you mean you dont like to shove gerbils… j/k :)
Short Story / Rodents
Rodents
Most trees were bare. Naked. Fruitless. Their fallen, yellow leaves would have created an illusion of a golden blanket, spread out for the whole world to have a picnic, except that everything was gray and wet so instead they weaved a dirty, soaked rag that a stray dog wouldn’t even piss on. It was drizzling out, but the humidity was so high that the drops didn’t even bother falling to the ground and instead they just hung suspended in the air, floating, drifting along with the currents of the wind. Being outside felt like stepping into the bathroom just after someone finished taking a hot shower and all the moisture was still up in the air, except it was almost freezing.
My sneakers were already wet. Instead of resisting moisture – they absorbed it like two sponges, which were now dragging me down, making my toes go numb. What was really dragging me down however, was the burden of discontent that my emotional sneakers soaked up during these last few month. Every time I took a step my swollen sneakers squelched as the water in my socks squeezed in between my toes. Same thing happened to my emotional sneakers. I pulled a pack of Marlboros out of my jeans pocket, opened it, gave it a little pat on the bottom and grabbed a stogie with my lips. I took out a matchbook and tried lighting a match but it was no use, they were too damp. Nothing was going right that day. That autumn. That year.
I haven’t had a clue where I was going and I didn’t care as long as it wasn’t home. I just couldn’t stand to look at them, or even worse, to be seen. They were all probably sitting there in an unbearable silence with lights out. Darkness is wonderful for self-reflection. Did the fact that I had escaped their silence make me selfish? Walking through the cold, gray streets with my feet wet, did that make me an egotist? Probably… who knows? I tried not to think about it, not to think about what has happened. I knew for quite a while about what was happening, that it was unavoidable, and I had time to prepare for it, but it still came as a shock. These things always do. I was in denial all the time. I’m in denial still.
A gust of cold wind sent buckshot of raindrops flying in my face and I pulled my hat right down to my eyes. This was the advantage of being outside; distractions got your mind off of things. Not for long, that much is true, but just long enough to get a breath of fresh air and feel the oxygen being carried though your bloodstreams, rushing on its way to your brain to give you an illusion of being alive. A delusion. Being alive however, always made me want to smoke so I went toward the park benches to see if there were any other miserable idiots out in this weather whom I could bum a light from.
I went past the empty playground where I used to play as a little boy. I would come here in the morning with my grandparents and run around pretending I was a captain of a space shuttle. I miss that innocence. I miss my grandparents.
The playground consisted of contraptions made out of steel pipes that were colored blue; the stairs were wooden. There were a few of these contraptions: the one for bigger kids was taller and had the Bridge of Death connecting two high platforms, one of which had a steering wheel that I sat in front and flew the shuttle on very important missions, and a slide, which I would use to come down to strange planet surfaces and fight evil aliens, the other had a poll you can slide down, like at a fire station or a strip bar: other two were for smaller kids with a lot of foam and rubber protection so they wouldn’t hurt themselves as they crawled around like little rodents. I used to play there too when I was even younger, but I don’t have any recollection of that age anymore. What then seemed like a great, big world of infinite possibilities, turned out to be – This!
Now, with no one there, it looked like all the rodents got frightened of the rain and burrowed into their little holes. I wasn’t used to seeing this place like this: so uninhibited; so peaceful. I envied it.
Past the playground I turned right and walked behind the red concrete bleachers that faced the baseball field. As long as I can remember it always smelled like piss behind these bleachers. Thankfully once in a while a rain like this would come along and wash the smell out of the air but the water could not wash off the sins of the pissers any more than it could of Lady MacBeth’s hands.
After the bleachers I walked by the little white tables where at night people gathered to smoke weed and paint graffiti, but in the morning the tables would be white once again and I always wondered who would get tired of this game first, these “artists” or the park ranger, and to be quiet honest, I always thought that the park ranger’s “clean slate” paintings made a much more interesting artistic statement. From here, to get to the benches by Nineteenth Ave, I only had to pass the tennis courts, where our school would bring kids who took up the burden that is tennis in physical education classes. I had the pleasure of experiencing what that was like first hand. Now the courts were filled with puddles that reflected the grayness of the skies and memories of being wasted and trying to hold the tennis racket the right way. “Its like shaking hands,” sang the teacher’s voice in my ear, but the only thing I wanted to shake hands with was my penis, behind the red bleachers.
When I got to the benches, there was no one there besides Harry, but I gotta admit, if I was looking for a miserable idiot, I found him. Harry was a bum that always walked around with a shopping cart, his Portable Existence. In it, he kept all the things that were a necessity to life, like videotapes, shoeboxes, and a bicycle seat. He was wearing his old jacket, the one he always wore, with sewed on patches of the American flag, the air force and others that were too dirty to understand. I think he was in Vietnam.
“Hey Harry,” I always said hello to him. In case he’d ever go postal or got locked in one of those Vietnam flashbacks and started killing people, he’d remember that I was nice to him. He was in the middle of a conversation with himself, which was no surprise because he was always in the middle of a conversation with himself, so instead of interrupting him, I decided to just sit down, wait for a pause, and listen to what he was saying. It was both hard and easy at the same time because if you spoke with Harry before, you know that he’s always talking about the same things, pretty much just going round in circles, so you’d probably find a familiar topic and go from there. However, the way that the information was presented to you was very dissonant and amorphous, so a newbie would not be able to find his way around and would find him self stuck, like the gerbil in the infamous Richard Gere story. He didn’t understand what Richard was saying to him either.
“…Yea, can you imagine… I used to know him. They don care… yep, that’s life for you. They don want you here; they’ll brake you, yea…Charity starts at home right?” He kept his bluish, dirty fingers crossed together on his knees, looking down at them through his thick old glasses. He was soaking wet but his PE was covered with a black garbage bag, which was ripped on one side and unfolded in order to cover more area.
What was an eighteen year old, in his prime, doing sitting in the rain with an old bum? Now, I know what you’re thinking and no, it’s not that! It’s just that sometimes people need an escape, something that will take their little existence and put it in a different world where they can forget everything or exchange their burdens on watching those of others, like watching Nathan Lane trying so desperately to catch the mouse in “Mouse Hunt,” but being outsmarted by the little critter every time. This can be accomplished in many ways. Some choose the more placid approach called the “soap opera.” Some take the drug route. Some go insane or find God, which is the same thing. Yet others choose figure skating or tennis. All trying to find their way out of the dark place they are in, not realizing that they are all blind moles and light will only hurt them. That’s exactly what I was trying to do.
Harry paused.
“Say Harry, you got a light?”
“…A light? Hmm… Yea, I remember… Yea! That’s what you’re looking for. Can you imagine? Yea! Thirty minutes… That’s what he said to me. I’m a veteran… They don care. Smarter then any of them, I am… yea… I was trained to be a doctor… I know what’s going on. My friend Kon tells me, ‘you’re right… they don want you here, yea, they use you, then try to get rid of you and cover it up.’ Put the covers on and slip into a warm bed soaked with warm urine… like crawling back into mother’s vagina, into the uterus. I don need this…”
“Yea. They don understand that apples need to have worms, cause it lets you know… yea it does, it lets you know the apple ain’t poisoned with chemicals. There is nothing for me to do here. Nothing. Yep. I got nothing here… What do I have? To Europe… To London… They won’t do it here. They don care. They’ll break you, yea. They have the big one, two, three and let me tell you its tough… the numbers… yea. To sit quietly, pretending you’re an apple, a purple little sun… an infested American dream. To infiltrate the core of your own self, disguised as a person… no… as a PERSON! ” He was still sitting as before, looking down on his hands. Drops or rain rolled off his dirty fingernails and on to his dirty jeans but I still wanted to smoke.
“Harry… How about that light?”
“The light? Yea… I remember seeing it… yea. In Europe, you know, its one, two, and you’re done. But the courts… They take a long time…to process the papers, they do…. Oh, it hurts!” He bent forward and shut his eyes. He was obviously in pain. “Stones… Yea… I didn’t get to stop. That’s how you get em. You know? Stones? Yea… cab drivers… Yep, you are in a car all day and you can’t go to the bathroom. Just holding all of the yellow in. Yea… London. They got the lasers there in that Europe, in London. They could take em out in a second. There is nothing here anyway, right? Yea. Relatives let me dig the starts a little bit. But my car… ‘Thirty minutes’ he said could you believe that? Yea! Like a trolley left for ages with the butterflies in our stomachs, we fight like children… yea, like people…no! Like PEOPLE!” He sat up at that point and looked right at me instead of his hands. The lenses made his eyes look like chameleon’s, blinking at their own accord, one at a time, never together, as if he didn’t want to miss anything that was going to happen during that frame of a second.
Hey! Are you still listening to me? Ok…
“Yea! What did you think?” he asked me as if he could read me just by looking at me through those thick glasses. “Haha, yea! I know… I know… yea I was looking for the light once, yep. I was there in Ia Drang Valley that November of 65… Yea… we lost 79 people in those two days. Yep…and now? They don want me here. No sir. My friend was twony five years old… He told me he’d come back in thirty minutes… Yea, I’m still waiting. Yea, I tried looking for the light back then… and I found it… Yep, sure did. Sure as kidney stones.”
He now began to frighten me a bit. I found it very strange that he began talking about something that was on my mind. The light. The escape. I would never have figured that I have something in common with Harry. He somehow knew that I wasn’t just looking for a match or a lighter. That I was looking for something bigger, something that would make living all right again. I guess I was desperate enough to consider taking advice from him. I guess we are all looking for the same thing.
“Go on, Harry…” I said with uncertainty.
“Shhh.” Whispered Harry and put his index finger to his lips, signaling me to be quiet. I closed my mouth and listened. Harry smiled and shifted his eyes from me, on to his PE. All I heard at first was the wind smashing tiny droplets of rain against the black garbage bag that served as a cover. I heard my heart beat loudly with anticipation. I heard Harry’s quiet snickering, and then I heard something that sounded like scratching. I looked around to see where it was coming from, and my eyes stopped on the same thing Harry was looking at. “Aha!” He said and pointed his index finger up to the sky as if he just solved a really hard puzzle. He pulled his PE closer to the bench.
“The dark.” He said and stuck his hands under the plastic cover. All this time I still didn’t understand what was producing the scratching noise and what Harry was trying to say. In a moment, Harry pulled something out from under the garbage bag. It was one of the shoeboxes he kept in his PE. I’ve never seen one up close and only now noticed that it had holes in the cover. The scratching evidently was coming from the inside of the box.
“The light, you see…” He looked around and whispered, “Well…I saw it…” He paused and then continued, “Yea… and you know what I saw? Everyone crowding around it like little bugs, they were… Yea… and one by one, falling to the ground all burned up. I was scared… to watch it, yes sir… but I couldn’t look away… such are people…no… PEOPLE! Yea… The trick, you see, is to learn your way around, feel your way around it… enjoy it… Yea…To make the best of your time, you see…Instead of looking for a way out, try to find the way in, boy! In to your soul…through a shortcut… like the Chinese finger trap… yea… one must try a different approach, maybe… an unlikely guess…have you noticed how peaceful this park has become? Yea… just.”
And with those words, he slowly pulled the cover off the box. The box contained 6 little, furry gerbils, running around and scratching at the bottom. This was when I saw you for the first time. You were no more then a baby then, and I knew it had to be you the moment you looked up at me. You, with those black, warmth-filled eyes… You, with your soft, sand-colored fur… I felt that same bond with you that John Coffey must have had with Mr. Jingles… Remember we watched them together and we cried?
“Take your pick.” Harry said to me, and for the first time I knew exactly what he meant. I tried to grab you but you were the fastest one in the bunch and that just strengthened my decision. You seemed in a hurry. In a hurry to be with me? After I finally pulled you out of the box, Harry put the cover back on and slid the box back among others. I now knew why he was soaking wet while the plastic cover he made out of the garbage bag was covering the PE.
That was the last time I ever saw Harry. The last thing he ever said to me as he got up from that bench, and I’ll never forget it, was: “I’ll see you in thirty minutes…” He then started walking away into the mist, with his jacket becoming less and less visible and the squeaking of his PE getting more and more distant until it vanished completely. I held your little, warm body in my hands and knew that everything will be different from now on.
I know… I know… you heard this story a thousand times, but this was the day that changed my life, the day that brought us together.
Alright Dib, I can see you’re anxious so let me just get the cardboard tube… there we go… like this… Ohh!
Are you ready my little cosmonaut?
And in you go…
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Helplessromantic87 reviewed Version 1 -
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cdnsurfer reviewed Version 1 -
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Careful of them run-on sentences.
Be careful of that passive voice. Write with nouns and verbs instead of adjectives and adverbs. It makes the structure stronger and the writing more powerful. Avoid the passive “to be” verb in all its forms (i.e., is, was, were, had, been, etc.) as it stops the action, it invites generalizations and it distances the reader. Use concrete, specific language that elicits emotions and appeals to the senses.
I think you’ve an interesting story here that is waiting to be cleaned up. Once it is it’ll zip along! Thanks for sharing this piece with us. Good luck!
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ConnorMacleod reviewed Version 1 -
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LynnFollett reviewed Version 1 -
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September 26, 2006
Deleted User
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I thought this peice was very interesting. I liked how descriptive it was. The only bad thing for me, was that I didnt really connect to your main character. However, this could be just a personal thing. Thanks for sharing!
poeticLicense reviewed Version 1 -
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Holy cow, that was good. The content is awesome—I had no problem getting into the story whatsoever, and at the end I had the feeling I get when I’ve read something that’s going to stick with me.
From the technical standpoint, there are some issues with verb tense (switching between past and present) and placement; I could go into specifics, but that would take a while, so if you’re interested feel free to contact me. I’d just go through and read it carefully for grammar things so you can polish it up. I think the potential for this piece is outstanding, so definitely take your time honing it.
Well done, seriously, though. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
September 26, 2006
Deleted User
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The dialog with Harry (or just Harry)is real. You nailed it. I don’t know if others will recognize this, unless they have been around a person with Harry’s mental problems. The story keep my attention, confusing, yet so simple. A lot of vivid imagery. Your very talented. The only critique I can give maybe a spelling error, but I can’t find it now. sorry.
funkycatfish369 reviewed Version 1 -
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Wow, this is cool. I like this a lot… especially the ending with the gerbil. Lol. It seems that the smallest things can make a difference. It’s cool how the narrator was looking for the meaning of life… but I’m not sure how the gerbil was it…
Floridagal reviewed Version 1 -
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I liked the story up until the end, all I could say was OMG that’s not right and giggle…....
fourtwenz reviewed Version 1 -
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instead they weaved a dirty, soaked rag that a stray dog wouldn’t even piss on..that needs repair imo
the ending confused me a bit but the entire story read well
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