Month: May 2014

Good Enough

The sponge lying on the floor of the tub is unattractive. It is still relatively new, but its shape is unappealingly squat and it has sooty stains on it, as if someone has been scrubbing rust crumbs off their body.

It is leftover, this sponge, from previous tenants. It is incredibly absorbing, I find, when I get in the shower and begin to use it. Some people would find this disgusting. My roommate would tell me off, like she does when I pee and don’t wash my hands. She is a neat freak, putting ever pin in its place and surrendering her body to the needle over and over again. There are knife scars on the inside of her wrist. She’s exchanged one habit with another when scratching the surface stopped being enough.

She and I have just moved into a new place. We’re getting actual furniture. We listen to music loudly and don’t care about the neighbors. There are children in the apartments all around us and they cry at night. It’s not exactly payback, blasting Led Zeppelin, but it’s close enough to be vindictive somehow.

The windfall that has allowed us to do this comes from my disgusting habits. My frugality knows no bounds. I scrimp and I save for a living. Companies pay me to do this. It’s a handicap that I stumbled through for years until someone told me it was a talent. I get paid nicely now, but I make my roommate pay me back exactly for half of everything. When we move out one day, each of us finding a new home, we will saw our things in half. I can see the gleam in her eyes at that suggestion. She likes playing with knives.

My room is bare of artwork, books, personality of any kind. Like me, it is unadorned. The only items of significance are hidden beneath my bed, in taped-up boxes. The cardboard is old and falling apart, but I wouldn’t let me roommate unpack and repack them when we moved. Their rotting edges remind me that they won’t always stay shut. It’s important to remember that things can burst from their seams.

One day, maybe I’ll open those boxes. And maybe I’ll buy a sponge of my own. But for now, I keep the boxes shut tight, reinforcing the tape and sweeping away the cardboard dust that accumulates under them. And for now, I use the leftover sponge to purify my pores. I shave my legs with my roommate’s old razor. I tie string around my pants instead of a belt. It’s a good enough way to live, for now.

Mayor

Greenlighting the project was easy. The mayor looked over the figures, read the reports, talked to a couple experts and figured that she could approve it. She failed to anticipate the backlash. Streams of letters flowed into her office over the next few weeks. She stopped opening them. Each had enough rancor in it to last a lifetime and she didn’t need to feel like someone other than her boyfriend  was slapping her around.

The boyfriend. He was another bit of uneaten dinner languishing on her plate. She wouldn’t get any dessert until she’d licked the whole thing clean. A lesson learned in early childhood, the mayor applied it to all aspects of her life with equal fervor and taught her children to do the same. The mayor’s boyfriend was a coal-miner, and proud of it. She’s gotten together with him partly for political gain. Nothing screamed one-of-the-people more than a widow and mother of four who also dated what most would call “a common man.” But now that he was leaving bruises on her a couple times a week, she needed to figure out a way to get out.

At least the children were gone for summer camp, up near one of the state’s beautiful lakes. The mayor spent the summer trying to handle the mess she’d made by approving the plans without backing out of them. That would be no good. She couldn’t be seen as weak, caving in at each bit of opposition. No. She would tough it out.

The mayor went to bed on July 23d, her birthday, with a black eye and a squad car guarding her house. She had received several death threats serious enough to worry the police. The morning was far away, she’d kicked her boyfriend out of her house, and she missed her children. She tried to picture them going to sleep in faraway bunk beds, whispering with their new friends, but another image kept intruding: her own body lying mangled in the kitchen, greeting the children when they got back.

New Look

Am thinking about buying my domain name. Have also added my name because it’s visible through plenty of my links, and since this is a professional space, more or less. So hello, everyone, my name is now above, and if you feel like googling me, you’ll find some of my published stuff!

Is there anything anyone here would want more of? Writing prompts, continuing stories, writing about writing, non-fiction?

Nowism

Sparks fly in a pathetic attempt at fireworks. Jared takes his fingers out of his ears and peers into the cardboard box. Faulty. The cylinders he got for cheap off of Old Man Bombay are all faulty. They’re sputtering quietly as their fuses go out. Jared kicks the box and one of the fireworks whistles and bursts horizontally. It hits a tree and releases a few pathetic bursts of color that melt into the dark ground.
Jared curses. He’s lucky nothing caught on fire or he’d be done for. Prime brush fire area this is. Stupid to try to light the fireworks here. Lucky they didn’t work, he figures. His forehead is damp with the panic of what could have happened. The damage that could have been done.
Jared’s biggest enemy is the subjunctive. Might have been, would have been, might and could be. Lethal expressions as far as Jared is concerned. Past and future are full of them. Only the present, the ever-occurring now, is free. Jared is a strong believer in the now. He tried to start a cult once, called Nowism. It didn’t go very well. None of the women he wanted to bone would join. And what’s the point of a cult if you don’t get to screw everyone’s women, Jared decided.
He occasionally pretends that it had worked out. Pesky imagination, fraternizing with the enemy. Nevertheless, he does this. Imagines that his tent under the overpass is his private domain, that the women and men who follow him have tents set up all around him. They would have chosen this spot because of the traffic noise, shifting and surprising in its rhythms, a perfect metaphor for Nowism. Something could come flipping off the overpass any second, a drunk driver crashing through the barrier. Or there may be a scream ripping through the night as a happy couple shout their joy out the windows on their wedding night. Anything could happen down under the overpass, but the only thing that matters is that it is happening now.
Jared scratches his ear and wonders whether it’s time to head home. Is it time for bed or is it time to go beat the crap out of Old Man Bombay, the skinny heroin addict who’d never set foot in India. Big thoughts for Jared’s big head. His ear is really itching. He takes a nail file out of his pocket and digs in his ear, trying to locate the source of the itch and pry it out. Maybe an insect crawled in there and died in his earwax. The nail file comes out waxy but insectless. A good sign.
It’s too dark to beat up the addict. Jared decides it is time to go home. His tent is always there. It IS, this solid ISness of it a comfort. Jared takes the cardboard box of fireworks to show Old Man Bombay as evidence tomorrow and begins to trudge home through the field.
When the police came to investigate who’d been shooting illegal fireworks in the middle of the Hellers’ field, they found a wide, bony, ravaged body missing a head. It seemed to have been blown off by something. When they found the head a little ways away, it was wearing an expression of surprise on its face, as if it was expecting something else that should have happened.

This is Why You Became a Writer

You crave punishment. You don’t go so far as to sit on top of the railroad tracks, but you hold your hand out, waiting for the honking train to rush by and break it.
You crave rejection. You seek out men who will banish you and women whose hearts you will break and you succumb to the sweetness of the chase even long after the black t-shirted back is out of sight. They have run on ahead without a thought to you struggling for breath, jogging in heels you despise, mouth smeared with redness from hurried, forceful kisses.
You crave a world of goodness, where people peer into one another’s minds and consider the feelings and emotions of others. You write them, and you destroy them, because perfect people are boring. You give them flaws and bruises and illicit desires and you kill them, mutilate them, smash them into tiny closet corners and down mine-shafts and into irretrievable peril. You are like a child tearing the heads of dolls because she cannot look as pretty as them. You are like a songbird, rising every morning to chirp at the sun with absolute faith that it will rise. But in your world, the sun does not rise, has not risen since your own glow was snuffed out. You keep chirping, pill beneath your trilling tongue, and you hope.
You crave order that is chaotic and chaos that is orderly. You crave the paradox to make sense: for the boy to kill his time-traveling grandfather and still live, for Achilles to beat the tortoise while the tortoise triumphs. When asked if you are this or that, you want to simply answer YES.

Consumption

There’s a lump in her chest that is growing like a cancer. It isn’t cancer. It’s just a teardrop that rolled down her throat one hot summer evening and has stayed there ever since. It pulses when it expands, alerting her of its presence.
She is aware of it tonight. She is aware, as she scrolls through the names and numbers and faces and words of the people she has loved, even if only for a second, that she will always miss a greater number of people than that which represents the ones in her life.
She is aware as she looks at them that they are not lost. They have lives and friends and contacts in their cellphones. They have deadlines they are meeting and desires they are fulfilling. They are simply doing these things without her. And she is convinced that she has been erased from their minds, completely, as if she never occupied spaces in their beds, in their heads.
She is aware that as the train rumbles past on its delectable-sounding tracks it is carrying countless forms she will never encounter, and she misses them too.
She wants to take the whole world in. She wants to hug every human being she finds repulsive. She wants to sleep with everyone who thinks she is pretty, even if only on the inside. She wants to collect joys in a jar and pick them out one by one when the lump weighs heavily on her chest.
She cannot contend with reality. She pushes it away from the corners of her eyes and sets fire to images of a future long past.
When the words spread out of her fingers and massage themselves into her skin, she breathes a sigh of partial relief. She can keep the lump at bay but it will consume her. One day.