writing

The Goof

It was going to be a stinky day. Mark could feel it as he walked through the halls. Some days just stank, and this was one of them. He kicked an empty can in front of him and concentrated on the rattling, metallic noise it made. It was better to listen to that than to hear the conversations going on around him in which he wasn’t a part.

“Hey.” The Goof was waiting by his locker again. Mark knew his real name, but he never thought of him as anything other than The Goof. The Goof had big ears that stuck out of his head, big eyes, a big mouth and an oddly small nose. It was as if someone had looked at pictures of boys in a magazine and cut out different bits of their faces and assembled them together. The result was The Goof. Mark didn’t answer him as he opened his locker, hiding the combination with his hand. Thirty-two… Seventeen… Twenty. Open. It was like magic, a little piece of magic, this locker-opening business. All you did was twist a knob around, but you had to do it carefully, you had to concentrate or you’d have to start the whole thing over again.

“Hey.” The Goof wasn’t going away. Mark grunted his approximation of a greeting. The Goof, now secure that he had Mark’s attention, launched into a long speech about the recent discoveries or, as he pointed out, un-discoveries, about the shadowy mystery of the God Particle. Mark didn’t know what he was talking about. He tuned The Goof out, as he usually did, and grabbed his algebra textbook and his lunch from the locker before banging it shut and walking away, The Goof trotting along at his heels like a persistent terrier.

Ten

One is unnoticeable. To others.

Two is still unnoticeable. Except to myself.

Three is so little that only sharp-eyed will catch it.

Four is within normal fluctuation.

Five is still not enough to talk about.

Six is noticeable but the tactful will ignore it.

Seven is enough to talk about, in whispers.

Eight is undeniable.

Nine is unignorable.

Ten is the end of the world.

Another Birthday

Freckled with the usual sorrows that inevitably mark the crevices of our faces as we grow older, Ally celebrated her fiftieth birthday alone, stretched out on a foreign beach. She was wearing an old one-piece bathing suit that had become baggy on her during the last year. She’d never known how strange a baggy swimsuit could feel; it was like she was wearing a second skin that had begun sagging and stretching. She wondered if people who lost a lot of weight very quickly felt this way about their extra skin, and then she remembered that technically she could fall into that category and that none of her own flesh and skin felt this way.

The sunlight felt warm on her skin and she fleetingly worried about skin cancer, before bursting out laughing. A passing local – she could tell he was local because he was wearing tight Speedos rather than swim trunks – stared at her, startled. She smiled at him but silenced herself. She was still capable of being embarrassed. Shame and modesty seemed to be human qualities that you didn’t lose, even after being poked and prodded and operated on over and over again.

Three to six months, they’d said. It was now the seventh, and she got to celebrate another birthday, something she’d resigned herself to not being able to do. So she took herself to somewhere warm and faraway, where people didn’t look at her with tears or panic in their eyes at the idea that she could go at any moment.

“Happy birthday to me,” she sang quietly to herself. The crowded beach was noisy and no one heard her, thankfully. She flung an arm over her eyes and decided to take a nap.

Real Contact

I’m reading Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. It’s a fantastically strange novel, almost like a collection of short stories that span through a few decades and show the connections between a huge cast of characters that hardly seem like they should be related and yet are.

I don’t want to spoil it for those who’ve never read it, so I’ll just say that there’s a portion in it that deals with characters living a decade or so in the future, a time at which it seems that texting is the primary method of communicating with people. One of the characters seems profoundly uncomfortable with real speech and much prefers the cleanliness of the short messages we sent to each other via text, or T as it’s called by then. This disturbed me profoundly and I’m having a hard time getting through this section. The notion of real contact between people being something that’s disappearing is something I dislike. I also don’t really believe it’s true.

As a child of the generation that has grown up with increasingly small cellphones, increasingly faster internet and the increasing ubiquity of social networking in our lives, I still don’t believe that the near future contains the loss of real speech or contact between people. In my world, at least, social networking is another means of communication, true, but it’s far from being the only one or the most preferred one. I know few people who spend more time communicating with friends online than face to face.

Thoughts? Comments? Opinions?

Show the World

Forgotten pathways twisted underfoot, undulating like snakes, seeming to shift with every step I took. I’d been told that the marshes were eerie, difficult to navigate and frequently deadly, but nobody had described the way it seemed like a living, breathing being. Clutching the thick branch I’d been smart enough to bring with me, I poked and prodded at every patch of weeds that blocked my path, terrified that some creature would jump out at me, even though I knew that most creatures wouldn’t be stupid enough to allow themselves to be detected by a slow human like myself.

I hitched my knapsack higher on my shoulders. The weight of it was digging into my shoulders; there were two red marks where the straps cut into my flesh and rubbed it raw. It was useless complaining about it, though. For one thing, there was no one to hear me, and it’s not fun to complain aloud to yourself. For another, the contents that I found so heavy were what I was relying on to keep me alive in the marshes.

I was a fool to undertake that journey, of course. I was young, a journalist major fresh out of school, and I thought that I could do anything. I wanted to prove myself. To show the world just what I could do.

Too bad for me that the world decided to show me what it could do, too.

The Mistress and the Magicians

Mistress locked me in a room with a candle burning and a loaf of bread, whispering to me as she shut the door that she promised to return. I waited for her. I waited and waited, but she didn’t came. The candle flickered and burned out after a few hours, and still the dawn didn’t come. I opened the curtains, but I could see nothing outside. The storm was so bad that no light penetrated the dark clouds. I tore small pieces of bread off the loaf and chewed them slowly, hoping that they weren’t the last things I would eat.

She said that the Magicians were doing something dangerous and that she was trying to protect me. I believed her, because Mistress never lied to me. I’d been with her since I was a small child, and I remained at the castle after my mother, her previous maid, died of a wasting illness. Mistress was about my mother’s age, but infinitely more beautiful. She knew the secrets of the Magicians because she was married to one. I almost never saw her husband, though, even though I’d lived at the castle for most of my life. He was always shut up in the tower rooms with the other Magicians, or else away with them on one of their infinite tours with the militia.

The reason was, of course, that we lived on the Border, which is the only place Magicians were allowed to live. They weren’t illegal, because the Crown used their services, but they didn’t want them to be anywhere near the capital. Some people in the big cities, I’d heard, didn’t believe that the Border was real, and they thought the Magicians were mad, people who’d contracted some illness, and that the Crown was simply quarantining them far away so that they wouldn’t spread the disease. It was feasible, I suppose, but living on the Border as I’d done, I knew that they did a real service for us all. They kept us safe.

So I believed Mistress was trying to protect me. When the men came into my room, I thought that she’d sent them. I’ll never know now if she did or didn’t, because by the time they took me into one of the tower rooms that were Master’s workshops, Mistress was already dead, spread out on the floor with her face as white as can be. They didn’t let me run to her. They pulled me back, roughly, and I knew that it was my turn next.

Three Hours

I have slept only three hours in the past… Wait, I’m counting… Oh, my brain isn’t working well enough to figure it out. Point is, I haven’t been sleeping much lately. And this is the first time in a very long time that I’ve managed to valiantly survive a whole day, without taking a nap, on this little sleep. I feel strangely accomplished, and am now going to celebrate by going to bed.

Sand Running

Sand ran barefoot down the street.The hot asphalt only spurred him on. His shoes hung round his neck, the laces tied together, bouncing on his thin chest. The air was heavy with invisible droplets of water, and as Sand ran he felt like he was cutting a swath through a sponge cake.

Houses flashed by, their windows shut tight against the humidity. The A/C units whirred, trying to outdo the mosquito’s buzzing. A few old people sat on porches, fanning their faces with cheap touristy hand-fans that their children brought them from the big cities when they came to visit. They watched Sand run past with interest, but forgot about him almost as soon as he was out of sight. People often forgot about Sand.

His sister, for instance. She was supposed to have picked him up from school and take him with her to visit their mother, but she hadn’t shown up. Sand had waited for an hour, after the school’s office had closed already. He didn’t have a cellphone since he’d accidentally dropped his in a toilet while being beaten up in the bathroom and his father had refused to buy him a new one. Sand hadn’t told him about getting beaten up, though. His father would have just looked disappointed that his kid didn’t know how to fight back and would have offered Sand, yet again, to spar with him at the boxing club.

But Sand preferred running. He loved outstripping his thoughts, slow and sluggish in the August heat. He loved the calluses that developed on his soles and toes, so hard that he could tap his nails against them and hear the same noise he got when tapping on the lids of the overstuffed Tupperware containers in the fridge. He loved not being able to distinguish one face from another because he was past them all so quickly. He could pretend that they talked about him once he was gone instead of forgetting.

Fa-la-la-la-la

La-la-la-la!

‘Tis the season, and all that. WordPress is snowing again. Night is actually cold again. As a Jew, I see the Christmas thing only as a cultural holiday, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I adore the holly wreaths, the twinkly lights, the cheery atmosphere of the lit-up trees, and the thought of little kids running up to open presents from Santa on Christmas morning. Yes, I’m a bit of a big softie when it comes to things like this.

Sure, I also have a healthy dose of cynicism, and I was getting royally ticked off at the fact that many of these decorations went up before Thanksgiving was even over. Yes, I have that bitter, jaded college student in me who thinks that all holidays are just business opportunities for Hallmark and Starbucks.

But, well, I can’t help thinking that it’s all rather adorable.

In other news, my semester ends on December 16, which is also the day that I’m flying home for my month-long winter break. I am SO excited!

But Are We Friends?

“How sad is it,” Diana said, smoke emerging from her mouth in a great, dragon-like puff, “that I slept with him because I wanted to be his friend?”

Jay, who was listening to music in one ear, was only half paying attention. Stevie Wonder was crooning at him on one side and Diana was whining from the other, and his eyes were looking at the twelve stars that he could see in the sky above him. “You know what’s really sad?” he said.

“Yeah, that I slept with someone so that they would acknowledge my existence and be friends with me.”

“No. Well, yeah, that too. Gimme a cig.” Jay waited till he had one in his mouth and, while lighting it, continued through a half-closed mouth. “No, what’s really sad is that we look up at the stars, and we can see a few tonight, and we’re like oh wow, look at all the stars! And there are like twenty, if that, and we think that’s a lot. Out in the desert – that’s where stars really happen.”

“Dude, are you stoned?” Diana looked at him, irritable, and noticed that he had one earbud still stuck in his ear. “You’re not even listening! Damn, I thought we were going to have some girl time.”

“I’m not a girl.”

“I know, but you have conversations that aren’t about monster trucks.”

“No one talks about monster trucks anymore.”

“Whatever.”

The two college dropouts lapsed into silence on top of the old orange car. Jay was still lying on the cold metal, one arm tucked behind his head. Diana was sitting cross-legged next to him, her knees close enough to brush the edge of his jacket. The sound of traffic from the highway kept them company, along with the chilly wind.

“So are you friends now?”

“Huh? What?” Diana had been gazing at the lights of the faraway cars and letting her eyes go out of focus, turning her vision into a strange image of blurred yellow lines on a backdrop of black stillness.

“You and this person you slept with. Are you friends now?” Jay heard the deep tones of Leonard Cohen describing to him the way love felt, and he allowed himself to glance at Diana. Sometimes it was dangerous for him to do that. It would make him feel too much. But Leonard’s voice fortified him enough to do that, at least.

“I have no freaking clue. That’s why I’m so upset.”

“Ask, then.”

“What? I should just ask if we’re friends?”

“Yeah, sure, why not? Just say – we slept together, yeah. But are we friends?”

“I guess. But, I mean, with you and me neither one of us had to ask that, right? We just knew we were still friends. Cause we’d been friends before.”

“Mhm. But we’re different.”

“Yeah, we are.” Diana smiled vaguely and nudged her hand against Jay’s shoulder in a comradely kind of way. He stopped himself from flinching against such a casual touch, and took another long draw on his cigarette.