Correct me if I’m wrong, though I’m not wrong, but I believe you are having a psychotic break, my friend. Yes, you, that’s right, don’t look at me like that, all doe-eyed and infantile. Your nose is big enough to tell you something is rotten in the state of Denmark but you can’t tell when your own blood and guts are rebelling against you? Well, my dear, it might be time for you to end it, then, to end it all, to surrender to the great extinction that is, after all, the obvious end to our species. Don’t cry, weeping is only another way of avoiding the situation.
Looking at the moon, are you? It’ll do you no good, you know, to keep on howling at it, you only have two legs and your fur is hypoallergenic. Nobody needs to take Benedryl around you, they only take handfuls of Advil and hope their heads stop hammering. Yes, she’s as crazy as a bedbug, that’s what they say, you got it just right there, darling. It’s not a reflection on you, you know, it’s only what they all see in the mirror and scratch at their skin when they’re in bed.
Get off of there, don’t even try going overboard, it won’t work. Nobody believes you, that’s the problem. You need a break? I should say so. Let’s check you in, come on, I’ll hold your hand the whole way there and I’ll visit you every Sunday until I forget about you. By then you won’t like me anyway, so it’s fine. You don’t like me already? That’s wonderful news, it’ll make the whole thing easier, now tie your shoes and let’s get going.
It’s only a one way trip, nothing to be scared of. Think of it as your own personal visit to Mars, doesn’t that make it more colorful?
flash fiction
It wasn’t about us, really
The swirling of all our stomachs at the same time was only the effect of the roller coaster. It wasn’t about our feelings, it really wasn’t. We just needed to get away from the ground, so we took a trip to the nearest Six Flags, screaming the lyrics to songs we barely knew all the way there, and paid the entry fee and found the roller coaster with the shortest line and hopped on.
The separation of our bodies from the earth was what made us queasy. Really. It wasn’t the divorce papers we’d signed that morning. It wasn’t our parents dying. It wasn’t the loss of faith in a childish heaven with pearly golden gates. That never made sense to us, anyway. How could anything be both pearly and gold? White gold wasn’t something we’d heard of yet back then, we were too young and poor. The realization that heaven could still exist for us only came later, dropped like a bomb in our backyards, tearing everything to shreds while we were scrambling to get out of the bathtubs we tried to drown ourselves in day after day.
There is turmoil and there is peace, and sometimes they coexist. At the top of the roller coaster that day we could feel both forces pulling and pushing at us, creating the perfect equilibrium. We knew in that moment that everything that had been holding us down would dissipate in smoky clouds and that we would never need to breathe lungfuls of rotten eggs again.
Restrained
There is nothing under the deep wide endless feckless ocean of a sky that I could possibly want from this son of a gun with his hat and his shades and the voice honeyed smooth with WD and moisturizer. There is something Slavic about his voice, though I can’t put my finger on what it is. Maybe a slight rolling in his Rs, not piratical so much as alcohol-infused even when he’s stone-cold sober. But maybe it’s something else, some shadow of a Cold War era film that plays at 4am when my insomnia is kicking me in the gut with its steel-toed boots.
I do not want a thing with him, with this Berkovitch, but he keeps showing up on my doorstep anyway, trying to sell me stuff I don’t need. He posed as a pizza delivery guy once, and I nearly opened the door that time, thinking some charitable friend had seen my Facebook status of announced hunger and laziness and had taken pity on me. But no, it was just Berkovitch, forehead and eyebrows huge and chin minimized to a pinprick in the fisheye view through the peephole.
“Go away, Berk,” I yelled through the several layers of reinforced metal I was lucky enough to have as a barrier between me and him. “Trot off, sniff at some other pussycat, shoo.”
“Pizza delivery,” he insisted, looking down at what was, unmistakably, an empty pizza box. There were no signs of grease anywhere on it, and no friend of mine would have ordered me some kind of low-fat, low-cal, oil-free pizza unless it was April Fool’s and they were trying to be cruel. Messing with my favorite meal is a profanity against a religious experience I don’t easily stand for.
“I’m calling 911 now,” were the words that made him shuffle away. He left the pizza box on my doorstep. I checked it after a while because I really was hungry and I was tricking myself into thinking maybe the guy had left me something edible in there, but it was empty, all empty, just a big childish scrawled heart drawn inside with a pen that was clearly only half work, going on the fritz, since the heart shape needed to be reinforced with lots of lines drawn over and over with various inky thickness to make sure it was legible.
Nothing, really, nothing I could want with a guy like that, this Berkovitch man, who posed as an Avon salesman the first time he came by, and had a civil and quite invigorating conversation with me about how Avon were trying to change their face by not sending out only women anymore, because that was sexist. It was true, I agree, the term “Avon lady” seemed to mean something pretty universal, if you, I added, meant to restrain universality to a certain demographic and geography and socioeconomic standing which, he agreed this Avon gentleman, most people did. But then, see, he turned out to only want to tell me I was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, and while it was nice to hear, because I’d been having some bad luck around that time, I realized he was a creep and a fraud and threw him out.
And now, well, now he’s just around, and he keeps coming back and sometimes I think about opening the door because he seemed intelligent except for the creepy stuff, and maybe I should let him in and just tell him we can talk and be friends, but the last guy who stalked me stuck a knife in my thigh in the end and I still walk with a limp so I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t do that, but I should call the police and that’s something I just haven’t done yet because really, poor guy, right? Poor guy.
Something Sharp
Their dogs run around wildly, leashes dragging behind them. It isn’t accidental, this leaving on of leashes. It’s strategic. If the dogs get into a fight, the owners want to catch at the leash quickly, yank the animals away from each other with a sharp pull at the neck that shocks the air and bark out of them. It’s cruel, sure, but efficient. Technically, they’re not supposed to let the dogs off the leash in the park either, so it’s a way to get around the rules, sort of.Â
Ida’s dog is small, lean and brown with perky chopped ears and a mouth bigger and louder than all hell. He’s a sweetheart when he keeps it shut, but he gets high strung and barks at people too often. Some think he’s mean, and she spends half her Saturdays with him fighting her arthritic knees in order to run after his leash when he gets too barky around little kids who don’t like it. Little kids these days, she always thinks, have been raised too soft, like melting marshmallows. Squeeze ’em, and the soft stuff in the middle will pour right out. It’s the reason she prefers her dog to her own grandchildren. She never utters such a blasphemous confession, barely admits it to herself, because she loves her kids’ kids, of course she does. She just doesn’t have a lot of patience for them. They’re too spoiled, their lips wobble so easily, they want and want and want.Â
Ruth feels Johannes’ arm’s weight on her shoulders and keeps her mouth zipped. She doesn’t tell him to take it off, that she’s warm, that it’s heavy, that he’s making her uncomfortable. They just moved in together, it’s their first weekend sitting outside with the dog, it’s too early for so much criticism. He’s a sweetheart, but he’s so proud of her in public that it’s hard to bear some days. She sees the old woman sitting to the bench on her left, past Johannes’ skinny little body, and wants to sit with her instead, to be a woman among women. Her dog is female, a gorgeous collie she got for free from a friend who couldn’t sell the runt of the litter. She’s named her Posy, a terribly sappy name, yes, but it suits the fluffy dog. Ruth is sometimes childish like this. Johannes isn’t, is the problem. He never wants to go out with a picnic basket and lie in the sun all day, or play with the dog. He wants to hold onto Ruth and sit stoically with her on a bench, a picture-perfect couple of yuppies. He wants to take her out to dinner at fancy restaurants where he gets to wear loafers and nice pants with a gap in between to show off his socks. He’s the kind of person who cares about what socks he wears. Ruth’s socks are all old, holey, and often mismatched.
Ida calls her dog over and he doesn’t come. She leans back on the bench. He’ll come when he’s ready. She sees him playing with the collie that belongs to the couple next to her. She’s pretty sure they’re new in the neighborhood, at least in the park. Though the dog is familiar, that collie. Maybe one of them is new? She doesn’t recognize them together, anyhow. They have that glow, she thinks, that smug us-against-the-world glow that young couples have. It’s tender, but so thin a veneer that she could pop it with a needle. Not that she keeps needles on her, or anything else sharp for that matter. It’s safe being an aging lady in this town. She’s thankful for that.Â
Johannes’ stomach rumbles. He leans his chin on Ruth’s hair and rubs it around. She makes a sound in her throat which he takes for satisfaction, although it is impatience. He asks her if she’s ready to go have lunch yet. You go, she tells him. She wants to play with the dog a little. He says nothing, but he stays.
Sticks on Stretched Leather
The drums thud in time to her heart. She feels loud some days, her mouth as wide as the sticks she plays with. She runs and runs and runs and is always behind the other girls running to school. She can’t catch up. Her legs don’t let her. The girls don’t know what she does in secret. They don’t know she runs at night too. She runs and runs and runs at night to the valley. Her head thrums with rhythms and she falls asleep in lessons and there are no two ways about it, she won’t be going to school next year. She knows she is wasting her time and her father’s money. Her mother’s care. Her sister’s sacrifice. But the books in tatters at the school and the walls dripping with sweat and Teacher shouting when they forget their lessons – there is no reality to it. There is no tradition.
The rhythms. There is tradition in the rhythms. In the footsteps on the ground and the dances and the songs. She sees the way the women look at the elders. Even the elders who have forgotten how to eat by themselves and who don’t go far enough away from the river to do their business, even they get looked at with respect. Even the smallest elders with the biggest ears that the little children laugh at, even they remember the drumbeats when everything else is gone. It is soul, the rhythm. It is heart. It is mind and body and memory.
Everyone’s history is in that beat. She thrums to the story of them all and practices far from anyone who can hear, and waits until one day she will be able to show them, show them all, that she has learned their family names in the language of sticks on stretched leather.
Craving
Carter bangs the till shut. He taps an order into the touch screen. He takes money from a customer. He counts the dollars, the quarters, the dimes, the nickels, the stinking pennies. He presses the button that shoots the till open. He puts the money into the right slots. He bangs the till shut.
The clinging of coins and rattle of his monitor aren’t satisfying. He’s used to the sound. It rises around him from the other four till workers. It’s the movement of his arm, back and forth, the same feeling he gets when he vacuums his small apartment. It’s the powerful thrust forward that makes something happen. There’s an agency to it that has become better than violence.
He’s tried violence. He boxed at the gym after beating people up in bars didn’t work out well. He did three months in jail that one year, and he never wants to go back. It was a cheap jail, not federal, not one of the places where they invest money for long-term stays. It was a revolving door there, people in and out. There wasn’t any time to make connections, figure out who did favors for who, whether it worked like the movies. He tried to keep his head down, ended up getting the crap beaten out of him anyway. Bruise for bruise, he figured. He started wearing his mother’s old cross necklace when he got out, hoping it would remind him of something. Mostly, he just remembers to feel guilty when he wakes up late on Sunday and realizes that he’s late for work, never mind that he’s missed church too.
There’s a girl now. In front of him. She’s a sweet thing, younger than him, but he always feels like that about any pretty woman, even when she’s his age exactly. He smiles at her. He takes her money. He puts it in the till. He slams it shut. She doesn’t smile back at him. She looks away, swallows, keeps chewing her gum. Carter opens his mouth to ask her name, to tell her his, even though his is written on the name tag on his shirt, but she glances at his mouth, sees the hole where one of his teeth should be and isn’t, and her lips suck in and shuffle sideways on her face in muted disgust. She turns away and walks to the pick-up area to wait for her food. Carter keeps his eyes straight ahead, his lips shut tight.
He craves whiskey and his apartment. He craves a moment alone, without the jingle of commerce and the false music of the mall echoing from beyond the food court. He craves a tooth he lost in a fight that didn’t make him feel better for longer than half an hour. He craves a punching bag. He craves the girl.
Squirt
The worst fantasy usually came around four o’clock, with an hour to go before the end of his shift. Kneeling on the carpet, gut hanging like a bowling ball bag over the belt holding his uniform from falling off his skinny haunches, Bob squirted cleaning solution onto the coffee-colored stain. Hours ago, it smelled like coffee, too, but so many people had walked on it by now that it smelled of lint and shoes. Someone walked on a dog’s little surprise too, Bob was pretty sure. His nostrils were sensitive, kept clear by the burning mist that rose from the red-bodied, purple-nozzled bottle in his hand.
The fantasy, the worst one, was intimately concerned with this nozzle. It was plum-purple, with a white twisting square on the end that shifted from OPEN to CLOSED position. Bob pictured himself turning the nozzle towards him and sticking it into his mouth, potent as a pistol. He saw himself squirting over and over, could almost taste what he usually only smelled, the sickly sweet chemicals landing in great white droplets on his tongue and sudsing-up as he’d begin to cough, the mist crawling into his lungs and bubbling there lethally. It would be a slow, painful death, if it even killed him. If he lived, he’d get fired, for sure, and he’d get sent to the hospital where Medicaid would need to cover him because his bank account wouldn’t be able to cover an ambulance fee, let alone a hospital stay.
His knees ached and his elbows felt like rusty hinges as he rubbed his white rag over the coffee-stain, pointlessly. It would take baking-soda to draw out the stain, but they wouldn’t give him any. They insisted on him using the same liquid cleaner for everything, from wood to glass to plastic. He leaned back and pulled mucus back into his throat, feeling the wetness curl down his throat. It was five after four. He had another fifty-five minutes. He had a coffee stain to get out. His large, pregnant-seeming stomach rumbled.
He leaned forward, and squirted some more onto the brain stain.
Never Be
Standing in the corner with the umbrellas and the hat-rack is an old rolled-up map of places the old woman has never been. She sits and rocks in her chair in front of the television that has been broken since 1967 and stares at the window behind her left shoulder and the silhouette of her figure  reflected in the rounded screen before her. The dials are dusty and the buttons are cracked with age. The plug is melted to its socket from the time a bad power outage sent a surge through the wires and sparks flew everywhere.
The old woman’s cheeks are sunken in and her shapeless knit hat is askew. She chews her bottom lip in a rhythmic motion that matches her rocking, and she counts. She counts the steps it takes to get from her chair to the kitchen, and from the kitchen to the post-box outside. She counts the steps it takes to get to the store in town and to the bus stop that takes to the city and to the music hall in the city where she saw the young man with the broken tooth and the newspaper hidden in his jacket and the glasses fitting his face lopsidedly. She counts how long it would take her to find her address book and run her finger down the alphabet to find his name; how long it would take to get a grip on the page and how long it would take to flip to it without ripping any of the pages in between. She counts the teeth left in her head and the days that have passed since her children have visited.
She counts wrong, often. She loses the thread between four-hundred twenty-seven and four-hundred twenty-eight. Sometimes she skips numbers, going from one thousand and one to twelve-thousand fourteen without a pause.
Her door is unlocked and she waits for the cowled figure she was promised in childhood. She remembers pictures of hourglasses and the fear of other girls looking at the scythed man beside them in the tarot cards. She knows exactly what she will say if he ever shows up. She will complain, and ask why he didn’t come when she could still take a step, a dance, a twirl. He will have to carry her out now, she’ll point out, and what, she’ll say, is the point of that.
Quickie #6 – Mostly Jill
Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack was a figment of Jill’s imagination, you see, so when he broke his crown (while falling down) it was hard for Jill to stay up top with her heavy pail, alone and afraid with her mind shut down and quiet all of a sudden, a girl broken up. The snake in the garden was small comfort but he was someone to talk to at least and he promised to help her get home, so she let him bite her ankle and tumbled down the hill and straight down a rabbit hole where she got stuck, rather, and had to wait for some pounds to trickle their way off her body, drip drip dripping down into a pail (that the rabbit in the hole kept for just such purposes) until she could shimmy back out again.
When she attempted the hill again, it was much steeper than it had been before and she kept finding herself too tired to climb more.
I’m too old, Jill realized, to be climbing these hills anymore.
Rough Night
“Someone’s having a hell of a night out there.” Earl’s rough palm was wrapped around the glass of cool beer, his body heat seeping through it. In ten minutes he would make a face and complain that his beer was warm and blast it all, what was it these days, it was October, the weather shouldn’t be this nice, something was happening and Lord only knows who’s being punished for what.
But his beer was still cool as he lifted it to his puffy lips to drink and he listened to the car alarm circle around itself in endless loops that changed tone and pitch depending on how he concentrated his ears. It sounded either like a repetitive beep-beep-beep or like a continuous whine then pitched up and down like the cheap roller coaster ride he’d helped put up at the Harvest Fair the week before. It was a sound he couldn’t keep his mind as firmly wrapped around as his hand around his glass, and it puzzled and pleased him.
“Mhm.” Rosie agreed, too late, to Earl’s assertion. Maybe she was humming in her head and had let a note slip out. Maybe she was nodding assent at the litter of kittens suckling in the corner of the yard under the cover of the mulberry bush. You could never tell, with Rosie.
“Poor bastard, somebody’ll call the police on him if it keeps on going.” Earl couldn’t tell if the car alarm’s volume was actually shifting or whether it was his ears. He had to go to the doctor again, get some wax taken out. They’d wanted to give him a hearing aid last time. He’d said no-sirree, it was just wax buildup and please take it out. The gold nuggets in his ears would have been worth millions if they were the real metal, Earl always joked. The doctor and his assistant shrugged and looked at each other and Earl had known what they were thinking, because it kept happening – that look. Just wait, just you wait, he’d wanted to tell them, until you get old, and see how you like that look then.
Rosie brushed her hands off from the dirt she’d been digging in. It was soft and moist from the watering can sprinkling she’d given it, and it looked good enough to eat, the richness exuding a smell as succulent as chocolate-pecan pie.
The sun was setting and the car alarm was still going and Earl hoped there was someone out there having a bad night of it. It was all part of the experience, having bad nights. All part of the same process, that getting old part people forget about.
Slightly Ignorant 