Flash Fiction (New York City)

Customer Service

“Sir, like I said before: you have violated the terms of agreement. Your contract will be terminated and we are forced to send this matter to collection if you choose not to pay the $450 that you owe us. It really is that simple.”

Nothing was ever that simple. The system had screwed him one last time and this time, he wasn’t going to take it.

“Listen you. What’s your name again? Melinda. Fine. Listen one last time. I asked you a simple question: how is it that if my phone is stolen while I am on vacation and someone runs up the minutes by making international calls in the 48 hours that I had no way of contacting you, I can not only have my contract canceled but you can immediately jump to sending me to collections? Where is the logic in this scenario?”

He could hear Melinda breathing heavily on the other end of the phone, each breath strained as if it were her last. He imagined an overweight white woman in polka-dotted spandex, Velcro New Balances, permed blond hair, squatting in a gray, musty cube, its walls covered with pictures of her little Chihuahua, an old pink shirt with finger-sized holes on the ends, and a pervasive smell of mothballs and leftover Chinese food.

“Sir, I don’t know the logic you are referring to but what I do know is I don’t appreciate your tone. I work long hours behind a desk taking a number of calls from individuals such as yourself with differing sad stories. I am not immune to your suffering but I will say that I have heard it all before and that’s the truth.”

He felt the anger boil up inside again, thought of the cabbie earlier in the week that drove him across town to a meeting he was already late to and then explained to him that in order to pay, he needed to call in his card number to the dispatcher who didn’t pick up the phone for another 15 minutes. He had utilized a service and he was being made later through attempting to pay for the service. Everything about the situation was ass-backwards and it was infuriating.

“Melinda, look. I take no beef with you.” She grunts into the phone in disbelief. “What I have a problem with is this fucked up system where I, a paying, long-time customer, am being punished for calls I did not make, from places I did not visit, from a phone I no longer had in my possession. It makes no sense whatsoever and to top it all off, from the beginning you have treated me like I was a criminal and threatened to send me to collections. On what grounds?”

He hears the squeaking of her chair over the receiver. He imagines her leaning forward now, bracing her engorged elbows on the corners of the plastic-coated, adjustable desk.

“Sir, I work for the phone company. I do not need grounds. I am not being listened to, nor monitored. My supervisor is my husband, his supervisor is his cousin. We are based in a small town filled with small-minded people who know the few blocks of this town but know them well. We have no need for big-city folk calling in as though they own the place, as if simply because we are a business, that gives you license to call in hopping mad over a missing telephone. Why, if the fact that you are missin’ a telephone has you so upset, we have plenty of those for affordable prices. May I interest you in a new phone?”

He felt like he was in the twilight zone. All rational people had been rounded up like cattle, shoved into trucks, slaughtered and ground up into hamburger meat and eaten by the small town calling center folks down on Main Street USA. Melinda puts a stick of gum in her mouth and starts chewing like a cow over the phone. The smacking grates on his nerves, crawls down his spine, sticks needles into his skin, punches him in the gut.

“HAVE YOU LISTENED TO NOTHING I HAVE SAID?! WHERE DO YOU COME FROM? WHAT PLANET MUST I DAMN FOR SENDING YOU MY WAY!”

He regains composure. “Melinda. I don’t want a new phone. All I called about was…you know what? Let me speak to your supervisor.”

“His name is Roger. He’s my husband.” Her sentences lift at the ends in sickening sweetness.

“Melinda, I do not care who he is. I do not care what his name is. Just get off the phone and let me speak to someone that has half a brain.”

He is breathing heavily now, feels his blood pressure rising, his temples pounding, remembers what the doctors said: breathe slowly, take a break, don’t get too wrapped up in a situation.

“But he’s my husband. A great salesman and knows a ton about phones. He can get you whatever phone you want, you know? But he’s busy right now and can’t talk. Sir, what else can I do for you?”

He shrieks into the phone, slams the receiver into the tabletop again and again. The inanity of the situation embroils him in a sweeping mist of hysterical anger and he curls up on the wooden floor in a fetal position, thumb in mouth, blanket in hand.

Paranoia

The little things were everywhere. Robert knew it. He couldn’t see them but he could sense their presence, hear their bitsy bug boots rapping the chipped wood flooring, dark chocolate brown now with burn holes all the way though to the ceiling of the apartment below. Their imperceptible bodies traversed his holey living space, through the patched up gray walls covered in black mold, up along the sizzling electrical wires, into and around the chipped, stained toilet bowl. “Swoosh” and he spins around to find one of the ominous creatures but the sound is outside. The steam from the subway grate languidly rises to his window on the second floor, squeezes itself sideways through the rusted fire escape, and nestles into the nooks and crannies of the cracked red bricks lined green.

“Eh, what?! Where are you?!” and Robert’s down on his hands and knees, face pressed tightly against the grimy floor. He listens intensely for their insidious conversations, their cunning plans to take him down when he least expects it. The rain patters down on the corrugated iron rooftops, cacophonous and jarring, and he cannot hear a thing. But he knows their devious ways and will be ready for them when they come.

A red fire truck rolls past, siren blaring in the still morning air. He has not slept in two days and it is beginning to show: dark lines under his eyes, tired creases in his cheeks, pressed forehead into jagged crossings, coarse facial hair far too long. The clock ticks from the other room but it’s louder now, almost painfully pounding out the seconds. He imagines its bent white hands clawing out time in the Coca-Cola frame, horrifically syncopated, vile and mean. Robert throws his face back to the floor, peers deeply into the cracks between the floorboards, tries to uncover proof of their presence. The dust-bunnies have gathered on his blackened socks, the fabric on the knees of his flannel pajamas has worn thin, the Florida State sweatshirt that he stole from another person’s doorstep in the building smells like putrid perspiration.

“Oh! There!” and he’s digging with a broken spoon into the gaps within the floor, up along the walls, scooping out bits and pieces of plaster and sawdust from the termite nests lining the apartment. Exasperated, he leans back against the failing walls of his tiny apartment, sweat rolling down his battered face. He has found nothing but he hears them still, continuing to march on through his living space.

He places his hands tightly against his ears, blocks out the beating of the clock, the siren, blocks out the scuffling of imaginary feet and serpent steam. It is all quiet now. He squats and merrily watches as the rain pours down on the street below, broken plastic spoon still in hand.

The Storm

He awakes to the contortion of palm trees. The salty air singes his nose hairs, the sound of thunder nearby shakes his bed and the almost imperceptible flashes of lighting in the morning sun ring ominous for things to come. He cautiously steps to the window, looks Westward, sees the pitch black clouds rolling in. A ghoulish silence sweeps the land. Trouble is on the way. Hurriedly he closes all but one of the shutters. In red velvet slippers and a tattered blue robe, he runs down the stairs to the kitchen, throws open the cupboards, grabs the hammer and a box of nails, and heads into the garage. He grabs the plywood planks by the armful, opens the door, throws them outside. The hairs on the back of his neck stand up straight. It is near.

All the wood is gone now and it won’t  be enough. He knows this and must now choose his best approach to save his possessions of 55 years: his late wife’s photos, his daughter’s school and music awards, the records that his good friend gave him as a graduation present from high school, his diaries. Whereas every impulse in his body is yelling for him to flee, he must remain, cannot outrun it this time for it is but minutes away and it will blanket this country.

Frantically, he is running through that early morning air, wood planks in his left hand, hammer in right. Silver nails stick out of his pursed lips like porcupine quills. His heart pounds against his chest. The present calmness of the setting unnerves him, he looks over the increasing swells of the ocean, sees the rain pouring down in ashen sheets. “Maybe 30 minutes,” he thinks to himself.

One by one, the planks are thrown up, pounded into the side of his house, over the windows, over the doors. He is building his fort, constructing his shell, fashioning his coffin. The wood is gone, windows still remain unboarded. The water will enter these windows en masse once the windows have been shattered, the chorus will sing of destruction. He moves his most precious possessions to the back room where there are no windows, places the items as high as possible, far away from the waves that will fill his home. The sweat rolls off his forehead, drips slowly, methodically into his eyes. He is blinded momentarily, wipes it away, continues.

The humidity has risen. The thick air and whipping winds speak tongues through the gaps in the planks lining his walls. Sewage and sulfur waft through his home. He looks out the one open window–the pitchy billows gather force. Lightly, rain droplets fall, get slammed into the straining glass, blurring his vision of what is to come. The palm tree leaves peel back, rip off, sail through the air and slap into the side of his house. Rolling waves from earlier in the morning now pace violently back and forth on the rocky beaches awaiting entry.

He hears the thunder, sees the lightning at the same time. He has but minutes. He has not prayed since his wife had died but he begins now. In the distance near the horizon he sees it and his stomach drops, his knees give out, he falls to the ground below and has trouble breathing.

He thought it was a cloud but he knows it is not. It is a wave, as tall as a skyscraper, obsidian and pernicious and it is coming his way. Downstairs a window shatters, above his head he hears the planks squealing, the nails beginning to pull out. The palm trees are dead now, the beach upturned. He cannot hear anything but the deafening roar of the winds. The rain sounds like pebbles riddling the sides of the house. All his past enemies are here now at his doorstep, all his mistakes and regrets present. He will be carried away tonight and he is not ready.

In a ball on the moist carpet, he holds himself tightly and wishes he just had more time. And it is here.

Wallpaper

“Let’s change it to yellow. You always liked yellow, right?” He doesn’t care what color they change it to. All he knows is the wallpaper needs to go according to his wife, it’s his one day off a week from work and they are standing with a balding dinosaur of a man, three snow-white hairs combed over to the side, yellowed teeth and a propensity to coughing without covering his mouth.

“Then again, we could choose rose-petal pink or sunset orange. Hey, either one of those would go great with the shower curtain in the bathroom!” He looks to his wrist. He forgot to wear a watch today, decides to look up through Wallie’s Walls and More’s greasy windows to the indigo sky above, locate the sun, stare into it in the hopes that his retinas will burst into flames and he will get transported far away to an all-white room where a nurse will bring him pre-chewed trays of food, his daily medications, will kiss him tenderly on the forehead and life will be good.

“Then again, really, how often do we use the bathroom? Most of the time you are using the one at work and I am constantly in and out of the house. But this forest green one over here would go fabulously with our living room, don’t you think? And we spend most of our time there, don’t we?” Her mouth moves with the speed of caffeinated mongoose. He watches it, imagines it hurling off its hinges, plopping sloppy onto the shag carpet below, chasing the salesmen and women down the dusty hallways of this wood-paneled, 60′s remnant of a store in the dregs of their fine city.

“The thing is, once we buy it there’s no going back, you know? I mean, we put it up and that’s it! Right, I mean, we can’t buy samples of all these colors. That would be crazy, wouldn’t it?” He nods his head. Yes, it would be crazy and yes, he doesn’t want to be doing this. And while you’re asking, yes I don’t think we ever had anything in common and shouldn’t have gotten married that one weekend back in the 70′s when we were both stoned out of our minds and looking for a dare.

“Sir, if you had to choose between Lime Vine or Gold Stripe for a bedroom, what would you choose? Think hard about it cause we’re the ones that will have to live with it!” She cackles, nudges the elderly salesman who morosely pulls the skin hanging from under his chin. “And you too! Think about those two and tell me which one you would choose!”  He thinks of a few means of escape: 1) Fall to the floor and fake a seizure for the second time this month; 2) Go to the bathroom. Never come back; or 3) Attack the old man, get arrested and pay someone in country prison to stick a shiv in him. He starts eying the old man, gauging his weak points, decides upon the knees.

“No, come to think of it, I don’t like any of these. They all seem to say, ‘Boring’. We need something with a bit more pizzaz. Let’s come back next week. Will you have new stock in next week?” The decrepit man nods. Yes, they will have new stock.

As she yanks her husband’s hand and pulls him out of the store, he locks eyes with the wallpaper peddler. Behind the cataracts he senses fear. One day soon he will make his move.

Sparrow

The sparrow twists its little head left, then right. It knows what we are thinking, studies us, flits away and posts itself gallantly on the weathered tree branches now barren.

Thriving off of the growth of civilization, the sparrow has adapted to the ways of humans, in great numbers they exist upon the refuse of mankind. Its movements quick, almost manic, it takes in sensory information at the speed of light, judges whether it is in danger or not, resides within a coursing ball of 15-20 other sparrows just in case. As with humans, they too have a tendency to plunder nature, ripping new plant shoots from the ground, decimating fruit still on the trees, extinguishing flowering plants. But this one simply sits and watches, seems far distant from a signifier of destruction, seems curious, almost playful. I throw a few seeds out along with some bread crumbs. It hops over on its pumpkin-orange legs, twists its head to the left watching me and then decides it is safe and begins to eat, manically pausing every so often to check that I have not moved.

One minute later, the sidewalk is inundated with their little puffed-up bodies, each vying for the best position nearest the food. The brawls begin, two begin pecking at each other, chirping obscenities and while they fight, another swoops in, takes the very food that they were fighting over. The timid or the small remain passive but clever in the background. While they miss out on the larger morsels, they wait for the intensified fights to begin and as the bigger birds go for each other’s necks, calmly they will hop in and begin their long-awaited feast. The old and decrepit are brought pieces by some of the bigger birds that hop them over in their beaks, drop them to the frozen concrete below, and stand guard as the elders eat.

There is a strange sense of commonality between these birds and humans. Perhaps it is no mistake that they have grown in such large numbers with mankind. They have become the backdrop of city-life, the nonchalant decorations in our daily comings and goings. Miniature representations of the radiance and madness that mankind embodies, the sparrows rest calmly within the collapsing branches of an effete  society marking time, watching us as we busily ride out our days.

A petite, disheveled sparrow hops in my direction, stopping not four feet from my boots. I smile and it opens its beak, its little pink tongue quivering. “Our day will come,” I hear the sparrow say and taken aback, I clench the bread bag tight in my left hand, turn quickly and go back inside, scrupulously watching that the sparrow does not follow.

It merely flies away.

Deadlines

Something was due. He knew this and it made him uneasy, rolled around in his stomach, punched him in the gut every time he thought about it. He tried the normal routes of procrastination: the painting of the walls, the cleaning of the bathroom, the mopping of the floors, the washing of the cats. Even these things, once completed, did not not sate his need to forget his impending doom. He drinks copious amounts of coffee, hoping that somehow the caffeine will block the neurotransmitters from firing, that he will fall into a coma and not have to deal with the deadlines. He searches the web for mental diseases, comes across a site for Huntington’s disease. The caption underneath the logo reads, “A disease of mind and body.” He thinks this will suffice and begins reading the symptoms: depression, mood swings, forgetfulness, lack of coordination, personality changes, decreased mental capability, slurred speech, and memory loss. He has all of these, is sure of it, focuses in on the severity of his situation. Somehow knowing that he is doomed to die via Huntington’s eases his worries. “I mean, if I am going to die shortly anyway, what really do a few deadlines really mean in the grand scheme of things?” he thinks to himself. He knows there must be a better way to do this, to avoid getting stressed out, that surely imagining one’s death to avoid physical manifestations of procrastination gone awry cannot be the most healthy decision. He takes a deep breath. “These things will pass,” he tells himself. But then he is thinking of all the year’s to come, all those deadlines of papers due, essays submitted, working papers being sent off to editors, being marked and diced and being sent back to him for revisions.

He is on the floor now in the fetal position and the cats are licking his hair. He notices how dirty the floor is from this point of view, thinks to himself that perhaps he should sweep and mop and remembers that he has already done that and checks it off of his list of possibilities. The pencils and stacks of paper taunt him from atop his desk, tell him he’ll never get it done, that once he sits down he will be in their control and fours hours later will awake only to find that he has written sixteen pages on the benefits of brushing one’s teeth in circles instead of sideways motions. As he topples to the floor from his chair, the pencils and papers will cackle. The deadline will be missed. He will hear the shredding of his grades, the red, downward slashing movements of the teacher’s pens, the “I’m sorry” statements of the doctorate programs in their one paragraph rejection letters. He looks up into the blinding white light in the middle of his ceiling, presses his hands to his temples, tries to go to sleep.

Two minutes pass and he remembers something, takes a succession of deep breaths. He realizes he is no longer ten and in need of adult approval, that the teacher is a mere hood ornament at this point in his pursuit of knowledge, that deadlines are fictitious like so much else, that there is so much else that is far worse than a deadline and that this is a choice that he has made. He doesn’t need to be doing this, can choose to do something else. But he wants to be here, wants to have the deadlines, likes the pressure and the eventual results. “At the end of the day, everything will be fine,” he thinks and he is calm now, knows that he need not worry, calmly stands, stretches his arms. With a determined calm, he takes a seat to begin writing.

The polishing of the kitchen tiles will wait for another day and with fervent determination, he presses pencil into paper.

Indifference

She looks at him with distaste, as though he has just shat upon her desk and asked her to take a deep whiff. “I just want to check in and make sure we are okay,” he says, “because, you know, we have two classes together and…” She stops him abruptly. “I know, I know,” she says, “but I do not hold hands. It’s graduate school and it’s not your first semester.” Her sentences turn upwards into menacing smirks, her green, algae-covered teeth scream bloody murder and she stares at him with an indifferent anger unknown to him. A deep breath and he looks away at a poster on the wall, breaks eye contact, slowly turns back and begins to study the  beast.

Cropped dyed-red hair, little to no makeup save a light blue eyeshadow and flesh-colored lipstick. Hazel eyes, pursed, full lips, white satin skin marked with dark chocolate moles. She keeps her neck careened upwards facing her computer, meanders aimlessly with the mouse, fumbling through applications and websites. He speaks but she clearly does not care so he stops. Long enough for her to turn around and look at him again and continues. Her eyes roll upwards, he is steadily losing ground while she loses patience.”So we are okay,” he says. “We’re fine,” she responds and turns back to her computer.

Dissonance erupts between the words she utters and the actions she portrays. Her body deceives her darkened intentions and she remains shrouded in steady indifference.

The conversation has ended.

Afghanistan

13:00 hours. Baghdis province, Afghanistan. The body of a soldier, submerged in a river in Western Afghanistan, is found. There is another missing. Both are from the 4th Brigade Combat Team of the 82nd Airborne Division. Eight Afghans, including four soldiers, three policemen and an interpreter are killed in either the NATO air-strike or in the fighting that broke out between Afghan and American troops. It lasted for hours.

He puts the paper down. Folds it neatly on his thigh and looks out the window to the cleanly cut grass, the well-managed trees lining the sidewalks, the women pushing strollers down the promenade. Hears the wind rushing through the trees, civilians carousing the bodegas of deep Brooklyn, the laughter of the children as they wait for the bus to pick them up or walk hand-in-hand with their mothers or fathers to the doorsteps of the school. The civilian cars, the airplanes, and the helicopters all carry on as normal.

“These are passing stories,” he thinks, “whims and fancies of newspapers and radio talk shows, 24-hour streaming news channels or regularly updated websites. But pause. Take it in. Allow the story to mean more than ‘bad-news’ or ‘distant suffering’.”

He looks out the window again. Sees the sidewalks have been blown apart, chunks of steel cables lay strew across the ripped up grass. The trees are on fire or already singed, the school buses lay flat on their sides and there are children inside. They are crying. He sees the school down the street has been blown apart, the chalkboards dangle from particle board fibers over the cavernous sides of the decimated building, ruled cursive paper flutters in the smoky winds, pieces of the American flags get caught in embers of mangled civilian cars. He smells the burning of rubber, the smell of a gas that he can’t place. There is silence save for the distant cries and crackling fires of exploded cars, loose electrical wires, and burning buildings.

He knows it’s not like this. It’s worse. There are more smells, more gruesome sights, the kinds of things that keep you up at night, wake you in the morning, grace you with their darkened presence throughout the day. They are the kind of things that can’t be forgotten because they are marked into your skin, wedged in your memory. They are the kinds of things that remind you it’s not too far from the shores of America to Afghanistan and this is harrowing and best forgotten.

He stops. There is more to this, even more disturbing. He allows himself to stop thinking of these people as soldiers, as men and women, Americans or Afghans, imagines them as children playing in the streets of Kabul or Brooklyn. Maybe with kites, maybe with basketballs, children’s things, fun and carefree. But it’s the 1980′s and Afghanistan has another foreign power in its midst. The Russians, under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev, remain until the late 1980′s when they leave under the direction of Gorbachev. The children in Kabul are immersed in war while in Brooklyn, there are children immersed in the class warfare of the Reagan-era but it’s different, less immediate in its death and destruction. Maybe for some it is not. There is funding of the Taliban rushing in from the U.S. to battle the Russians in the midst of the Cold War. Over 1 million Afghans are killed, 1.2 million disabled, 3 million maimed or wounded. What were their names, where did they come from, what were their stories?

He thinks long and hard on the missing American soldier, thinks about the man found in the river. What were their names, these men and women who gave their lives to protect America or Afghanistan? What was it that brought them to the doorsteps of the Army, the Navy, the Marines, the Taliban? He looks out the window, the sidewalks are back in place, the schools back in order. The trees stand tall, full of the orange and yellow colors of Fall and he watches as a child plays with a soccer ball in the street below. “What war,” he wonders, “will this child fight?”

Armadillo

Jeraldo wanted nothing more than to be an armadillo. He had seen them on their family’s trip from Mexico, through Texas to Oklahoma where their mother’s brother, Papillo, lived with his four dogs, two wives, Eline and Enerva, and three shotguns. Jeraldo’s mother had stopped at the first sighting between Austin and Round Rock and they all sat there, amazed at the armored creature as it used its extended claws to dig a hole ten times its size near the side of the road. His sister, Adalia, at only three years old, sat perplexed at the two foot long alien gracing their presence and not being able to hold it in any longer, screamed at the top of her lungs with roll upon roll of gleeful laughter.

“Look at how it moves,” his mother had said. “It knows that it is safe with us so it keeps digging as if we are not even here. But if it is scared, do you know what it does?” She had asked this with an upward cadence at the end of her question, turned completely around in the front seat to see her children’s faces. Seeing that her children did not know the answer, she quietly told them. “You see, if it gets too scared and it can’t run away, the little armadillo tucks its head and its legs into its shell, places its tail next to its head and pulls itself into the tightest ball you can imagine. That way, no one can get in and hurt it, you see?” Adalia had squealed with excitement. “Mami, I want to see the ball animal. Can we make it ball?” Her mother had said no, but not accepting that as a viable answer, Adalia had rolled down the window and thrown a plastic cube at it, smacking it right on the back of the shell. “Dios mio, Adalia!” her mother had yelled but the creature simply looked up, smelled the cube that had fallen to its side and continued digging. Jeraldo just shook his head, looked at the creature. Sensing something, the armadillo had paused, looked up from its ever-expanding hole, its nose covered in dirt and torn roots. For a full minute, it met Jeraldo’s eyes and they sat, watching each other, communicating child to creature, the kind of communication that adults have more often than not lost in the ridiculous toil of taxes and 8-5 workdays. Through eons of time they traveled, creature leading child through the phantasms of moments when man lived in unison with his surroundings, through the soil burrows of the armadillo past and present, across dens where their children lay awaiting their meals, into the depths of the Earth where only silence reigns and the warm bodies of armadillo mothers wrap themselves tightly around their babies. Safety, warmth, history, love. Jeraldo had sensed all of it, caught it and sent it coursing through his veins. The armadillo had lifted its head higher, curled its lips into a tender smile and all the days when Jeraldo felt alone as if no one understood him were gone, all the days of crying in the back of the school yard because the other boys were teasing him melted away, all the moments at home when he hated his father for leaving him, for leaving them, disappeared. He had put his palms to the window, pressed them tightly against the glass, wished that it would burst, that he could leave and live with his newly found friend and just get away. The armadillo had shaken its head and begun digging again.

Their mother had started the car again and Adalia had fallen fast asleep. “Are you okay, hijo?” she had asked, looking in the rearview mirror. “Si,” Jeraldo had curtly answered but he hadn’t been. He had watched the armadillo one last time, taken in the claws, the pink snout, the furry belly. Most of all, he had studied the shell, the nine lines across the top, the dark grooves.

As they had driven away towards Round Rock, he had begun constructing his own armor and had looked back to his friend one last time who had stopped digging to watch them drive away.

Midnight Trade

Fog rises from the subway grill, rolls across the face of the icebound midnight moon. Smells of old socks, mildew and burnt chestnuts from the lone vendor a few blocks away on the corner singe his nose hairs as he traverses the lonely streets of the old financial district near Gold and Liberty streets. Spotty lights shoot forth from the silhouettes of the sordid emblems of capitalistic endeavor where the legal crimes take place: the Nordic pillaging of villages unseen, the trades of people’s livelihoods, the desire for more continually unsated. He tips his fedora back, lifts his head upwards towards that chilled night sky and watches through the windows of the first few floors as the immigrant workers clean the cubicles and conference rooms, hallways and offices of those that have much. He shakes his head, looks down at the soiled concrete sidewalks below, the gum and trash, the homeless people bundled up and sleeping in the recesses of the wealthy’s playground, the layer after layer of dirt and grime in the shadows of the pristine corporate headquarters, lifts his head back up to see the workers still toiling away and walks away slowly, subdued by the numbing indifference of it all.

A dusty yellow cab pulls up, “On Duty” shines golden through the mossy air. “You need a lift, mister?” The cabbie looks at him with a sideways grin, pulls his hat back towards his neck to open us his face. He shakes his head, tells the cabbie there’s no time for joy rides. “There’s too much work to be done,” he adds and continues traversing the bowels of New York City.

Right on Liberty and up to William street, he turns left, heads towards Pine and Wall Street, Exchange Place, the belly of the beast. All is quiet. He can hear the scuffle of rats in the black bags of garbage left out for collection in the morning, smells the always-pervasive smell of shit that seeps through the darkened cracks of the city and settles down for a good, long stay. Sees the security guards sleeping at the New York Stock Exchange, the ghostly figure of Washington lit up like a Christmas tree watching over the center of capital trading. The wind rips through the cobblestone streets, lifts the giant American flag on the face of the Exchange and yanks at its ropes, bends it to its will, threatens to snap it off and send it flying into the dirtied Hudson. He pauses for a second, takes in the filtered light of the lampposts, the recognizable hums of vacuum cleaners, the violent whispers of the icy wind. Looks down and sees that here at the junction of Wall street and William street that the sidewalks are spotless, knows that the filth here has moved fully inwards to the weaknesses of man encased in stony structures. A couple approaches, the man in a navy blue suit, slicked back hair, a silk pink tie and a clean, pressed white shirt. His loafers click in step with his companion’s six-inch stilettos, shiny ebony lost in the shadows of the capital-rich calluses. Her flowing watermelon dress, her white sash, her soft blond hair and thick, catty carvings of makeup on her baby blue eyes. They move in sync, robotic marching at a midnight hour, pay no attention to him and walks right past, pauses at the door of the latest luxury apartments around the corner. With a twist of the key, the woman enters. The man pauses, looks back at him and scowls. “You are trash,” he transmits and enters. And they are gone.

The light from the nearest lamppost begins to flicker. He turns to face it, looks upwards. Smoke curls upwards from the subways in droves. The light expands, blinding rays shoot outwards to the murky intricacies of that baleful junction. A high-pitched emission and the light explodes. Shadowed curtains fall, he hears the menacing whispers of those all around him, sits on the soiled corner and pulls his coat in tight around his shoulders, flips up the collar to protect his neck from the increasing winds.

The dimly-lit carcass of the American flag on the Exchange looks on, bemused.

Limitations

“Photons, you see, are those tiny elementary particles that constitute the most basic unit of light and all forms of electromagnetic radiation. Without them, we would not be able to see.” He looks around the classroom to see if anyone is listening. Not one but three people are nodding off in dramatic fashion against clenched fists, pens poignantly steadied, tips against paper as if, in their sleep, they will take notes. “Photons are light in a most basic sense and what we see are the reflections, scatterings or absorptions of those photons as they interact with objects in the outside world. What we see, we refer to as the visible light, one of the seven possibilities on the modern conception of the spectrum of light.” A pen is dropped. It slams against the tiled floors, the sound reverberating against the concrete walls. He pauses and begins to think of those first days of his teaching when it all seemed possible. He was going to push the boundaries, expand the limits of the minds of men and women alike, blow up old conceptions of the world and egg students on to offer new ones. But here he was. The guy with the puffy fro in back chats with his latest girlfriend, the blond woman with the pink ‘fuck-me’ dress in the front chews on her gum like she’s a cow chewing cud,  the young man with black hair and a solid uni-brow plays on his hand-held PS2. Disinterest marks the minutes of their lives in his class and he balefully continues unabated, teaching of the very matter which constitutes their lives and his.

“So what does this all mean? Why should you care? Well, maybe you shouldn’t as it seems some of you don’t. But I would propose the following: we see only 1/7th of the spectrum of light. All around us, every single day there exists light which we do not see. Of that 1/7th, we do not even see all of it as some of it is either absorbed into the objects, scattered beyond our vision, lost to somewhere else. Think about this and then think of the fact that when you see, you do not see but objects in a way, see you. What does that do, to say this?” The boy in the green sweatshirt and the frumpy corduroys seems to listen intently, leans forward in his chair awaiting the professors rhetorical reply. “Well, I would say it offers a damn good idea towards complicating the notion of human agency. Think about it. If objects act upon us, act upon our eyes, and offer us our visible world that everyday we work with, live in, operate against, where is our agency, how does that idea that we humans are the actors upon this world really hold up? What does it mean that in our daily lives, we operate while seeing only a fraction of a fraction of the possibility of vision, that the vision that we do see is comprised of millions of tiny photons and that even then, most of those are lost or filtered out by our eyes?” Now on the edge of his seat, the boy in the green sweatshirt looks intensely at the professor. His face is strained, the veins in his forehead protrude by what seems to be inches. The boy’s lips tightly pressed together, he stands and lets out a fart that slams against the professor’s face, weaves toxic gases through the nostrils of his fellow classmates, and settles into a grimy soup that wafts through the singed air.

The professor pulls the chafed stool towards him, gracefully takes a seat and ponders the many limitations on vision.

Skipper

The watch hangs from a tarnished brass chain stuck to a rusted nail above his desk. Silver lines the edges of a cracked glass front. It was a gift from his father who in turn, got it from his father and the hands of the clock do not move. He would twist the top occasionally to wind the gears, push the heavy hands forward in a march to future times now gone but would become irritated at the incessant clicking sounds emanating from its soiled belly. No matter where he was within the house, the padded ticks could be heard, the calls to the forcibly forgotten patriarchy of his childhood reverberating off of the walled temples of his inner sanctuary. And so he would let it run out in a slow, mournful death; would refuse to rewind it, practice resistance against its presence and hail glory in its lazy habitation of the nondescript wall with no purpose other than to solidify the silent within its furrowed brow.

His father lived across the country, worked in a job for the state, and they hadn’t spoken in months. The casual conversations rarely took place, the cordial calls or letters gathered dust in that locked basement of the childhood home now sold, the grassy hills now dried and left for crows. The watch represented all time that had passed, all time that would pass, an object imbued with the sorrow of conversations never had, connections never made. A stranger’s presence watching over him as he wrote and went about his day, the frozen mouths of a geist in situ.

Across it glassy face, two words were emblazoned in dark black ink: The Skipper.  The captain, the leader, the master of a ship. The skipper. He thinks on this, laughs and shakes his head. The silenced skipper encased within a 1 1/2 inch by 1 1/2 inch steel tomb, the functionality of it depending on the winding of the gears by an outside force, the fragility of its face and the mechanical innards in need of care and attention to avoid the severity of coming to a grinding halt. The captain: a leader of well-worn walls and settled, safe seas,  white-painted bows and depths of 2 x 4′s and mangled electrical wires. His day has begun, the watch reflects the early morning light, reveals it scratches and divots.

He reaches up, turns it over to hide the face, continues writing.

Fondue

Barbara Wagner always loved a good fondue. Dried meats, toasted breads, succulent chunks of pork, slices of roast duck: she enjoyed dipping things. Taking foodstuffs in her pudgy fingers, she would renew them in a  baptism of melted cheese, cackle wildly as they emerged, and set them aside to cool. She would arrange them in a pyramid, cube or some other madly popular shape, going for the aesthetic affect of a towering establishment of curdled milk, referred to it quietly as her nativity scene of deliciousness. Seeing as how she never had guests, the creations would often get eaten by her rottweiler puppy, Turner, who in turn suffered from loathsome bouts of eye-watering gas.

Her holidays were often marked by the silence of lonely years now normalized. The coffee pot more often than not could be heard hissing its woebegone cries from the innards of the lime-green kitchen. The subtle humming of the small burner under the earthenware pot of melted cheese was like the respiration of a baby, the stalwart humming of a carpenter, the calming presence of the silent elder. It’s reverberations imbued every object in the house with a sense of pastoral continuity, grassy highlands on roaming hills, endless sighs of relief in the open lands of forever.

She dipped with fervent regard for the task at hand, practicing metallurgy with product of moo. The downward dipping motion, curled fingers backwards towards her palm, the extended index finger and thumb, the light grip touching the object to the melted mass, the release and the sigh of relief. It was in, it had been placed mindfully, it would remain for two minutes, no more, no less, soak up the milky characteristics and mix them with its own. Then the quick movements to the tray of pronged fondue forks on the right, picking up just the right one that speaks and says, “It is my turn. I am ready to dive in, to prong. I am ready to live.” The gleam of the polished silver, the ebony handle tight within her grip, she sails it downwards into the murky waters below, fishes the food item out with a perfected hooking motion, gasps every time it emerges anew. “You are beautiful,” she tells it. “You have started the day as a piece of salami and now, you are a work of art. Bravo, dear marbled sausage!” She would place it carefully amongst other dipped items, lean back in her worn, oak rocking chair and smile at a job well done.

“To fondue,” she would think to herself, “is an act of God.”

Communion No. 2

I walk to the convenience store near the train stop and there is a scuffle going on. An older black man is trying to exchange a Banana calling card that he just bought but the man behind the counter calls his bluff, tells him he knows that he is lying. The older man is getting heated, the exchange intensifies, names are called. The man behind the counter explains to me that the older man is a cheat, tells him to, “Get the fuck out,” and the older man disappears. The man behind the counter laughs but is upset, an exasperated “this is how my day starts” kind of look across his face. I tell him that I hope his day gets better, grab a coffee and a stale apple turnover and go on my way, out to the throngs of people waiting for the bus.

On at Marcy Avenue and the train paddles along its rickety tracks. The MTA bus stop below, the weathered faces of the numerical decals shine on the top of the buses, patient individuals wait for patient drivers to get on, open the doors, begin the journey. My journey has begun in cacophonous movement, this one simple trail by which I move criss-crossed by the thousand movements of other individuals.

To sit with this thought is not only humbling but earth-shattering. It is so simple a thought but from it shoots an array of assemblages of other ideas: that there are no universal ideas, that we are one amongst so many and if the numbers were not of humans but animals or plants, bacteria or viruses, atoms, molecules, it would make no difference. And if we are this one amongst so many, surely each and every one of us has to have a slightly different take on any number of issues. While I may call the sky blue and think of the lapping waters of the Atlantic Ocean, another may say it is blue as well but think of the baby blue bonnet of their new infant. Or we may think simultaneously of the Atlantic Ocean but think of different parts, see different images and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. This is an amazing thought: that we operate with simplistic generalizations but allow for deep, endless spaces to exist in between, each person’s visual memories laden with different images connected with senses, interconnecting with lived and imagined experience unending, constantly reformulating, reconnecting, making new connections. This is infinitely complex as the layers unfold. In the case of the remembered sea and its connection to blue, do we unfold each sensory, memorical layer like an onion? To do so would be to imply an origin; if we only could peel enough of it away, we would get to the core. What if we said something more radical? What if, instead, we said that the layers were interwoven like a web, that by plucking on one strand by remembering blue as Atlantic Ocean or Atlantic Ocean as that part of the beach over by the piece of driftwood and so on, other strings vibrated in the process? As if pulling on one would affect the whole, cause new connections to be made, old ones to fail, rearrangements of memories to occur? So the onion fails, the teleological chain of causation fails, and complexities reign supreme. And what if this web was not “my” web but “our” web (inclusive of all that is , ever will be, ever was?) and so if I remember something, is it truly mine to remember and suddenly “my” conception of blue has infinitely complex linkages to “your” blue. This opens our world up, has the possibility if pursued to deeply challenge conceptions of individuality, to draw webbed linkages to not only people but their thoughts, memories, actions, viewpoints, imagined realities, words and the list goes on and on.

My stop has come. I step off the train. Communion has been taken.

Rise and Fall

The gig was up. The time had come. They run to the steel window frame, clamor out and up the fire escape ladder. These next 15 seconds will define their lives forever. They gather steam and leap as hard and as far as they can and they are flying, through that darkening wintry air, the other side in sight. Down below the women scream, the men rush for their guns, chaos has erupted. They focus on the here and now and right here and right now they are mid-air awaiting, God-willing, a landing on the other side. The slippery bricks glisten, the soiled chimneys rise in defiance, bulging black smoke billowing from their innards. They can smell the freedom of times ahead, hear the cries of their loved ones as they nestle in for a good long sleep. 1 more second and they will be there. Then the swooping sound from overhead. Razor sharp claws, curved beak, cries of exaltation, and their bodies are lifted far into that night sky, far away from any rooftops, far from any sanctuary, far from the bread bins, and the garbage cans and the leftover cat food. The stars incandescent, icy stones reflecting in the clawed beast’s beady eyes. Punctured ribs, pounding heads, and that unending cry of that freezing wind.

A high lift and release and they are flailing through that night air once again, headed for those snowy streets below.

Escape

He folds under the pressure. Backwards into a twisted scene of origami swan meets warty toad. The stacks of paper pile up high on the corner of his desk, the cats have taken a liking to the manifestos in the corner of the room and the silverfish fill  the banquet halls of whittled books with their kin from afar.

That nervous beating in the tips of his fingers won’t stop playing to the long-lost beats of the jazzy underground that he dreams of every night. The colors vivid from clocks of tangerine orange and wallpaper of lime green flower petals littering concord grape purple waves to the watermelon carpet and the lemon leather couches. Those women over in the corner near the bar stare, the smoke fluttering over their fake, ebony eyelashes, twisting into furtive smiles, rising into unseemly curtsies and hitting the dust-crusted fan whirling above with a whoosh and it’s gone. One wears silver sequins, apple-red lipstick, tight black boots reaching up her calves. The other wears a snow-white skirt, flamingo top, fire-orange lipstick, cat-eye contacts and calls herself Lucy. She flicks her cigarette across the room, it hits his pants, trails down his leg and  falls to the paper below, begins to burn. Everything is alight and the singed papers flutter upwards and out through the window, into the streets below and just keep churning outwards. More and more of fire-lit words into the frigid night air. Kids watch with wonderment, old folks sit on the stoops bundled in their warmest coats following the dragon tails of burning paper. And he’s free. Free of all that has piled up. Free of all that which he feels needs to be done. Free…to start again.

Only a few minutes have passed and the paper stacks remain just as high as before. The cockroaches have congregated on his desk, begin to play hockey with his pencils and erasers. He tries to flick one off, it spins and grabs his finger with a ravenous bite. The others run over, break their friend away from his digit, pantomime apologies and continue with their game. The coffee cup remains half full and he grabs it, sloshes the liquid across his desk, sweeping the creatures off of their feet and into the crevasses of the soiled wall below. He hears them gagging and cursing as they pick themselves up, promising him that they will be back. The silence returns. The deadline is in 20 minutes.

He thinks long and hard of his search for the sky blue whale, his flight through the clouds on feathered arms, the slaying of radioactive Gila monsters, his waltz with the shrew queen through the toadstool palace. The clock ticks. He imagines harder. 18 more minutes to enjoy the innocence of oblivion.

Dust

The ringing won’t stop and he’s heard it all before. She moans about his lack of integrity, the longing she has for different days, the hopes and dreams of that better life that she imagined herself living as that small girl curled up in her attic near the frosted windowpanes. That snow has fallen outside and blanketed the neighborhood in silence. The droning of the baseboard heaters rumbles beneath their feet, disrupts the dust-bunnies, sends them flying. The floorboards creak in the silences between her words and within his deep sighs. He looks over to the fireplace, sees the film of dust that has settled into the grooves of the bricks. The matchboxes of their favorite restaurants, the log from the last fire that was lit two years ago, the fancy dinner with white linen napkins and both of them intertwined on the couch. Sandalwood candles, darkened oak, heavy red wines, the brie from the Italian store a few blocks away, the smell of musty books. They dance through his senses and the traces of his memory bank, fall closer to the ground with her every word.

His heart screams through the backs of his eyes. The pressure builds high, he wants to save it all, sees the cards folding as she plays again, and again, and again. And it’s nothing like it used to be. Her words leak from her mouth with garbled everyday nonchalance; as if she’s said it all before a thousand times. She holds her hands in crooked, sharp positions of indifference, fingers dangling like slaughtered mackerel. Outlines the many facets of their finish line with foppish breezes of whittled facial expressions and inconsistent gestures. The wallpaper was always too yellow, he thinks, and the walls too thin. They let in the cold, release the heat, never could hold anything worth keeping. He notices it peeling in the upper right-hand corner of the room and the wallpaper glue reveals weaved webs of decline.

His patience wears pantaloons of aired consent, her words spill outwards in messy splatters. Time’s unending gaze unfolds along their trials of years untouched, gazes never met. On two separate planes, they stare inward gazes to pasts imagined, nostalgia-imbued.

The strangers waltz plainly  in the company of forgotten dust.

Communion No. 1

Renaldo had read it fourteen times by now. Each letter seemed to explode upon the page, reach through his eyes, grab a hold of his optic nerve and twist to the unending beats of his troubled visual cortex. The past bubbled up through the web of words before him in muddled movements left and right, up and down, circular turnings, and unending spasms of now. He would sit for hours simply staring at the pages, waiting for them to tell him their stories and whispers of clarity would come, slithering through the innards of his brain, through his arms, rolling around through his matted nerves and outwards, through the tips of his fingers, the pen he was holding, the paper he was writing upon. To see the gossamer notes through which the universe operated was his occupation and he knew the impossibility, sensed the inabilities to do so piling up minute after minute, day after day. Attempts to grab hold of them with his pen and mark them down only failed and the sense of that which is unspeakable would move elsewhere in coiled transparencies. Structures, fleeting and temporary, would formulate in speedy creations and precipitous declines, sloshing constantly through vitreous solution, never-ending, never truly complete. In-creation. In-making. In-destruction. Simultaneously coming and going. Movement. Change. Morphologies.

He had written five books, all attempting to name that unnameable. Knew that each time he made particular choices to call out particular people, use particular words, write within a given language within a given form and style. He would begin to mark out in his brain all of the intricacies involved in the waltzing performance of writing that he performed when putting pen to paper, would begin to feel overwhelmed with the possibilities before him, the choices unfolding, the heaviness of marking out one’s existence with darkened lines on porous paper. The layered and sedimented existences of the pen, paper, choices, the artwork of typography, the streets upon which he walked, the language he spoke, the hushed tones within walls, the silent susurrations that washed the spaces all around him. Fulmination, eruption, discharge, dissonance, outbreaks and combustion and the, “If I could just see more, sense more,” “I’m almost there, I can feel it. Just keep pushing,” “One more letter, one more page, one more book, the etchings are on the wall, it’s nearly complete,” kept coming.  And then it would be lost. The unattainable remained so, continually. A communion, defiled and hygienic. A repetitive affair.

The Bag

It’s a very quick look, almost imperceptible. Down at the Whole Foods bag in my hand and up to my face and then she’s past me. Within those milliseconds and through the eyes of that older Puerto Rican woman and her three year old daughter, years of sudden change pass by in a whirl of images, a montage of upped rents, displaced friends and the changing faces of the blocks where she has grown up. She remembers the corner store being the place where she and her sisters pretended to play games while all the time watching the boys getting off the rickety JMZ trains in the late afternoons, stripping off their dirty t-shirts to nothing but a white undershirt and sitting on the stoops drinking cold soda from their mother’s fridge. She remembers the old men gathering at night in front of ‘their’ buildings, slapping down dominoes and cards on flimsy card tables, the blue plume of cigarillo smoke twisting up into those humid summer nights. She also hears her mother screaming at the top of her lungs as the neighborhood gangs have a shoot out in the street, knocking holes in the cars and shattering the windows of the first floor apartments. The sirens, the screams, that dead night beat of the South streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It’s all changed. And so now, she walks the streets seeing new, cold faces all the time, where people walk by without hellos and sneak into their apartments like silent ghosts at night and slide back out in the early morning. The silence between 8 and 5 that she never knew as a child growing up has nestled into the neighborhood like a poisonous vapor and she wonders where the people that she knows have gone, where the change came from, and how long she’ll be able to withstand the ebbing pressures for her to move.

Her daughter runs on past me to look at the pigeons that have found some food behind the chain-link fence on the corner. As the older lady glances at me and passes by, we stop as the child plays on. One word, ‘Hello’, opens the floodgates of pent up rage and we stand on South 4th and I listen while Ivonne tells me of the uneasy feeling that comes over her when she feels she no longer knows where her memories lie. How when she goes home and remembers Pablo Mercado leaning on his cane outside his carniceria that has now been turned into luxury apartments, she has to think of something else or she will cry. How her daughter may never know this pain but may also never know the pleasures of those long summer nights hanging out with friends on the corners watching boys, of the parades with the flags and the endless seas of food and smiles. ‘Things have changed, things have really changed,’ she says and her daughter giggles with delight as the birds take flight and throw gusts of feathered wind through her hair. Her daughter’s ready for her next adventure, looks over at us all smiles and Ivonne needs to get home to start cooking. She says, ‘Have a good night’ and I tell her the same and then we are done, moving in opposite directions while living not three blocks apart.

Senses of Seasons

Distant Gershwin sounds across the mist-laden rooftops of Brooklyn. The pitter-patter of the kittens paws slide against the polished oak wood floors and the oven, just slightly cracked, releases smells of warm sweet potatoes as the snow gently gathers along the edges of the rusty-black window frames. Cracked ebony paint peels back off the faces of the time-worn red brick, gives a deep sigh and slips off forever, catching flight on the swooping breezes of the wintry strolls of November. He looks distant through the frosted glass at the children running out into the white sidewalks…

And then it’s gone. He finishes the post, goes to hit publish and suddenly, 2/3rds of what he has written has been demolished because of a faulty internet connection. The anger boils up inside of him and it goes from a wintry night to a flaming inferno where snow never falls, children never enjoy the spirit of their first winter, where the squirrels are rabid and cleverly wait behind garbage cans for the unsuspecting tenants to throw their empty bottles of Jack away in before they leap out and go for the jugular. He feels an irretrievable loss, takes a deep breath, gets angry again, takes another deep breath and begins to visualize the posting system as the enemy to be vanquished. His fingers slam down on the ‘Save Draft’ button and with every click, he throws his head back and cackles. ‘You may have won tonight but I will be back tomorrow,’ he says, as he begins scheming for the next day’s post.

The Witch of the Black Sea

Her long, black fingernails rap fervently against the stony walls of Swallow’s Nest castle in Crimea, each one slamming down in syncopated motions with the crashing waves below. Her tangled, black, rat’s-nest hair guards her eyes from the early morning sun glistening off the mossy rocks below. For twenty years she has been alone, the raging witch of the Black Sea, forced into solitude by the hatred of the local villagers and her misguided love affairs with a multitude of men from the Crimean Tatar National Assembly. On her shoulder perches a raven, dead for five years and stuffed with the innards of her disgruntled mattresses piled high in the circular prison precariously balanced above the booming ocean below. She names the raven Valentin (from valeo in Latin meaning healthy) and speaks volumes to it, the only thing that dares to listen these days to her rantings and emotional outbursts. Her curvaceous nose shoots outwards and down, riddled with furry moles and her crooked, toothless mouth droops on the left, an aperture of dark light and befuddled loneliness.  She was once the ‘Queen of Point’, the diva of the outer stage, a wicked woman with a biting tongue and dark entrails of sinewy cynicism, greed, selfish-pursuits, and a lack of empathy unparalleled. And she wore this in her face as a darkened shroud, pouting lips, wrinkles of times spent weeping. The world was created solely for her and she perused the hallways of her steward’s fears and insecurities and exploited them, turned them inwards against the poor souls and collected the refuse left in her wake, stuffing it neatly into a satchel she carried in her ever-darkening soul.

She sighs, lifts the matted hair from her sight, looks out into the ocean but sees nothing but blue-gray mist and tumbled tides. The rotting velvet curtains frame her decrepit body in deafening solitude. She speaks to Valentin to calm her troubled mind, tells him of her greatest achievements, her wondrous feats. A feather from his spotted chest flutters to the ground and is swept out by a gust of wind to the sea below. Piece by piece he is able to escape her grasp.

A scuffle of paws sounds as three mice scamper across her bedroom floor. She grabs the waxy candelabra,  turns to hurl it their little bodies. They escape into the hole in the wall and her anger boils up inside of her and explodes. A torrential downpour of fury-ridden words are shot from her mouth, reverberating against the stone walls, pounding against her temple, and loop out through the window in inky gobs of negativity. For miles the wailing cries of the Witch of the Black Sea can be heard, children shuttering at her deafening sickness. In her loneliness and solitude she wades, a woman now forgotten in the halls of this ancient castle.

She drops the candelabra from her limp, bony wrists to the stony floor below. Turns back towards the window. Scrapes her hair back over her eyes, listens to the pounding waves, strokes Valentin and knows that somewhere she went wrong. She scowls. Tears can no longer soothe her emptiness. One finger at a time, she marks out the years she has wasted in anger upon the stone walls, loses count, and begins again.

Dissonance Part 1

I walk the dusty streets of never and forget of where I am. I wonder where the time has gone and to whom it has passed. The street corner lamps lit low, I peruse the cobblestone streets of the infirmary, bidding goodnight to hawkers, prostitutes, and the forlorn. I continue as the horns from the steamships sound from the harbor across the way and the gleeful laughing of the gentile parades in front of our faces. One stone amiss. I bend to fix it and a rat the size of a small dog snatches my pocket-watch by the chain with its paw, screeches with horror as the watch is yanked out and smashes against the blocks of stone. It bumbles on endlessly through the darkened night and the remnants of time dangle from the worn trousers of my father, worn by his only son. The heirloom screams of holes in time, moments never had, loss and forgetting far too young. Pockets within pockets line the inner walls of my fortresses of leghood, places to store the many trinkets of ones childhood-turned-adulthood. And they overflow.

I stuff the shards of glass into one of them and continue on my way. Governor Chamblis is in rare form tonight. The old curmudgeon rallies the mind-trapped troops of his youth to battle on the knoll of never-was, yells orders to the lot of us to load this and stand this way and over there. I strike a pose of great repute and when he turns his back, I slip into the seedy shadows of Jack Alley where there are no lanterns and the only light that leads my way is the faint moonlight showing through the drifting fog. My shadows resound against the mossy mounds of drunkards and dead, the soul-stricken and the refuge-seekers and with every step I take, the sound of my repetitive footsteps rebounds shooting skywards to the heavens. A door opens to my right, down but five paces away and I stop. Slink to the sides to see who may emerge. It is none other than the true Governor, the great Monsieur Lambois, stumbling drunk through the swarming arms of six fair ladies. The door closes, the ladies of the night recede into the warmth of Madam’s bosom and I match footstep with footstep and follow from a safe distance.

The hunt has begun.

Hobble Me Red

“That’s the funniest God-damned thing I have ever seen”. Roger always seemed to say things at the wrong times. This time, it was to a one-legged girl trying to hop around a stainless steel pole in a seductive pole dance on 43rd and Lexington. She wasn’t amused.

He often, in retrospect, realized how awful the things he said were but was never able to bring such realizations to the fore when he needed them most. His doctors had called it A.D.D., his father had called it terets and his mother just considered it, ‘a pain in the caboose,’ as she called it. He often replied that if it was a pain in her caboose that it must be a pretty big pain cause  her caboose was bigger than a moose. He loved to rhyme as a child and would continue this until very late in his life.

“Really? I mean, your legs are like toothpicks on a torso of balled muscle. What were you thinking? Do you need to drag your legs behind you like wet towels as your arms do all the walking?” The spin class instructor, for the first time in his career, had stopped the class, walked over to Roger and punched him right in the face. Strangely, it was the best spin class Roger would ever have and they continued on, insulter and insulted, until class had come to a complete stop.

Many jobs had been lost due to his condition and he perused the hallways of the corporate skyscrapers like an awful comedian, the one that no matter how much you drink at the show, he just isn’t funny.”I like this look. It’s as if a poodle had just given up, thrown its paws up into the air, handed over its pelt and you decided to slap it on to your shiny, balding head. You’re like Minnie Driver meets Shakara Ledard.” The onslaught of spit and varicose-veined cheeks had gently informed him that he was fired.

He would often meet people on the street that he had touched in his unique way and it wasn’t uncommon for him to return home covered in coffee, mango smoothies, or energy drinks. Abrasive, uncanny, unyielding, and friendless were all words used to describe him and he would sit and listen to such descriptors and then proceed to describe the women’s hair as, “frizzled strips of burnt bacon”, “auburn nightmare on elm street”, or “razor blades of desperation”. The men  received descriptions that were no better: “Soiled toilet-seat cranium”, “Like a parrot pooped all over your head”, “Like snakes met gel and gel won”, or “A sandy beach of loneliness”.

Roger would continue undaunted through the avenues of shamelessness, keeping the masses humbled against their will. He sat and watched the one-legged woman, oblivious to the words continuing to spill out of his mouth and smiled at the silliness of it all.

Minor Keys

“Our lives are composed of minor annoyances, right? Those little things that are small in and of themselves but add up, yeah?” Harold looks around but no one is listening. He decides to continue unabated.

“The laundry is not yet dry and won’t be dry because it’s in a machine that is broken but the lady doesn’t tell me. The cats have just pissed all over the floor, leaving it to me to wallow in the duty of cleaning up after them. The bureaucratic lender Sallie Mae has yet again messed something up with my account, and doesn’t seem to abide by human logic. The man on the phone (who I am sure is nice) is watching what he says and how he says it in case the Sallie Mae customer service/satisfaction agents are listening in and so even when I get to speak to a human, it’s a regulated, corporate machine”. They look at him in wonderment, their mouths dangling open. Harold doesn’t care.

“The little wheels on my desk chair won’t swivel so I keep slamming my knee against the desk and the levels of frustration just keep rising. I want to go to a movie but this entails me interacting with 5,000 people before I even get to the movie and the point of me going was to just have some space to myself but it’s a mute point in this city cause there are people everywhere!” His voice is rising, he hears giggles from the back.

“I just want to feel a non-chemically-induced relaxation for 5 minutes, a calming soothing sensation where I don’t feel like the city is conspiring to knock me down and run me over with its grungy 4×4 tires. Just a small break, that’s all I ask.” He sees it out of the corner of his eye as it is sent hurling towards his head. A gob of chewed up, sticky sucker smacks against his cheek. He sighs. The bell rings. Day 1 at Sunshine Preschool has come to a close.

The Pitch

“Okay, so here it is: Santa and every other imaginary creature except for the easter bunny leaves and the easter bunny is forced to deliver presents while simultaneously taking teeth from under pillows. He searches endlessly for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and loses his mind in the process. He then gives teeth as presents and leaves turds under children’s pillows. What’d ya think?”

Ralph looks at Sted, puzzled as all hell. “You do realize this is a children’s book, right? Two to three year-olds? Talking alphabets and dragons and fairy godmothers. That kind of thing?”

“Right, well I feel this has the makings of a new type of book, an emblazoned take on traditional children’s characters. A real winner. That’s what you’ve got here.” Sted grins, his upper gold teeth bare in unwelcoming company.

“Listen son. I’ve been doing this for 30 god-damned years and I can honestly say that your story, out of all the lousy stories I’ve been subjected to, is by far the most out of whack, pile of rat shit I have ever heard. I mean, what parent in their right mind would buy this for their small child? A flipped out, klepto rabbit shitting under children’s pillows is not what sells to this crowd. You can be damn sure of that”.

“Okay. So, the rabbit isn’t crazy. Done. Maybe he’s not crazy but just stressed out. I mean, come on. With Santa’s duties on top of everyone else’s, who wouldn’t be stressed, right? We could turn it into a moral story about how best to deal with stress in an increasingly stressful world. When the Rabbit Thought He Couldn’t. Something like that? As far as the stealing, I don’t know. It seems pretty central to the story, don’t you think?” Sted turns his head to the right and smiles like a postmortem deer.

“No. I don’t think. I don’t think cause the whole thing stinks. All of it. Let me be very clear because it doesn’t seem I am getting through to you: these ideas are not fit for children of two to three nor will they ever be at this publishing house. Not while I am here, not while the next guy is here, probably not while this building is still standing. In fact, if ever you come into this building again, ever walk by this building, breathe on it, touch it, even think about it, I will call the police and have your ass thrown in jail for disturbing the peace”.  Ralph is out of breath and huffs and heaves in his wooden chair.

“Okay. So we throw in a moral about not stealing. How borrowing is okay. Like stealing but then you give it back. The Taking and Giving-Back Bunny That Could. I like it Ralph”.

“165 emails. 43 calls. And now, 15 minutes of my life. Get out of my office you god-damned nutcase and take your cockamamie bullshit with you and never, let me repeat, NEVER come here, call me, or email me again.” Ralph’s flaring nostrils inhale a fly and a piece of string from his jacket.

“Fine. Unheralded fiction will come to glorious fruition in some other publishing house. I can sense when genius is unappreciated. Sir.” Sted bunches up his pink tutu, rolls his glossy-red lips over with his pierced tongue and struts out of the red man’s office on 6-inch, velvet-purple stilettos.