Dawn broke, and so did Ryan. He felt his mind splitting, disappearing within a vortex of pain and anguish. He hadn’t thought it was possible to feel this way, but here he was, lying in bed as the sun rose outside his curtained windows, and there was a yawning pit of emptiness sitting within his chest and sucking his internal organs into it. He had yelled, for a while. But then the neighbours from upstairs had pounded on the floor with their chairs and somewhere, Ryan still cared about what they thought, and he shut his mouth, feeling a burning shame come over him.
So for the last couple of hours, Ryan lay in bed silently, barely moving, knowing that the sound of the sheets moving sounded loud only to him and that no one else could hear it, but still too scared to move.
Nothing made sense to him. Nobody had died. Nobody had dumped him, not recently anyway. There was no reason for him to be feeling the way he was feeling. He thought he must be going mad. He wondered whether anyone else in the history of the universe could have felt as much pain as he was feeling at that moment.
There was a part of his brain that was talking sense and that kept telling him that he was merely going through a depressive episode, that it would pass, and that he had a lot of nerve to be assuming that what he was more dramatic or worse than what other people had felt at other times. When he thought of people dying in wars, being tortured and interrogated or gassed, he felt ashamed of himself.
The logical bit of him that was thinking this, the part of him that still had a personality and that hadn’t given everything up to the despair, was also rather intrigued by the whole thing. It was interesting, in a way, to be feeling as deeply about something that was utterly undefinable, unexplainable and unreasonable.
It was that part, that still reliably Ryan-like part, that decided that something had to be done. It forced the languid, limpid body to lean over and grab the phone from the bedside table. It forced the fingers to uncurl from their tight fists and to dial the number of his best friend.
“Ryan? Is that you?”
“Deb?”
“Oh my god, what’s wrong? You sound awful.”
“Yeah…”
“Seriously, Ryan, what is it? Who died?”
“Nobody.” He wanted to say more than this, but he wasn’t managing to articulate the words. His mouth opened but his tongue seemed to dry up almost at once and he gasped for air even though there was a steady breeze coming in from the other room.
“Ryan. Talk to me. Right now. You’re making me talk in cliches, and you know I hate that.”
It was that, more than anything, that somehow made him begin talking. The Ryan-ish part of him couldn’t bear to hear Debra talking in common phrases, so far from her over-stylized and careful vocabulary. Other people asked how you were when they talked to you on the phone; Debra asked you whether your muse was around and whether your lungs felt happy and whether your toes were enjoying the cold. She didn’t say things like “talk to me.”
Ryan explained, haltingly, with many pauses for gasps of air, what was happening. Deb was in London, and he knew even as he was talking that there was absolutely nothing she could do for him. He hoped that talking about it might help, but it wasn’t, not so far. On a normal day, Ryan couldn’t talk to her for five minutes without bursting out laughing, either at something flowery that she’d said or at a witty remark she’d made at his expense.
When she grasped the gravity of the situation, she began to ask him, with utter seriousness, whether he wanted her to come home. He teared up and began to sob, because she was the only person in his life who would do something like that for him. He choked out a resolute “NO” somehow, and made her promise him that she wouldn’t cut her vacation short.
He could almost hear her in his mind’s ear correcting him, as she’d done for the last few months when he’d complained about her going away. “It’s not a vacation,” she would say every time. “It’s a honeymoon. We’re going to dip the moon in honey and eat it and read poetry to each other during the rest of the time.” He’d rolled his eyes and expressed his opinions about how wrong it was for her to get married and she would shove him off whatever chair he was sitting on.
But she didn’t correct him this time, and that was what made him understand. He put down the phone without saying goodbye, and felt a fresh wave of sorrow lap at his feet and steadily rise to high tide. Meanwhile, the Ryan-bit of him was repeating the words “Huh. I didn’t realize that,” over and over again.
relationship
Jason and Michael
There are things that get resolved, and then there are things that don’t. Michael and Jason are, and have always been, once of those that don’t. They are brothers, you could say, but they don’t like thinking of themselves that way. They prefer referring to the fourteen years they lived in the same house together as a situational accident that nobody could have predicted and, thus, prevented.
They shared a mother, it’s true. They didn’t share fathers. If that were the only problem they had… well, things probably wouldn’t have turned out the way they did. But they did, and things are the way they are now, and that’s that.
Of course, both Jason and Michael don’t realize how ridiculously similar they are. It’s inevitable, you might say, that brothers who live in the same tumultuous household for fourteen years end up using the same turns of phrases, or, taking shots of vodka with the same exact swoop and shake of the head as the burn goes down. It’s inevitable, you might say, and you might be right, but the thing is that Jason and Michael spent most of their time during those fourteen years trying their hardest to be as different as people with similar genes could be. Sure, alright, maybe not all fourteen years were spent that way. There must have been a few years, at the beginning there, after Jason was born, when they weren’t around each other all that much because one of them was in preschool and the other was at their mother’s breast. There must have been a while when Jason even looked up to Michael, and maybe wanted, in a vague and faraway kind of way, to be like him.
But the thing is, Jason got over that awfully fast. It wasn’t just that Michael tormented him, although that must have played a factor. It wasn’t only that right from the start the boys had incredibly different temperaments. No, there was something deeper there, something mysterious and unknown, and it was this that forced them apart. Trying to get them to play nicely together was like trying to force the minus sides of batteries to touch each other. It was like telling the moon to go and dance with the sun for a while. Their mother gave up pretty soon on the idea of their ever being friends.
Then she gave up on them altogether.
Here are some of the things that Jason and Michael have in common now. Neither one of them blames their mother for any of the problems in their lives. They both use the same exact sentence when they try to describe her to people: She had a hard time of it, they say. Other people try, some less tactfully than others, to call BS, but neither one of the brothers will accept any criticism. They see her every weekend – Jason on Saturdays and Michael on Sundays – and they bring her flowers and they kiss her cheek and they look at her with eyes that seem to have regressed to tender childhood, and they don’t blame her.
Another sentiment they have in common is this idea of utter and complete independence. If anyone tries to help them into a parking place, for instance, they will get very annoyed, very quickly. When they’re sick, they pretend they’re not and show up for work anyway. They insist on lifting heavy things for their significant others, even now that they’ve both got the beginnings of bad backs, and cling to this chauvinistic notion of chivalry as an unbreakable rule.
Even their taste in music is similar. If they talked more often – ever, really – they might realize that they’d both drifted away from the vastly different and extreme genres that they used to like and have both fallen in love, at a later stage in life than most people do, with the tuneless musical poetry of Bob Dylan. But they don’t talk, so they have no idea.
Their significant others tried meeting each other for coffee once. They both had a vague notion that it would be a good idea to somehow intervene, perhaps even initiate some sort of reconciliation between the brothers. But an hour into their conversation, the two women were angrier with each other than they’d ever been with either Jason or Michael. They parted bitterly, each of them convinced, for the first time, that her partner had a reason for acting the way he did.
Jason and Michael don’t talk. I wonder, sometimes, whether they’d even recognize each other now. In the grocery store, for instance. If they both reached for the same pack of frozen fish fingers of that brand that their mother always bought.
Thin Disguise
The old building was cold, its concrete walls never absorbing the day’s sunlight. A small heater that sat in the middle of the room, its metal bars glowing a fiery, hellish red but spreading little enough heat beyond the foot or two of air right around it. The owner of the little room sat huddled by it, shirtless, with a sweatshirt draped over his back. The warmth on his chest almost felt as if there was another body there, pressed close to his.
He knew he should be working, spewing word after word onto the blank screen, crafting some sort of pseudo-intelligent babble that his dissertation adviser would eat up. A disturbing image of turds wrapped inside scones came to his mind; it seemed oddly fitting, though nauseatingly easy to imagine. He put his fingers up to the heater and marveled, as if he were four again, at the way the light shone right through his fingers, making the nails shine with the blood moving under it. The thought of blood always made him begin to hear his pulse knocking through his ears.
Her pulse had always been discernible in her stomach, right where his hand rested when they slept, curled up, their two pairs of cold feet trying to soothe each other in vain. That had been a long time ago. There had been others in his bed since, but they either didn’t spend the night or didn’t fit into the curve of his body quite as well. Besides, they’d all wanted to be the small spoon, and he often needed to be hugged himself, comforted in sleep by the presence of someone at his back. It was one of his only child-like traits. Otherwise, he was often too grown-up, he was told. Even in college, he’d never been as free as he should have been, as easy in himself.
The balcony door blew open and a sharp wind stung him. Getting up, his sweatshirt dropped to the floor, and he felt assaulted as he stepped over the heater, into the harsh breeze. He had to fight to close the door.
Passing
It was a mistake to think that going down Main Street at six o’clock in the evening would be a good idea. It was all part of getting over it, of living her life, of being the bigger person. She’d heard these phrases over and over again, coming out of her friends’ lips. She watched those odd flaps of skin move around those words, fascinated by the way they were formed out of clicks of the tongue and smacks of flesh on flesh.
It was strange, but over the last six months, all the faces Paige saw had turned into a strange arrangement of mouths and noses, eyes and ears. They stopped seeming like a cohesive unit – as they’d always seemed before – and began looking like collages, bizarre formations stuck together on a blank, flesh-colored slate. The only face that still made sense was the one that she hadn’t seen in person for twenty-six weeks.
But on the winter evening that she finally took the once-regular route home from work, Paige saw that face again, and its perfect clarity baffled her more than all the bits and pieces of faces that she’d gotten used to. He said hi, and she said hi back, and she could feel her mouth as if it, too, were its own entity and not connected to her skin any longer. The awkward pause lasted a lifetime and a nanosecond, both at once, and then he said that she looked good. Paige didn’t know what to say back, so she nodded and clutched at her bag. It was something solid and real, and the feeling of leather and fabric anchored her and reminded her that she was of this earth, not an alien who’d fallen from the sky moments ago. She remembered that she needed to get away, and fast, or something bad would happen, although she was unclear what that might be, exactly.
She didn’t turn back to look at him again. She was too scared that his face would have turned away by then and she’d only get to see the back of his head.
But Are We Friends? II
Diana woke up to the blast of a car horn. Her head ached with its usual weekend hangover. She half sat up in bed and looked out the small window. She flinched as another loud honk sounded from the orange car parked on the sidewalk next to the apartment building.
“Shut up! Some people are trying to sleep, you know!”
Diana pulled her head away from the window, worried that the old lady across the street who’d stuck her head out to yell at Jay would see her watching and associate her with the car. The neighbors were unfriendly enough; Diana didn’t need to give them another reason to shoot her distrustful looks. She pulled on a a big black sweatshirt and a pair of leggings and stuck her feet in mismatched Converse high-tops that had been worn so ragged that she used them like clogs.
“You seriously cannot do that. Ever. Got it?” Diana slammed the orange car door after her so hard that Jay looked past her nervously to see if she’d torn the handle off. She was breathing hard and leaning towards him, hair in a messy bun smack on top of her head. She looked ridiculous.
“What? Pick you up for pancakes on a Saturday morning?” Jay fluttered his unusually long eyelashes.
“Don’t play innocent.” Up came Diana’s finger and down came her voice. She was, Jay thought, the only woman in the world whose voice went low when she was angry rather than turning high-pitched and squeaky.
“I’m not – ow! Stop it!” But Diana didn’t. She kept poking his chest and stomach mercilessly while he began to laugh helplessly. He was incredibly ticklish.
“Now here’s what you can do to make it up to me.” Diana leaned back, tired. “First, change this depressing music.”
“It’s not depressing, it’s-”
“Dylan. I know. Poet, artist, musician extraordinaire, blah blah blah. I know. Put on something that doesn’t make me want to slit my wrists, will you?”
Jay rolled his eyes but took out the ancient Dylan cassette and pushed in an equally old Earth, Wind & Fire tape. He watched Diana’s stupid hair arrangement begin to fall down as she bobbed her head to the trumpets and drums. As he began to drive she let her hair down from its constraints. He kept watching the road purposefully. “What’s second?”
“Huh?”
“You said that changing the music was ‘first.’ So what’s second?”
“Oh, right. Second… second is you pay for breakfast!” Diana punched the roof of the car triumphantly.
“Can’t. No money. Spent it on gas to pick you up.”
“Oh. So I have to pay?”
“Yup.”
“Oh, fine, whatever. But you owe me.”
“Yeah, well, I owe you like a hundred dollars by now. At least.”
“No, I mean you owe me a second thing to make your rude awakening of my neighbors up to me.” There was a grin playing around the corners of Diana’s mouth that made Jay’s stomach turn. His knuckles on the steering wheel turned white. If Diana had looked over, she might have seen this and noted it, but she was busy looking out the window, giving attractiveness scores to the guys she saw passing.
Open-Casket
The church felt damp, which didn’t make any sense. How could stone and wood feel damp? Whether or not it was feasible, that was how it felt to Gina, and she kept wiping her hands nervously inside the pockets of her black pants. She worried that her mother, lying in the open casket across from the pews, would glisten with unearthly moisture and would freak people out.
All the way across town, Nicholas was getting ready for the funeral. He kept changing his mind about what tie to wear. There was a dark green one and a dark blue one and he couldn’t decide which one looked darker. He had almost bought a black tie just a couple months ago, but had then decided that he’d never have occasion to use it. Gina’s mom provided the occasion now. She always did like to be contrary.
Gina stared at her mother’s pale, pinched face. Her lines had smoothed out a little and she looked younger than she had before she died. The expression around her mouth was still the same, though. She was scowling.
In the cab, Nicholas asked the driver what color his tie was. The man looked at him like he was insane, but humored him and looked in his rear-view mirror. “Green,” he said. Nicholas cursed himself and wished he’d worn the dark blue one.
Gina heard footsteps and turned. Nicholas came up to her, wearing a sympathetic expression. His eyes looked tired and one of his shoelaces was untied, although he didn’t seem to notice. Gina smiled and hugged him. They stood together and looked at her mother. “I almost wish she’d wake up and tell us to get married or break up already,” Gina said. Nicholas kissed her head and squeezed her shoulder. He didn’t wish any such thing.
Flight
Flying was not new to Gretchen Mckenna, but it was always wonderful. Adjusting herself, she wheeled to the right, feeling the leap in her stomach as the small craft dipped and caught the next thermal. Her feet resting on a poll behind her, at the bottom of the wingspan, and she felt the inevitable itch that she always seemed to get on her calf at some point during flight. She forced her mind away from it and concentrated on watching the fields below her for a convenient place to land. She didn’t want to flatten a whole row of beautiful corn plants if she could help it.
The sky was a magnificent blue above her, and it seemed impossible that below, on the ground, there was anything wrong with the world. She wondered perversely whether it would be possible to simply exist without any human companionship; maybe then she’d never, ever, need to be exposed to the meanness, the smallness, the pettiness, the stupidity and callousness of those around her. She knew that a fifteen-year old girl shouldn’t be as negative and as done with life as she felt she was already, and she was guilty about that.
If she’d been at all suicidal, she could have snapped herself out of her harness and fallen to her death any time during this and all her other flights. But she had a deep will to live and find something better, something worth living for. She was determined to find it. The family she was born into was all wrong for her; they were bigots, they spurned any kind of education and laughed at her pleasure in reading, they encouraged her to be a “normal” girl and go out to parties where she would get plied with alcohol and lewd offers. There weren’t parents or siblings like she had in most of the books she checked out of the small, rural library that she spent her time in.
A draft carried a scent of damp earth from below and Gretchen realized her mind had wandered and she was getting closer to the ground in her circling. She found an empty expanse of weedy field to land in. She wasn’t looking forward to the long trudge home, lugging the surprisingly heavy craft behind her, but she dreaded even more arriving home and hearing her family berate her for being gone all day, again.
One day, she thought, I’ll fly away for real.
Everything Unlike
Rhonda appeared unconcerned. Her hair looked particularly well that day, and she knew that everybody in the restaurant must be looking at her, arching their eyebrows in jealousy or appreciation. The person across from her was arching his eyebrows to, but with anger.
“So you’re lying to me,” he stated.
“No, William. I’m not.”
“Then you’re lying to yourself.”
“That might be a possibility,” Rhonda admitted. She didn’t think it was so, but if she were lying to herself she probably wouldn’t know it. She was an excellent liar.
“What on earth can you want with me? Why do you keep toying with me?” William’s voice was still barely above a whisper. He had an impeccable sense of propriety, and he disliked having this conversation in the crowded eating-house, but she had brought it up.
Rhonda knew, of course, that both the subject matter and the setting would pain him, but for some reason she didn’t mind. It was odd, especially since she was so incredibly convinced that she loved him again. She had changed her mind various times, but she’d never seen herself as cruel for doing so. Even William didn’t see her as cruel. He saw her as Rhonda – nothing more, nothing less, and he didn’t really understand what he meant by that, only that it made sense to him.
“I’m not toying with you, dear, I really mean it this time,” she said.
“You’ve meant it before.”
“True.”
Rhonda patted her hair delicately, making sure that the tumble of curls at the back was still only half-collapsed, looking as if it had fallen out of an arrangement and just happened to rest so beautifully on the nape of her neck as it did. She adored this sort of pretended natural style. Her clothing was similarly on the verge of looking windswept and rumpled, and her face was made-up very lightly, as if she hadn’t finished applying the proper cosmetics before she’d had to rush up and go somewhere.
William loved all this about her, no matter how fake it was. He often convinced himself that there was no artifice involved at all. He thought that she was so consistent in her inconsistencies that they must be genuine.
She read him like a book. Though not exactly cruel, she had a streak of playfulness that made her fickle, and there was no one who could stand it in her the way William did. So Rhonda used him. She knew she used him, but she also knew that he enjoyed it on some perverse level.
It never even occurred to her to feel guilty.
Kiss Me [Flash fiction]
“Kiss me.
I want you to kiss me.
Do I get a kiss?
So what about a kiss?
How about a kiss?
Goddamn it!”
Shannon’s face screwed up and she put her fists over her eyes, blocking the view of her rapidly reddening face in the mirror. She breathed deeply, trying to calm down. She felt the blush recede slowly, and took her hands away, although her eyes were still closed. Puckering her mouth, she made a soft kissing noise and then uttered a loud “yech!” Turning away from the mirror she grabbed the phone off her bedside table and scrolled through the texts she’d received from Peter. They weren’t many of them, but they all seemed to indicate that he enjoyed the two evenings they’d spent together.
So why won’t you kiss me? she thought fiercely, trying to telepathically send him the question burned across the coils of her thoughts. She wasn’t obsessing. She’d been warned not to obsess again, not over another one. The past three men had been nothing, bodies that she remembered stretched naked in her bed, unappealing in the morning when the alcohol and excitement had worn off. But Peter was different. He and she had known each other for years, had worked together companionably at the factory. There was that one week when she’d been transferred to make up for a lack of employees in some other section, and it had been horrible, full of men trying to hit on her and women who looked at her tank top and low-slung jeans derisively.
Peter saw past that. He told her about his troubles at home and how his wife’s last miscarriage had been the final blow for them. He was a widower, and three dead babies hadn’t helped him emotionally. But Shannon thought that she might be helping. She wanted to see him in her bed from the first time they’d met, but, uncharacteristically, she’d never made a move, even when he and his wife were separated. She waited until the divorce papers went through, and still never hinted at her interest in him. Instead, she continued to date others, pretending that everything in her life was just the same as it had been.
But then, finally, he’d asked her out. And now he wouldn’t kiss her. Tonight was the third date, and she didn’t know if she should kiss him or not. She didn’t want to, though. After years of being the initiator, she thought that it was someone else’s turn this time. She threw her phone back on her narrow bed and strode over to the closet. The door creaked as she opened it. She pulled down one of the blankets from the top shelf, a blue and purple afghan, and flung it over the mirror. Then she picked up her toiletry bag and went to the shared bathroom in order to get ready for her date.
But all night, the two words that kept going around and around her mind, looping like a broken record, were ‘kiss me.’
Week
Will you be weak first,
Or shall I?
It’s been a week, the first,
And I’m sorely tempted.
But maybe the weakness
Is in my mind and heart only.
Mother says it isn’t so,
And others say it too,
But my aching sore,
My blistering insides
Where someone came
And took something away-
That hole tells me it is.
Will you be weak first,
Or shall I?
A weak week it was,
Laughter stolen,
Soul broken,
Eyes bright in the glass.
But worry not, for weakness fades,
And strength gathers anew.
A week from now,
Where will you be?
Shall I be there too?
Slightly Ignorant 