by like icy smooth veined marble. He stared as if in a daze until he heard a sharp ping and started up sharply to see a blue ball bounding to escape a game of monkey-in-the-middle, panicking towards the undertow. He jogged over to intercept the renegade toy and shocked it deftly back to the monkey. He slid on his rough sandals once more. Looking off far away he mused, “I wonder what’s over there? Probably nothing, but there’s always something anywhere.” It wouldn’t be the way he expected, but he expected this. Fistfuls of rose petals sank in the sapphire sphere as though cast onto the skin of a lake. Two thin overlapping lines had been sliced into the horizon where it was exposed just above the pier by the hot sharp tails of two cruel jet-planes. “Maybe she will be there.” The thought drifted idly through his mind. ‘She’ was always in places you wouldn’t expect to find her. There was always a chance she could be around every corner. He saw her in the faces of people he had never met and glowered when at a second glace they were not who he would’ve wanted them to be. She appeared to him out of nowhere; from the deep, secret depths of his imagination or the repository for the vague memories of past lives and then shortly thereafter vaporized back into the jumbled up and tangled fabric from whence she came. Since then, he had been trying to bring her back. Years ago, when he was working in a small department store, sorting through all the junk that was always overstocked he had several bags of broken stuff he heaved over his shoulder and hauled to the back like a decrepit young Santa Claus. He walked out into the sunlight where the woods rose up and retreated from the last battalion of the onslaught of stubborn pavement and dragged the bags down the concrete steps to the flaky green dumpster. As he was stretching out the plastic knot, something flashed over his shoulder in a muted shout for his attention. He turned and rummaged through the debris and found a beautiful shining glass rose. The stem had been broken, (in this part of town, presumably for a crack pipe) and this was why it had to be thrown out. “What a waste!” He exclaimed, and shoved it in his pocket and kept it there with him as a secret treasure to draw out when no one was looking. A week or two later, he lost it. He told his father what he was looking for and asked him if he’d seen it. “No,” his father replied, “and if I had I would’ve thrown it out. Don’t you know you’re not allowed to keep damaged goods?” He wouldn’t let this happen again. He wondered sometimes if she was for real. He ran through the possibilities to the point where even his own reality carried more than a little doubt. It seemed so contrived, like some cosmic April fools joke in which he was the target. Was it intentional? Sometimes he thought perhaps they were all just unwitting conspirators in a joke conveniently used to hem him helplessly into the punch-line, the only difference between him and them and also the reason for this abuse being that he realized what was going on. Was he better off? Try as he might, he couldn’t change it. In fact, if there was some kind of super-sentient jokester all his efforts to be taken seriously would only serve for more yuks. Sometimes he himself couldn’t help but laugh. Like the time he donned his 3-D glasses and as ‘Sunday Morning’ hummed in his headphones attempted to relieve a local convenience store of a bottle of wine in plain sight, blowing a kiss off his middle finger into the video camera, and telling the young man at the counter, “I’ll take this.” “Ok…” he said. He clacked on the register a moment and when he looked up, the customer was gone. The jangle of bells between the resounding Alleluias on the radio roused him from his unbelief. Rushing out after the offender, the cashier called out as he walked down the street, “Where do you think you’re going?” “Prob’ly to the park” rejoined the matter-of-fact would-be robber. He didn’t get far because before long he relinquished the bottle to a hobo who wrestled him on the sidewalk and returned it to its former charge. They stood there shaking their heads. He felt like a fool. If he had been more determined he could’ve got away, but he wasn’t sure if he should’ve. He stood on the corner and stared up at the sun that flared red on the left, blue on the right. It was such repeated incidents that caused the dean to call him on the phone one afternoon. “We need to talk” she said. “I’m listening.” “No, I mean you need to come in to my office and speak with me. I’ll have my secretary set up an appointment and…” “Can’t I just swing by when I get a chance?” he interrupted. “I don’t do that. You’ll need to set up an appointment.” “I don’t do that.” There was silence on the telephone. “I’ll come in tomorrow around one.” When he arrived the next day, the dean tried to make it clear to him that there was a fine line between speaking freely and causing a disturbance. “Where exactly is that line? If you can show me where it is, I promise not to cross it.” She stammered an answer as vague as the line. What she did manage to articulate amounted to this ultimatum: We would like for you to stay here at our school, and so we will give you another chance. However, if you wish to stay, you must abide by our rules. “If I did harm to anyone, no one has, as yet, made any complaint against me. I have no alternative but to act according to what I have already determined to be most just and conducive to my own well being (though I am also taking others into account,) but all you can say is that someway, somehow, what I’m doing is against the rules without actually being able to tell me what those rules are. Seeing as how I cannot stay here and abide by conditions that I do not sufficiently understand, the only option left to me is that I have to leave.” It is difficult to trace the concatenation that led up to this decision, for the causes and effects seem to blend into a multitude of factors too minute to be recalled, much less recorded… and yet if there is one instance that dredged the most to light, it would have to be this: the night ‘she’ appeared. There was a high wind blustering above the flapping oak leaves in the dimly burnished purpling sky. It was the last weekend of October, and wild-eyed collegians teemed out into the cobblestone streets of the city, thirsty for high times and boozy locales, eager to make memories they wouldn’t remember in the morning. He was no longer in Halloween garb, though as was his custom what he had on would pass for a costume. He clomped all night, carousing kitschy bars and raucous keggers, gliding in his wing-tip shoes and by and by breezily weaved his way down to the square. A cigarette holder clenched between his teeth wreathed the evil harvest moon that formed on his face as he beheld a scene worthy of Hieronymus Bosch. A disco ball whirled from above the music store on the corner spattering lucent shards across the street like shooting stars or a broken mirror. Snow white and the seven dwarves paraded down the sidewalk and all manner of demonic, mythical, and colorful creatures danced to the palpitating rhythm of scandalous music, leaped from the benches and sprawled in a sordid stupor in the shadowy grass, roaring like monsters from ‘Where the Wild Things Are.’ He hastened to swim with the mermaids in the fountain that boiled and foamed up to the knees and the hubcaps of passing cars like a witch’s cauldron, soaking the skin of the depraved debauchees. He recognized a cow that cruised up on a bicycle and the simian boy that trailed, elated in a solemn hood. He joined their train and trekked far throughout the crumbling brick, the thronging waste and the tangerine twilight. They lingered and laughed in a dingy apartment heaped with smoke and ash, bottlecaps, dirty dishes and broken guitar strings. Hunter Thompson typed on the television in the 1970’s beside a luminous window and a stained and tattered curtain. Suddenly, it was 2005. He didn’t know where he was, but he knew where he was going, and this no more than gonzo out the door. The road was still and empty, a ghost. The night itself was sound asleep. He was the last human being on earth that was still awake. The thought tickled him, the draft ruffled the edge of his trench coat and he slinked along merrily trailing the resounding echoes of the steps he had yet to take. Massive barked and gnarled shapes rustled uneasily in the penumbral bushes, antediluvian giants masquerading to evade the prying eyes of the onset of human civilization. He nodded discreetly as he drifted by to say don’t worry, he was one of them. Shades knocked their knees on vacant porch swings and abandoned alleys, clinking wind chimes frivolously. How strange and wonderful to be the solitary sentient refugee, a wispy witness to a mysterious world that noisy mortals seldom see, on the dark side of the moon. Something stirred across the street in his imagination. He suspected he felt the focus of eyes obscured somewhere in the gloom. Adjusting the brim of his then favorite cap (they came and then they went) he whisked along his way. Suddenly he heard a disembodied voice call out and bounce off into the innumerable deserted corridors and catacombs. He looked around here and there but seeing nothing thought the trickster was boxing him on the ears. All doubts were soon dispelled when once again the voice rang out clear; ‘Hey, you!’ it said. ‘I need you to walk me home.’ He shifted to the side and saw a girl crashing through a hedge as she had just escaped the jaws of a tall, pale pillared house. She rushed in her stockings across the road, her high heeled shoes hanging from her hand, the other she boldly looped round his arm. She explained that she had twisted her ankle (doing the Charleston shuffle it could be, but no one danced the Charleston anymore.) He matched his loping stride to her puckish sprightly step. She looked up with lucid, painty turquoise eyes through supple tangled tresses like Spanish moss hanging down on the shoulders of magnolia branches. She blinked and parted a moist smile, averted her eyes and said… “Shit, I forgot my brooch.” They eased up to the nearest streetlamp and she gingerly strapped on her shoes. He looked at her curiously. She was wearing a mottled corset with a kaleidoscopic tincture like the variegated surface of a soap bubble and a frock that flowed over her thin, sandy neck like a river of raven feathers. He couldn’t tell if she was beautiful or not, but she buzzed like the invisible broken transistor in the lines and wires above his head. Judging from her outfit, he could have guessed what she was up to in that made up and powdered old house even if she hadn’t told him. She was canoodling some dude but didn’t like him and decided to leave, though she didn’t know the way. She seemed to pride herself on her shameless, sultry swagger and no one would complain. There was nothing to do but wander, and he had something of a policy to walk people home when in need. She reclaimed his side and they walked on, into the morphine lacquered evening. They talked and told their stories and meandered through the baroque veneer of a brilliant stream, the very air felt close and thick like a sticky watercolor swimming pool and they rippled along as the town was gilded and bejeweled with the rosy flush of dawn. She was a funny girl. He had to suppress a giggle just looking at her. She looked too small for her high heeled shoes, and he may have thought her lewd if she didn’t seem as though she had clothed herself in hand-me-downs from her mothers’ dressing room. It soon became apparent that he was as lost as she, but as they approached more peopled routes and the break of day, they got directions and soon reached the arching doorway and mosaic floor of the entrance of her dorm. Since it was so early or so late, she invited him up to get some sleep, and he only acquiesced since his soles were sore and his knees were weak and his bed was endless blocks beyond the remaining strength in his legs. She punched a code into the security device on the wall by the door which unlocked, permitting them to pass into a white tiled echo chamber with stairs that collapsed against the wall, regained themselves and doubled back to the second story. The two of them thundered up the stair-steps and around the corner into a narrow hall with a carpet floor. Her room was about halfway up on the left. She twisted a key and turned a knob and in they went. They passed through the common area and into her room where he slipped off his trench coat and deposited it heavily in the corner of the floor and sat out of place at the edge of the bed as she stood on the far end getting dressed. He saw her as she pulled on a shirt, blushed and turned his eyes to the carpet. She walked up in front of him and he removed his hat from his long dusky orangey hair that looked as if dyed crimson in streetlight. He tried to make conversation and shifted uneasily. She leaned in close and if he didn’t know better he would have thought she had struck him in the face with a cattle prod. The voltage of the first kiss of his life shocked him flat on his back, exposing his tingling stomach between his academic red sweater and blue jeans. Two more warm darts pierced his waist, enflaming his every nerve and vein. She flopped down beside him and they lay sweetly raveled in each others arms for some time. Soon she got up and brought in some beers. They imbibed heady, toxic, ethereal fumes and hung in the air like misty clouds. She spoke in rich, capricious, endearing tones and they swapped scar stories from their homes. He noticed some photos stuck to the wall behind the bed of her boyfriend who lived in a faraway town. Sensing his shame, she told him that she and her man were on the outs and since she seemed sincere, he didn’t feel so down. Suddenly, he was seized by unmistakable deja-vu and everything from the funky gorilla poster on the wall to the azaleas in the window seemed like fragments from a recurring dream. Her radio played strange yet familiar tunes and all things took on an uncanny hue. They were amphibians then who only just learned they could breathe air and walk on land and though they retained their physical shapes strange lights seemed to emanate from places unseen revealing traits reserved only for dreams. She reared up like a Naga, or Kali and untold manifold universes hung in her beads, her hair stretched out to lacy infinity. He imagined he was crumpled on his knees with his face interred in the recycled rug before a television screen that beamed indiscernible static of red, yellow, blue and green. It seemed obvious, unmistakably clear, “So, this is my girlfriend” he thought, but this wasn’t quite right, though this was as far as he dared. She was different than he had expected yet just as he’d known and remembered. Being itself and true love go hand in hand. He had a queer feeling as though he had traveled back in time, only to forget exactly what it was he meant to do. Here was the stage, they were the actors, but where were the lines? “Don’t get attached,” she muttered. He couldn’t tell whether she was speaking to him or herself. She curled up on her side like a seahorse, rapt in his reiterated frame, a woman held in a womb in a womb. Alarm pealed the morning in two. She stretched her arm and hit snooze. She had to meet her mom for breakfast but she still had some time. Presently there was a knock on the door, she urgently whispered, “Quick, hide!” He threw on his hat, coat and shoes and hid in the closet not knowing what to do. She told him to scratch his number on a scrap of paper and he complied. He waited, saw her signal and rushed out of the room, and stood before her mother who towered above him from half of his height. He exhaled in relief when she smiled, he introduced himself amiably; exeunt stage right. He slept through the morning, after the afternoon and into the night and when he awoke there were only the faintest traces of light. “What a dream” he reflected, unsure of where he had been and what he had seen. His roommate sat craning his roman nose toward a computer screen glowing on the vapid lenses over his eyes. ‘Did anyone call?’ “Nope. Were you expecting someone?” “Well… yeah. I met this girl last night and she said she would call me today.” “Well, nobody called and there are no voicemails. Why don’t you call her?” “I don’t have her number.” “Why don’t you look her up in the directory?” He paused for a moment. “I hadn’t thought of that!” and he eagerly cracked open the booklet… and froze. “I don’t know her last name!” Just then he looked down to the page he was on and saw beside his thumb, to his surprise, an entry with the peculiar spelling of her first name, uncommonly asymmetrical. The last name sounded right, but he wasn’t sure. But the dorm was correct, and she lived on the second floor! His elation fizzled to an ember. “What if she just didn’t want to talk to me? What if her mom got angry? What if her boyfriend was in town?” All these fears nearly paralyzed his will, but after several deep breaths… then several more, he punched the keys and held the bulky receiver to his ear. Rrrriiiiinnng… Rrrrriiiiinnng…Rrrriiiiinnng. As his breath rasped in his hand he thought that he could die. What would he say? “Hello?” said the voice on the phone. “… Um, hi, this is that guy that you met last night. I looked you up in the phone book and wanted to call.” “Ohh, don’t you know you left the wrong number? I’ve been trying to call you all day! Nobody leaves me a phony phone number.” She laughed a little. He said “Oh, sorry, I was kind of in a hurry” and asked “So, did your mom get mad or anything?” “Nah, she knows I’m a big girl and I can take care of myself. We didn’t end up going to breakfast though. I had a lot of stuff to do.” “Would you like to… hang out later on?” “I’d love to, but where should we go?” “I don’t know. We’ll figure it out.” For the next month, they saw each other quite frequently, their reflections slipping along the smooth display windows of downtown walking arm in arm or hand in hand under the stars and neon lights, to a coffee shop or a cabaret. He told her of all the nights he watched his own solitary phantom flit between the shapes on the crowded streets and he would pretend he was a ghost. They were very close, but there was always a certain tension, an uneasiness, as if there was always someone standing between them. Their words were hurried, and their laughter was followed by nervous backward glances. She said to him one night, “Hold out your hand.” She gently gripped his wrist and with the other, sparked a flint beneath his fingers. He jerked away a little bewildered. “I’m still human, you know. I feel pain.” She said “Trust me.” He gave her his hand once again, this time determined to leave it there even if she decided to melt it to the marrow. The lighter made one or two hesitant, rough scrapes, then several more, then vigorously scraping over and over again. The burning pain never came. "I'll destroy you." she whispered. "You're the only one who can."
She called him on the phone one night and they talked for over an hour. When he was about to hang up, the words “I love you” sent a joyful rattle through his whole frame. They sat in a Mexican restaurant one night, and when the man came to take their orders she conversed with him in Spanish. The boy could not speak so well but he could understand “No es mi novio.” She excused herself for a moment and walked to the ladies room. She returned in a minute or two and slumped down holding her stomach with a pained expression on her face. “Ugh. My stomach’s been killing me lately.” He couldn’t say anything since he didn’t want to tell her what to do and what not to do. After a while he said, “I don’t want to be just another face to you. Not just another name on the list.” “You want me to choose you above all the others?” As worthless as this question made him feel, he looked up with a steely stare. “Yes.” They made idle talk and looked at each other passively. “We can help each other up.” She said. He shook his head, “Every one must stand alone.” He reflected that neither one seemed quite right. “Do you like that painting over there?” “Heell yeah” she said. “I’ll steal it for you if you want me to.” They laughed out loud but they both knew that he was telling the truth. Days and days would go by when she wouldn’t answer her phone. He was teetering on the head of a pin. All the questions and doubts reeled relentlessly through his mind and he could never rest. He thought maybe she didn’t like him and didn’t want to see him anymore. On the rare occasions when they did get together, he would read her face and she seemed genuinely excited. Perhaps he wasn’t as despised as he supposed, and yet the tension grew and grew. He mightn’t have been so mono-manic if she had been fair and given him a “yes” or “no” rather than ambivalent slights and lures. He had never prepared for this sort of situation where so much was at stake. In this case, he had to lean ever towards hope. Sometimes her boyfriend would call when he was there. The muted voice would drone sharply and she would just nod her head. She told him that she thought her estranged partner was a good guy, but she wasn’t as attracted to him as she wished she had been. They were together for about three years and had discussed marriage in the past. He had dreadlocks and a beard and she wanted someone she could take to a fancy restaurant. The boy cringed. “If that’s what it means to be a boyfriend, I would rather just be whatever it is I am.” What a silly word. It means nothing; it was up to her to choose, but that was the one thing she would never do. He would often feel guilt ridden and miserable, but he had to assert himself because, as she would say, “I’m nobodies’ girl.” To love someone like her was to cast off the fetters of civilization, to plunge into constant war with your fellow man, in short, to become nobody. So he became an anarchist. He clenched his fists violently, sniffed powder in bathroom stalls, got drunk and slept in graveyards and in the shadows of forgotten monoliths that smeared beyond the dismal shingles of the ghetto. He could tell she wasn’t really happy with where she was and he wanted to be the one to change that, but she wouldn’t let him. “Maybe if I’m patient with her and give her time. Maybe if I wait long enough, maybe if I endure long enough…” meanwhile he grew gaunt and vicious, like a hungry wolf. He prowled the charred streets for days on end, his blackened eyes counted out the minutes and the hours. He didn’t go to school anymore except sometimes art or poetry but he always forgot his homework and he had no ear for verse. He would sit alone in the sun-dappled cistern beneath the wizened oaks and the rosy castled gateways. She would come ticking slowly along unexpectedly on her bicycle, park beside him and nudge him with her toe; he’d look up, smile tenderly and babble earnestly about things he couldn’t relate. He walked home from class one day and as he waited for the light to change, she came up whizzing easily on her bike in front of him, sighed as their eyes met, he waved and she remorsefully turned away and coasted on by and he shouted and ran up behind, his portfolio slapping against his shoulders and when he heaved up to the doorway she was already locked inside. Still, sometimes they would paint together up in her room. She lingered by the window in a chair, drawing a stickman on the knee of her jeans. He leaned up and deformed it with a stray smudge and smiled. She started to scratch it out but he wouldn’t let her. She drew a second one on the other leg. She had a nice one on one knee and an ugly one on the other knee and he wouldn’t have it any other way. She fiddled with a broken clothespin in the shape of a sundered man and woman. When he calmly took it from her hands to mend it and return it, it brought a sparkle to her clear blue eyes. She set up a still life on a table; he painted the patterns of the rug on the floor. He tried to demonstrate the idea of relativity by comparing the two tone shades she had made on either side of a line. When she looked at his, he said, “Just try to mess it up” and grinned. She’d smear it and try as she might, but the blue shone bright lapis lazuli just like before. “What I’ve been trying so hard for so long to explain, well, this is it. I want you. I need you. I miss you. I love you.” She was taken aback and stared with startled rounded eyes and thought a minute, then she said, “I love…” she fumbled for her boyfriends’ name but instead came “I can’t say I love him. I love you.” She looked like she couldn’t make up her mind whether to laugh or cry. She poured like a broken reservoir into his cradled arms and he held her like an orphan claimed. He sang ‘Don’t Go Home Angelina.’ By and by they emerged from the room, their smiling cheeks streaked in glistening blue. Early in the coming month, his birthday rolled around and a close friend of theirs threw a party at his house for the boy and other December-born. The hours rolled by slowly, and as she flitted like a hummingbird from room to room, he slouched against the fireplace and tried to hide his interest. The beer flowed and the smoke steamed and giddy voices shouted. Day blurred into late night and the boy was stymied and puking off the porch. She got him water, a blanket and a can and laid him on the couch, but as he saw her walking off, he hopped up, ran over and touched her arm and as she turned around he knelt down and gently took her tiny hand between his palms, kissing it reverently. As he pressed his forehead against her knuckles she squeezed firmly and he said, resolutely “I’ll wait for you. As long as it takes, forever if I have to. Just for a chance I’ll wait for you.” That being said he turned and headed back to the sofa and watched her walk into the light of the room down at the end of the hall, cordially held open by the host of the party, the boy and girls’ dear friend. The door closed behind them and he was alone in the nauseating blackness. His stomach turned. He heaved and coughed bitterly into his bucket until he was nothing but an empty hole and dozed off into a wretched slumber. She asked the boy to paint her a picture for a Christmas present and he aptly complied, but when her birthday rolled around, he planned a big surprise. He was the one who was stunned to be left in the lurch. Days and weeks went by and he spent all he had trying to forget. The first to go was around five grand he had in scholarship refund loans, next the television and calculator and the books from almost every class. The only peace he had was out of sight and out of mind. He would spend whole lazy afternoons on the luminous porch with his friend. He was a well-educated and clandestine young man with a laser wit and an evil, evil grin. He was like a closet pothead youth group leader who wore no watch but he’d always know what time it is. The house swayed salient in a metaphysical wind that danced along the mounting rooftops and blew in the discordant clang of church bells across the peeling road. They pinched pennies to nickel and dime and listened to occult music that seemed to stem from far away times as they drank a mix called ‘limes with orange’ because nothing rhymes with orange. The friend would spread a lithe grin as he scoured secrets from the internet, while the boy would stretch out on the bed beneath the US flag hung upside down, scrawled with an ardent ‘Apocalypse Now!’ He’d spit out lines from the Bhaghavad Gita or Siddhartha from off the top of his head petering out the instants mining for gems of enlightenment before he was dead. Fear city was an ever present reality that expanded far beyond the song. It manifested itself bodily in the frosty air and artificial light of the wintry southern town. A dying man wept poignantly in his headphones from beyond the grave. Every long fall, piked iron fence and errant car seemed to call his name. She became a slowly fading dream which stripped the people, winding roads, chilly shanties and courteous trees of all their former beauty. Nightmares stalked even the daylight hours and he was one as well. He was swallowed by a ubiquitous demiurge from which there was only one way to wake. He found true love and as it passed away every vein in the world was bled dry except those contained in his own tattered remains. There was nothing left he wanted. He was packing up his things and tying up a few of far too many loose ends, smoothing out the frayed edge of his remaining moments. She had told him that if he didn’t leave off the cool amphetamines she wouldn’t be his friend. It had been two weeks and he was snared again. That night, in a fit of self-directed rage, he locked himself in a hidden bathroom stall and split off the flimsy plastic from a razor blade. Listening quietly to be sure that no one was around, he braced himself for a long, slow, ripping sound. He stared at the spackled soft tile ceiling in a trance. Once again he held his breath as the cold point pressed firmly against the warm trembling flesh. He could feel the air enter into a gap that widened where something alive had been, but this time was different. His stomach dropped. He looked down and gasped to see that this fresh wound gaped far too deep. He cursed as he gripped the gushing grin and grabbed a t-shirt as molten crimson droplets formed on his finger-tips and dribbled on the frenetic glassy tiles shifting black to white and back again. He crashed out into an endless sea of grimy mirrors and a crowd of panic stricken teenage boys staggering ad-infinitum in all directions in a horrifying kaleidoscopic spiderweb of sweaty black t-shirts, pallid yellow wallpaper and grating lungs and lunged into the hall. Vertigo set in as he slipped into his vacant room and set about hissing to himself as he cleaned and bound his mangled limb. A tingle on his tongue like battery acid lingered for the remainder of the riotous month. Neon spirals swirled on the walls and responsible students ticked and tocked in skipping frames while washing machines stomped furiously from foot to iron foot in the musty, dingy basement, bawling like crashing jet planes careening through cobwebs hanging from mothball clouds. Something was happening that made the whole town teeter like a ship on the verge of a gigantic waterfall. The paths of people traced arcs and veering cracks into a porcelain vase. There was an old man doddering down the road with his name colorfully emblazoned on the back of his shirt, just in case he forgot. Vehement rains and otherworldly squalls pounded the hapless building block town. The plans all went to pot. Everyone was jaded and cynical. The boy was no doctor, but his diagnosis for this condition was a severe case of consumption and indigestion. Originality had become obsolete, so everything was easy except changing anyones' mind. He tried to do something drastic but all the kids had homework except him. So instead he walked to the park and sat by the fountain. The bridge was in the other direction. What was he doing here? No matter. “There is still water beside me, its not means I need, its courage. All I’d have to do is inhale and in a few minutes…” Just then an old homeless man sat down beside him that he didn’t recognize. They talked for a long time. He gave him his last few dollars for a bus out of town. Some fraternity brothers were giving a squat Mexican hobo a hard time and the boy took his part and they walked off. The little man was pleased with his new friend and invited him to drink. The boy counted the cracks in the sidewalk as they clomped up to the statue in the park which he climbed and where they sat drinking and breaking bottles long into the night. King Cobras were provided by el companero. The boy noticed a ghastly scar that tore from the man’s neck to his ribs. When asked about it, his new friend explained that long ago he had worked for the cartel and in order to escape he slit his own throat with a pocket-knife. His face grew taut and he made a jagged motion across his neck with his thumb and the boy thought that must’ve been exactly how he looked as his life streamed into a puddle at his feet. She misunderstood when he said she was his lucky charm. He only meant that if she was around nothing could go wrong. He knew he was a fool to go back on what he knew was true, that nothing worth having could be held on to, but he had to know for sure whether he was right or wrong. Everything was at stake to win or to lose. She was most precious of all things to him and he made sure to clarify, when she made an accusation of objectification “When I say ‘thing,’ I mean of everything, including human beings.” She said she knew, but there was something else. There was something else he knew she wanted to say. It made him bitter because he always held as a matter of principle that to ignore a problem doesn’t make it go away. He called her on the phone and left a voicemail: “You need to talk to me so we can straighten all this out. It’s doing harm to both of us. I’ll be downstairs in a few.” He had remembered she had said that once she hated her boyfriend for waiting outside the door for her, so this was the way it had to be done. He lingered on the sidewalk beneath her window and sent her a message saying he’d be waiting. Hours passed and he remained as the satin January dark wrapped its blue arms round his shoulders and turned his breath to steam. He dribbled a hackysack to keep warm and the beads crunched on his instep over and over again until it fell, splat, to the ground. He picked it back up, thinking this simple game the best ever invented. Another young man walked up beside him and leaned against the wall and soon entered into conversation. He was waiting to pick up his fiancée who lived in this dorm. The stranger told stories of how they had met and things they did. The boy asked him how he could be sure that he was doing the right thing. The stranger replied, “It wouldn’t feel quite right any other way. Sometimes you know something, but you don’t really know how you know it. You know, like deja-vu.” The boy was a bit taken aback that he phrased it in just such a way. The stranger continued, “Yeah, sometimes I’ll just walk into a room, look around for a minute, and know for sure exactly what’s gonna happen. When I get this feeling, I can call it most of the time, but if someone wasn’t actually there they usually think I’m crazy.” The boy explained how he arrived in this particular doorway at this particular time. The student was surprised. “Wow. You never actually hear about people doing stuff like that in real life. Is that all you’re wearing?” he asked indicating the boy’s gypsy sweater that drooped over a thin black and bright Sex Pistols t-shirt. “Well, yeah. I didn’t really plan to come out here but one thing leads to another, you know?” “It won’t do for you to be out here all night in some half-assed little sweater. Here, take this” and handed him the hooded jacket from his own back. “You sure?” “Yeah, yeah, no problem. I’m pretty well bundled up tonight, plus I’ve got another jacket in the car, so just take it… oh, and I’m glad I met you. Good luck.” He handed it over just as his fiancée creaked open the door, took his arm and they climbed into his car. Stretching out the sweater, it read in red on blue, ‘Eagles 25.’ He moved across the street and sat on a stoop. He was alone again, knitting his eyebrows, scribbling intently in his little notepad. Electricity was popping in the boughs of the telephone poles and pools of sickly azure incandescence scattered the inky stained shadows like rooks to the rooftops. Every minute was a frigid eternity. He counted them out by seconds and always stopped short of forty days and forty nights. His fingers were hard and brittle and splintered like icicles. Even the electric light seemed to take on a certain positive mass and solidity, and singed the bodies frozen within its boundaries with a dull, insensible fire that burned in the void like the valley of Golgotha. Somehow he must’ve unwittingly strayed into the Twilight Zone. Shadowy figures would amble by, to some he was invisible, others would have a word with him and he would trade a cigarette for a lighter, a lighter for a mouthful of beer and he would wonder if he could continue living here forever, letting the few little things he needed swim through his hands like a happy magic whale filtering plankton. He thought of the Buddha who after a long journey through suffering sat calmly content beneath a banyan tree and unfolded the thousand-petal lotus until all evil like a rain of dead scales fell away and he stood up, gazed in the eight-point compass and sculpted the world anew. Voices would whisper, “You could go home any time you like. There is a warm bed and soft sheets. It doesn’t matter. No one will know. She won’t come downstairs. You can slip through the entrance when somebody leaves and knock on her door. If she sees you here, she’ll only get scared.” He rejoined that he had as much right to the street as anyone and he had told her what to expect. He was in no rush to get back to his bed. As long as he lived in that room, the mattress had a fetid odor that seeped from deep in the fibers, like the guilty stench of a long-concealed corpse. His eyes were fixed on the second story window, searching for a motion, a light, some sign of life. Street sweepers, policemen and strangers with glaring and staring eyes would peek around the corner discreetly at intervals as if he were interfering in the plans of some nocturnal secret society in disguise. A station wagon screeched around the corner and hurtled towards him as if to run him down. A bottle flew out of the passenger window and clattered off the railings of a dilapidated old house. The boy braced himself and plugged his ears, anticipating a deafening blast from a loose Molotov cocktail. A colossal creature mounted, rumbling up the street like a mysterious train and disappeared around the corner to gorge itself noisily on mélange tin can remains. Every passing moment was torturous to body and mind. If he could feel his flesh it would be aching, his thoughts were mangled and his spirits had waned. Every semblance of purpose and identity had perished and he was left with nothing but wild eyes and fierce will. Absent minded and automatically, he flicked a piercing cherry into the palm of his open hand where it seethed and sizzled like a rusty iron blade until it was stifled deep under his skin and escaped as a thin, wriggling wrinkle of grey. The sun shattered the alabaster sky like a stone thrown though a dusty pane of condemned glass. He saw the bulb flicker on in the second story room, thought for a moment, gathered up his weathered bones and stumbled away across the disintegrating badlands like a man possessed. There was nobody left to prove nothing to. He was tired of trying to justify himself to people who didn’t have a clue. He glided like an apparition into the lobby of his dormitory and the girl at the desk was shaken by the ragged precipice and ashy eyes. “Can I see your ID, please?” she asked monotonously. He stood stark still and stared blankly deep into her eyes. She repeated again, firmly, “I need to see your ID.” He simply asked “Why?” Disconcerted, she reiterated, “I’m supposed to check everyone’s ID. It’s my job. You have to show it to me to come inside.” “Does a security camera have a job? Don’t you know who I am? I’ve lived here all year. No. I’m going upstairs.” He turned adamantly and stumped to the stairwell and swung open the door. She called after him futilely and a maid approached and said “Sir…” He jangled his room keys conspicuously without even turning his head and continued upstairs, stripped down and collapsed in his bed. In a few minutes came a rap at the door. When he didn’t answer, there came several more. His roommate got up and creaked it open, turned and said “The police are here to speak with you.” Emphatically, he leaped from his sheets and stood in the doorway, stark naked. “What do you want?” Trying to hide his astonishment with a professional mask, the proud leader of the three related his task. “We got a call from the girl downstairs saying that you…” “Yes, I came up to my room to go to sleep. It’s been a long night.” “We need to see your ID.” “Obviously, this is my room if I opened it with my own key.” “We need to see your ID.” “Is that all you people know how to say? Why do you need a plastic card when I’m standing right in front of you? If you insist, it’s by the window in my pants near my bed. You can go get it if you want to.” “We can’t do that.” “Why?” “You need to bring it to us.” “I’m telling you that you can. This is my room. If you want to see my ID you can get it yourself.” “We can’t do that.” “If you want to see my ID, that’s fine, but it’s not my prerogative. If you can’t speak sensibly, then this conversation is over and you can just fucking leave me alone. I’ve got better things to do than stand here and try to reason with a voluntary machine. Goodbye robo-cops 1, 2 and 3.” Slamming the door resolutely he walked back over and flopped wearily down on his bed. In a moment or two came another knock. His roommate answered again and quietly left the room. The RA and RHD entered and walked up to the edge of his bunk, where he sat up, blew a sigh and told them to pull up a chair. They began a rebuke, but when he answered, they quietly listened as he came to make his point. When he had spoke his final word all three sat in a substantial pensive silence. “You make a lot of sense, kid.” A pause… “But as long as you live here you have to abide by the rules. The dean will want to talk to you. I need you to fill out this report.” He took it in hand and after little more than two seconds flung it, exasperated, to the floor. “Haven’t you listened to one word I’ve said? What do all these forms have to do with anything? If there’s anything she wants to know, she can just ask me herself. I’m not trying to deceive anyone.” The RA tried to suppress a wry chuckle. “You know that girl downstairs?” “What about her?” “This was actually her first day.” “Oh. My mistake.” He informed his friends he was going home and went from place to place trying to gather up the breadcrumbs he had left behind. The last one was at the girl’s dormitory. She was going to just leave his things where he could find them, but she consented to his wish to see her one last time. He picked her up and swung her around awkwardly like he always did and hefted his portfolio and paint supplies. As his lips parted to speak she said “Shh. I hate to say goodbye.” “Maybe I’ll see you again.” Were the last words he said and waddled back downstairs. He stood at the entrance, and sent her a message that said simply, “Goodbye.” He hoped it would make her cry. After a somber ride home, he was an alien crash-landed in a suburban wasteland with no intelligent life to be found. Bare poles and insulated threads stitched a faded blue rag of a bed-sheet stretching the slapdash heavens over the oblivious heads of 4-wheeled automatons ranging on their cables. There was nothing in this town but strip mall churches, chain restaurants and divisions and subdivisions. He was delirious and inarticulate and didn’t want to speak to anyone. It was nothing personal, just that faces and voices were strident and unwelcome. Mother or father would find him weeping in the closet or peddling the paddleboat late at night, fixated on the stars and talking to the moon. He would close his eyes in a shivering smile as he lay in the wet grass in the trembling rain. He crooned and banged on a broken guitar he didn’t know how to play. For all he could see the colors, sounds and shapes were nothing but a painting pressed too close against his eyes on an ever-present but elusive canvas. He pressed on towards the edge of the page. He stared at the shape in the mirror for hours in a disembodied daze waiting for the image to distort or disengage, drift apart like Pangaea’s fractured continents. Successions of psychiatrists tried hard to fix his broken brains but to no avail. He had no mind to change. They were consolation for his parents and a preoccupation for lonely days. They were paid one hundred dollars per hour excluding the expenses of all the snake oil they sold them. He told mother and father, “You’re wasting your money.” The two-car garage had been sealed off with spray foam and made into a dim but comfortable room where he remained with his promise and his memories. He lost himself in dreams and mythology, and sent her letters obsessively. Sometimes he would gain a brief, scarcely sentence long reply but one must cut one’s coat according to one’s cloth, so he read the scanty words over and over again, like a message in a bottle or a rolled up note shoved through a chink in a jail-cell. He would tell her often that he loved her still, but she told him “I have a boyfriend. What do you want me to do?” He gagged as he read that vile word and replied “Break up with him. That’s no excuse. He may be good, but he’s no good for you. Don’t ever let anyone walk all over you.” He wanted to say, “Stay with me,” but thought better of it. He was garbage. “For now we’re better off alone.” He felt awful for thinking and saying such things. At night, he prayed for his friends and family and he prayed for death. For days and weeks he would begin the day by savagely beating himself just for waking up in the morning. He’d hurl his body repeatedly against the wall. When he was alone in the house, he would bellow and wail at the top of his lungs like some ferocious changeling until his voice grew coarse and he was utterly drained. By and by he’d wander into the back yard, slump down on the stoop, clumsily light a cigarette and rock back and forth dissolved in aimless degradation. “Freak… ffreak… freak… freak… f-freak… useless… worthless creep… sshit-bitch… fuck-tard… why can’t I just… how can I… what should… ruined… ruined… ruined… ruinssss… ruinssss… crushing… crushing… crushing… crushing… crushing… crussshhhing…” His voice would trail off as he continued rocking, clear tears raining from his cloudy grey eyes. Then he’d climb a tree, sit there for a while watching the birds dip and flutter back and forth and smell the pungent leaves, teeter for a moment and slide limply into the aromatic air, hovering for an instant divided into instants in the careless vertigo of golden pollen and thump suddenly face first into the dirt. It was all upside down. He would lay there motionless, expressionless and listen to the dust settle in his hair. The dogs would bark and sniff and lick his face and he would languidly rise up, not even bothering to brush the grainy sand from his forehead and his cheek. He’d stand there for a moment and climb back up the tree. She sent him a message saying she had done what he wanted her to. He wished she would have done it since it was the right thing to do, but he knew she knew it was. When he went out with his friends to sit around a bonfire in the country at night he’d
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This 90 word review has not been unlocked.
This seems well-written. Your descriptions are good.
However from the opening paragraph I wasn’t grabbed or excited. Nothing was happening. That’s why I didn’t carry on reading. A story generally begins at a break in the equilibrium- when normality is lost. By page 4 this hadn’t happened. That’s as far as I got.
You used the word “Schizothymic”- I had to go to dictionary.com to find out what this means. If you’d have delved into further detail on this from the opening sentence the story would have been more intriguing. But just slipping it into a sentence left me bemused.
”...’cicarette,’ was his reply.” (Insert comma.)
“He was 2 weeks off”- what does this mean?
“Visitors centre”- is there an apostrophe after the s? The centre as used by multiple visitors?
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This was a very descriptive piece. I love the use of your vivid terms when setting the scenes. The only thing I had an issue with was your lack of the characters engaging in dialouge.
On page 1, i dont know if you meant to put middle-middle age, but i thought i would address that
and the sentence beggining with This would account for his felicity-salt and peppered hair is a little long. May need a period inserted somewhere in the middle and begin anotehr sentence
the last sentence, got married had kids, can be got married and had kids
There are quite a number of run on sentences in the piece. Also on page 3, instead of sandwich stuff when describing they are at the picnic, you can sandwich or picnic items
The sentence of this page where it says It felt like there was some stranger standing behind you, is out of tense, maybe you can say It felt like there was some standing behind her or him
also dribbling down the back of your nick, may also be out of tense.
I absolutely love the last sentence of page 7 beginning with it sizzled in the brain like the infrared beam
On page 12 when he flashbacked to the being in the store and witnessing a would be robbery, good imagery is used
On page 14 did you mean dwarfs when saying Snow White and Seven Dwarfs or Dwarves, is plural so you might leave that like it is
On page 18 when the couple starts showing affection for one another, again great descriptive terms are used.
I absolutely that this piece was stellar, you have great descriptive skills when presenting a picture, very illustrative, just work on the dialogue of the piece to make it stronger.
I’m sorry that it took me so long to respond to your request, and that I couldn’t read the whole thing, but I just couldn’t concentrate. This is good, however I feel you use too many adjectives, and that tends to clutter the piece.
I also noticed that in Page 9, you tend to use a lot of “the”s. It’s hard, you but have to refrain from using the same sentence starter.
“Presently, pebbles popped off between the pressure of the rubber…”
You don’t really need the ‘presently’ part. Just starting the piece with ‘pebbles’ is fine.
“Their bare feet sank and squeaked in the snowy sand which blazed like plaster against the horizon like a Grecian relief, depicting the exploits of fat grey men in sunglasses and hot pink tank tops and their be-visored freckled wives in one-piece bathing suits languishing in umbrella shade as thousands of children exulted in the summer heat, milled about in the sea foam and like sand fleas dug in the clay with their hands and feet under the moist freshly frescoed clouds.”
Although you have used a comma, this is a run-on sentence.
“‘We were all standing moveless and intent Upon his notes, when lo!...”
What are you doing here? Is this part of the book, or just randomly thrown in?
“He was two weeks off. He hovered in the stiff wooden seats of the…” First we are talking about the boy in the grocery store.”
Now who are we talking about here? I know in the first sentence it was the boy at the grocery who had won twenty bucks, but now is the second sentence the main character?
I think that, near the middle and the end, you seemed to be more confident and stopped using so many run on sentences to describe things.
One of the reasons why I couldn’t finish the whole thing was because this piece is confusing, mainly because of breaks (enter key). If you don’t use a break, it gets hard to tell when you move from one thought to the next. Like for example, when the boy is reliving the memory. When does the memory end? It would be a good idea to switch from him looking at his surroundings to the memory he has.
This is a good piece. I think you’re main weaknesses are run on sentences, too many adjectives, using “the” and “he” as sentence starters, and not using breaks enough. You have a great gift of describing scenes and people, which is terrific because you really want your readers to paint a picture.
Good job.
I must say that your wording is sometimes over done, meaning you exhaust a description until the reader is lost. Some people love that, but the majority will not and will lay such writing aside as they do not have the desire to decipher. I am actually reminded of an author that centered his works on Africa that I really enjoyed. whose descriptive’s were like flowery poetry within the pages of his novels. I will leave him nameless as at the I can not recall it. Sorry about that.
There are several places where you need to correct a double grouping of words and likely your spell check did not pick them up because it is two or three words together. However the piece’s length and my time constraints here at lunch keep me from going back and copying the exact phrases for you. Best check the end of your sentences because I am sure it was at the end of a couple.
I find that for a short story this is rather lengthly and at times you wander and the reader is lost. Is this a condensed version of something even longer? It actually seems to ramble at points.
I enjoyed the read but think it could be much better and stronger should you choose to shorten it a bit. Or divide it into parts or chapters so that your reviewers here can complete it in a more timely manner. I guess the end is in the next section huh?
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