Intents and Purposes

            She’d been on the back stoop all afternoon, starring at the red fence between the neighbor’s yard. At first she’d been reading, but now the book lay beside her. She’d barely moved for five hours, listening to the house and the family inside: Mom setting the table, dad coming home, Dave bursting the door open, a half muted fight then the door slamming, and a car screeching away.

            No one had been out to look for her yet. They probably thought she’d gone to Mary-Beth’s, not an unreasonable inference, she thought ruefully, given recent behavior. She’d spent all last weekend there, although she wouldn’t tell anyone but Mary-Beth the why.

            Before she had come outside, she met her mom on the stairs. She’d hidden the book behind her back and hugged the railing. Mom pushed by with a mountain of freshly laundered clothes. Mom asked in passing, “How’s Jacob?”

            In her ignorance, she said, “Fine.”

            They’d met in cross-country, both of them middle of the pack runners too lazy to meet mediocrity. He’d complimented on her latest dye-job. She’d liked the way his smile only ever touched the right side of his mouth.

As time went on, they began to become more verbose in these rear guard conversations, discussing just about every detail of their lives at one point or another. Each day presented an hour or so of mostly uninterrupted conversation.

Sometimes, Ms. Corelli would hang back to yell at them and the others, most of whom were actually doing their best. One day, she’d directed her malice at the pair of them, saying, “Jacob and Miranda, quit the flirting.”

Miranda would return the scowl, but with her head lowered. She perceived herself as somehow better than flirter. But Jacob would smile. It’s how she learned his name actually. It was a topic that they’d skipped too often and had become embarrassed about.

Later, after the groups of girls and boys had showered and changed into seasonable clothes, they talked again. They were all filing out and drifting apart, into groups expecting rides, or desiring a chat, the seniors going off as loners or joiners, laughing it up to freedom.

Miranda leaned on the bike stands. She was scouting for her mom, when he came up behind her. She jumped, then laughed. He smiled. He took up a position next to her.

“Waiting for a ride?”

“Yeah.” He wore flannel. She could have guessed that. He probably had Nirvana in his tape deck, that or Soundgarden. She bet he would sing along. She cocked her head and decided she was okay with that.

“I can give you one.”

“Oh, thanks, but my mom-“

He cut her off, “Say no more. I know how…particular parents can be.” His smile didn’t dim. “But, how about telling her you got a ride for tomorrow?”

“Sure.” She tried not to smile.

He waved to her as he left, “Catch you later.”

The next day she rode shotgun in his Dodge Dart. It was black turning to rust. Halfway through the ride, he awkwardly wrapped his arm around her shoulder. She didn’t stop him. She smiled to him when he dropped her off and he saluted. Her mom was waiting inside.

“Who was that young man?”

“Jacob.”

“Is he nice?”

Miranda opened the fridge, grabbing the cider. “Yeah.”

Mom had been smiling. She would always like Jacob.

They’d gone on their first date as a double, with her friend Thomas and his friend Mary-Beth. Miranda had never met the girl before, and watched as Jacob and her interacted. She would have laid money on them being exes.

Jacob for his part was cordial to Thomas, who didn’t look happy to be there. He kept fidgeting; his eyes kept looking at the door. He didn’t talk much to Mary-Beth.  She talked at him. She was peculiar that way. She liked the inanimate. She discussed with herself fashion and fiction, whole Thomas nodded and feigned some understanding.

He kept looking from her to his hands to the door.

Miranda worried about this. The miscalculation both had probably made. The effect it would have on the evening.

On their way to the theatre, they rode in near silence. The boys were in the front, switching stations as announcers roared in and droned out. They had similar enough taste in music for a denetente to be reached, but the girls in the back had no such bridge.

They sat still and would sometimes look at each other than glance away. Miranda compared herself to Mary-Beth. She was prettier. More alternative. Much more like Jacob, and in odd ways. Where he had his half smile, she had the Gallic shrug. They talked in the same open manner. They laughed almost in unison at the same jokes.

She looked down then back, and saw Mary-Beth examining her, then looking away. They scooted one another all the way to the theatre and built their first impressions almost gradually.

Miranda decided that she didn’t have to worry.

Mary-Beth, or so she later told Miranda, had decided they’d be friends. She also liked the dye-job. It was the first and last thing they said to one another the way their.

At the theatre the girls sat in the middle, with the boys flanking them. Jacob had his arm around her shoulder.  Thomas was scooted to one side, his eyes still glancing at the door. Mary-Beth would look from the screen to Miranda, a smile playing on her face throughout the movie.

As they left, she whispered to Miranda, “Wasn’t that awful?”

“Yeah.”

“Next time let’s go to the Plaza.”

Miranda just nodded. She was unsure of this arrangement. She didn’t think she liked Mary-Beth.

The ride home was silent, save for the radio.

Later, Thomas told her never to set him up again. They stopped talking after that.

Jacob did sing to the music when he drove. She’d learnt that on their fifth car journey.  He turned up the volume and started his singing. She put her hands over her ears, but smiled at him. He grinned back and turned it down, apologizing. He wasn’t brutish about the dial. If she asked he’d gladly change the station. But she never asked.

“Come on, pick something. Something you like.”

“I like this fine.”

“Don’t bullshit. It’s bad for you.”

“I’m not bullshitting you. It’s fine.”

“Please, I know you don’t like it, so change it. What do you listen to?”

“I don’t mind. Just drop it, god.”

He’d give her a grimace, and his grimaces, unlike his smiles, touched his whole face. “If you’re sure.”

“I am.”

She sat in the front, of course. Jacob always had his arm around her. She liked that. It was always warm and reassuring. Her other boyfriends had never managed to acquire the knack for this particular skill. Their arms were always crushing her. Smothering her. She’d wriggle out from under them and there would always be that hurt look in their eyes, as if she was rejecting them.

Sometimes, mostly on Wednesdays, Jacob would give Mary-Beth a ride as well. She sat in the back, the middle seat. Her arms were spread like a Kraken’s over the front two seats. She’d stick her head out, bobbing between them, and Jacob never put his arm around her when Mary-Beth rode along.

Miranda tried to be cordial. She rarely managed it. Mostly, she was quiet. Mary-Beth would choose the station, turning it at will, and laughing at Jacob’s protests.

When they rod alone, Jacob would always stop a few blocks from her house. They’d make out before driving the rest of the way. He told her he’d feel weird doing so outside her house. When Mary-Beth came along, he’d drop her off with only a brief kiss. She’d watch from the curb as they circled the cal-du-sac. She’d bite her lip and wave as they passed, receiving two smiles and a wave in return. She’d always wonder if they stopped a few blocks before Mary-Beth’s.

In the evening, when he called her, she always almost said this. She’d catch herself, though, and replace it with something colorless glossed over in a minute.

Miranda began hanging out with Mary-Beth almost by accident. They shared a study hall, one with Miranda friendless and Mary-Beth bored. Eventually, they gravitated to each other. Familiar was better than nothing.

Besides Jacob, they shared only one thing at first: The margins of their papers.

Mary-Beth called herself a doodler. Miranda called her an artist. The drawings would sometimes overflow the margins of her paper and become embroiled in territorial wars with her notes.

Miranda for her part had inherited her brother’s main vice, writing song lyrics there. On the page her writing was calligraphic, but in the margins it was cramped.

They admired one another’s amusements; they talked like water, slow in parts furious in others, tearing apart interests and activities only to discover that, really, they liked each other.

Outside of school, they bummed around, Mary-Beth introducing Miranda to the car her parent’s had gotten her. It was clunker, a Lincoln Towncar from the early eighties. They goofed around. They went to the 7-Eleven, were thrown out of the Home Depot for playing on the dollies, viewed movies at the Plaza. She started splitting her rides home between the two of them.

Miranda didn’t have many friends, and there were few as similar to her as Mary-Beth. Slowly, they became nearly inseparable, to the point where only Jacob could wrangle one from the other.

He began then to adopt what they mockingly termed the “puppy-dog voice”.

“Come out with me tonight! I haven’t seen you in three days.”

“That’s ridiculous.” They still ran at the back of the pack. They still talked to one another. But something was flacking off.

Last Friday, Jacob had taken her to a show, a remake of something smart and terrible, turned dumb and glitzy. The finish was Hollywood, but the workmanship European. It was a disappointment to Miranda, who’d seen the original a few years ago when it had come to the Plaza, with Dave, back before Dave started to become crazy. She’d been scared, then, and her brother had guided her through it. Now she was angry. And Jacob couldn’t figure out why.

He kept asking, and she stalled him.

She never wanted to tell.

He put his arm on her and she didn’t shake it off. But when he let her out, she bolted.

“Goodbye?” He was indignant.

Inside, she called Mary-Beth.

“Can I come over?”

She spent the rest of the weekend there.

On Monday she broke up with Jacob.

She got up from the stoop, the book loosely clutched in her hands. She opened the back door and nearly silently walked up the stairs.

There was music coming from the dinning room, a laugh, then someone falling over. More laughter.

Upstairs she went to her parents’ room and grabbed the cordless. She punched in a number and waited. She tried to find the reason for the abrupt shift. It was so hard to articulate, but she’d known it from the second that his arm on her shoulder had become so heavy.

On Criticism

I hate criticism. And to paraphrase the Ernest Hemingway character in Midnight in Paris, if its negative I hate it because I hate to be criticized (and who does?) and if its positive it makes me feel uncomfortable and I will hate it all the more. As such, I enter bouts of criticism as though I’m entering a championship match, easy demeanor masking a keyed up tension that’s ready to explode. I have a million little tricks, a billion ways to duck and dodge the reader’s constructive comments, and my verbal repartee with regards to deflection is second to none. It’s not that I hate the people doing the criticism, indeed it is often the reverse, or that I feel any animosity towards their comments, but more that I am a creature of inverted narcissism, always attempting to avoid comments that seem so much better than the work they are critiquing.

            But when the comments are mostly positive, I get the wind knocked out of me, a sucker punch to the stomach that leaves me winded. I’m on the defensive now, my arms protecting my head from the soft battering of vaguely complimentary remarks. It’s so much worse than that negative criticism, because you can’t parry the way you can when everything’s a negative rejoined to your own furious back peddling and reworking. “No, I meant to say X not Y, you didn’t get it at all.” When it’s postive though, I can’t stand it. That pleasurable feeling I get when every someone seems to like my work is then brought down a guilt that I’m taking such pleasure in these compliments, a “Who do you think you are?” moment from my superego, which long ago beat most of the interventionist tendencies from the id.

            So I always enter these things wearily, and today was no exception. And instantly, it is the second dreaded scenario. By the end I was a guilt ridden mess, barely able to stumble through my own poor analysis of my partner’s essays. It was a technical knock it in the first round, Gallagher down and out with barely a fight, a spring chicken against the seasoned pros. …I need to stop reading Hunter S. Thompson.

A Genre Writing

A writer is a man who’s taught his mind to misbehave.

                                                                        - from Bag of Bones by Stephen King

            There was a vast manor house near where I used to live, and we would often pass it in the fall when we were returning from…something. I honestly don’t remember that part all too well, as it hardly seemed relevant to me. But I remember the house, for whenever we passed it I could feel a chill running down my spine. Because I knew that house. It was the house of the Autarchs.

            See, this was the same year when I began to listen to the novels of John Bellairs, and from the ambivalent silence, I can tell you have never heard of him. That doesn’t surprise me. He began his career with a bang of a fantasy novel, or at least it seemed like a bang in the late sixties, before the flood of cheap Tolkien knock offs. His was an odd book, partly comic and partly horrific, with all the hobbits and warriors cut out, so that the main conflict was between three old wizards. It’s often placed in the children’s section nowadays, because it lacks the requisite sex, violence and language to be in either the adult or young adult section, but, because of the age of its protagonists, it holds no joy for children either. So it haunts the shelves of libraries everywhere, unread by all except those like me who are fans of the deceased Mr. Bellairs.

            But, back to the reference, the Autarchs are the villains of his novel The Mansion in the Mist, an audiobook I listened to with near religious fervor when I was nine and ten, a substitute perhaps for the more formalized religion that I never possessed any real believe that was on sale there. The book was, in retrospect, a good but fairly typical work by John Bellairs. The stories he wrote all followed a similar storyline, boy (X years old), with older, and ostensibly wiser, companions stumble upon a plot to destroy the world hatched by an evil sorcerer or sorceress, with one of those deliciously old fashioned names like Ezekiel Morley. The plot would often involve an old fashioned but fairly everyday object, like a lamp or a clock hidden inside the walls of a house that counts down to the end of the world…like you don’t have one of those.

            His tales were mostly in one of three series, focusing on the misadventures of a few teenager boys of varying ages in Michigan. From what I can tell, the most popular series was the Lewis Barnavelt, followed by Johnny Dixon, with the rearguard brought up by the Anthony Monday series. And of course, as a contrarian, I always loved the Anthony Monday series the most. The character was a little older, and his companions were a librarian and her eccentric brother, something I found remarkably easy to relate to, though I can’t quite say why. Of course, it helped that the covers for the Anthony Monday books were done by that master of horrific comedy Edward Gorey.

            John Bellairs was my first foray into horror, a genre that as a young child, and even as an older one, I found to be a tad too much for me. My mind has always seemed eager to conjure up images to frighten and disturb its vessel. I had, I remember, a particular fear of Halloween masks, which persists, although even then it was les a visceral reaction to that plastic substance they are made of that I always worried would suffocate me. Not that I was overly morbid, just that my mind would often run away with me, and it still does from time to time.

            As I grew up, though, I began to hold a greater fondness for the genre. My particular favorites have always been Stephen King, as you can tell from the epigraph of this piece, and Shirley Jackson, whose best work seems to have been forgotten, particularly We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a novel that seems in some ways a precursor to A Series of Unfortunate Events. I like horror stories (though the better term is terror stories, but that’s besides the point) because they seem to make my mind misbehave in often bizarre and disturbing, but also sort of interesting and fun, ways.

Anything scary has also produced such an effect in me. I can distinctly remember the late nights filled with checking and rechecking and finally giving up on checking for monsters and beasts beneath my bed. Though sleep when it comes, maintains its steadfast grip on me till dawn, the hypnagogic state is fraught with a dreaded tension. Horror novels however, are rarely the source anymore, as there are a million more pressing and real dangers; most of them involving the somewhat worrying possibilities of my own body betraying me in new and hideous ways. Like an aneurism or a malignant tumor. So now horror novels are more of a pleasurable distraction than an actual terror inducing experience. Except for those nights, when my mind will misbehave.

"I am the North Wind and All It's Eccentricities"

This story contains some violence and language, but it is minimal and towards the end. It is a follow up to "Violets in Bloom" though it might not seem like it.

I am the North Wind and all its Eccentricities

“I am the North Wind and all its eccentricities.”

A tarmac hell of inscribed potholes and fissures of the ungodly black substance battered the chaise of the jeep as it fumbled along, the men inside looking stoically forward at the hazy horizon-line. Rich sat shotgun, a rifle nestled on his lap and his hand thumbing the pillar, bobbing and grooving to the monotonic beats of the emergency broadcast system, static bursts providing an erratic and occasionally melodic off set to the baseline of nothing. Next to him was Holland, worriedly checking the GPS every few minutes, despite it having given out almost two hours ago. His wristwatch, a clockwork relic of the ante-bellum north and that much more reliable for its age, read a little after noon, and he checked it every few minutes, assuring himself of their relative earliness.

Rich turned a quarter over in his gloved fingers, gazing lazily at the brilliant luster of its surface, the photons of light reflecting off into the oblivion of empty space. He looked to Holland, placing the coin in his back pocket. “Do you know the general philosophy of Bronislava Mihailov?” Rich checked the gun’s bolt, the smooth motion a caress of the steel, moving out languid as if through custard, then a sharp thrust back into the wooden sheaf of the mechanical death, eliciting a dimwitted echo on the steep cliffs rising to their left.

“Huh? Who’s that?” Holland attempted to tune the radio, and quit when he received only more static, finally turning it off. “That’s the outpost?” He pointed to a speck of blue on the horizon, a speck hanging dead in the thick air.

Rich checked his nails. Holland put a hand to his brow and scanned the outpost, coming into a dissident focus, as uncaring about the two men as it was for the boiling sun. The bunker-tight material gave no glisten in the sun, the flag pole painted a slightly off-colored white had none of that lusty power of its silver contemporaries, more of a period than an exclamation mark, spelling out the simple word ours for the whole of the wastes. The site was formally designated by the Emergency Council as UHH 2, built on the ruins of one of the first towns obliterated when the Crisis began. Four residents of the town had still been alive when the Emergency Council did a sweep over. Holland shivered as he remembered the sight, a young man with his skin peeling off in the baking sun, reaching out for the helicopter as he wailed at them. “Help us you fuckers!” He screamed. One of the soldiers had initiated him into the red mist club, a plume of blood erupting from his head as the bullet hit, which certainly stopped his gnashing teeth, though not his flailing limbs. Holland had heard from EC workers on the second sweep that the young man’s body was still contorting on the baked earth. “About ten miles, and we’re” he checked his watch “right on time. So, what was that thing you were trying to tell?”

“It doesn’t matter just now.” Rich adjusted his breather. “Wouldn’t a smoke be great right now?” He grinned, although Holland couldn’t make that out, their masks obscuring one another, the obfuscation of the modern era, a shortage of information about your companions, but an abundance of facts.

Rich had gone to an impressive school back east, the kind where even the bedrooms are glutted with ivy and gilded expense, attended private schools as far back as the any record of him would show. Graduated in the upper middle of his class, he was undistinguished in the ways that garnered the top tier of jobs in the current administration, and had made his way out here in jumps and starts, small victories and a precipitous decline only given vague hints. But Holland had barely spent fifteen minutes in conversation with him before the trip, the smiling man with the up market breather, a sleek affair of white plastic, its breathing tube the spine of some hideous terror, the vertebrae of plastic moving like those of an expert contortionist as he shifted and leaned hither and fro, the mask little more than a mouth covering and goggles barely reached by the regulation 5 containment suits.

Holland took a sharp left, jerking them about, and steered them towards their descent.

The water hit them cold. They’d stripped down in the first containment area to boxers, then stepped into the rinsing area, Holland shivering slightly, his mind focused ahead to the liquid. The substance, known in the trade as IoxyPlutoral 281, was standard issue for every UHH outpost and several of the more at risk UHH areas, up to zone 318, noted most for the blue residue concentrated amounts left on the skin (a side affect that neither the government, Malonik, and even the Emergency Council would not admit to), which some of the townspeople claimed was poisonous.

Holland was a skeptic, having found most of these people to be relying on spurious of un-confirmable accounts likely dreamed up or heard as second hand gossip during the town swaps. Hardly credible. Yet, he always shied away from prolonged contact with the stuff. He tensed before the spray hit him, curling himself up, his back crumpling and shoulders sagging in, his head at a 90 degree angle to the floor. His lips were tightly closed eyes shut. Rich, meanwhile held himself open, his palms out and head back, spine arched, a nearly Masonic figure of the straight lace variety. When the substance hit him, he seemed to purr, expanding himself, as though to say, I am vast, I contain multitudes. Do you contradict yourself? He spread himself out, his roots firmly planted, branches spread out as the moisture soaked into him, engulfed him, drowned him in the loveliness of its condition and his state, until he became undistinguishable from it. And when the taps shut off, he breathed in a sigh of deepest exaltation. Holland grabbed a towel from the stack by the door, and handed one to Rich.

“My thanks.” He smiled, yet seemed loathed to dry himself. Holland shook his head at Rich, then went into the bunker.

Inside was the full Monty of post-event survival. Stainless steel counter tops below cabinets and shelves that contained the accoutrements of survival, bandages next to morphine, iodine tablets liberally littering the available real estate, canned food stacked to perfection, nestled in obscene necessity beside the survival guides covered in obsolescent dust. Below the counters were the containment suits and spare breathers, bottom of the bin variety with oxygen tanks that must have numbered in the hours instead of the days or even months, cheap plastic of the happy-meal type. On the far wall were an assortment of rifles and shotguns, first issued when there were residents who were “beyond any hope of recovery” out in the wastes. They were still in working order, Holland had checked the last time he’d been down, after he restocked the testing gear with its vaunted place in the back room.

Holland grabbed a first aid kit, removing the useless objects, antidotes to snake venom and the like, pre-event bric-a-brac of little relevance now. Rich, following in after Holland, was heading to the back. “You know what we need?” Rich flashed him a grin, “Of course. Just the reader, a few trackers, right?” Holland nodded, then turned to the shelves. From the cabinets with medical supplies he plundered, shoveling iodine pills and extra gauss into the first aid kit. Rich returned shortly, a black duffle bag on his shoulder, and flopped it on the table. Idly, Rich went to the gun rack. Deliberate in his motion, he examined each of them, a caustic mixture of ease and uneasiness whirling about his actions.

Holland threw the first aid kit in the duffle bag, hearing the melt clattering against the trackers. He hoisted it up and began heading out, looking back to see Rich focusing down the double barrel of a shotgun. On his face was a notched smile, a calm sea about to erupt into a carnal, tidal explosion of violent force, which sent a shiver down the back of Holland. “You coming?”

“Yeah.” Rich cocked the gun, his unnerving smile widening as the sound ricocheted through the bunker, dying out slowly in the reinforced concrete of the out walls. “I’ll be right there.”

The car idled as Holland lined the tracker up with the car tracks, roughly a line to the bunker, minus whatever minor swerving Holland had done to avoid the occasional debris in the field. In the suit, he felt like he was swimming, the sun ripping down through layers of atmosphere to beat him bloody with its cosmic brutality, sweat not so much beading but flowing down from his forehead. He raised the hammer brought it down, driving the tracker down into the earth, breaking the dry and brittle soil. The trackers were a last minute solution, after the event knocked out GPS signals in the UHH zones, and so this high-tech trail of bread crumbs had cooked up by the Emergency Council and the Japanese government, a short hand system to avoid getting lost in the wastes as they expanded and swallowed up the nation.

Holland raised the hammer again, bringing it down hard, feeling the tracker slide easier into the earth, then slammed it again and again. When it was biting down hard into the ground, Holland gave the sharp kick to the tracker, nodding as it lightly hummed, vibrating back and forth then subsiding into the stillness of a coma. He clambered back into the car, slamming the door shut and exalting in the cold refreshment of the air conditioning. He put the hammer in the center consol, then looked over at Rich, who lay almost supine in his seat, eyes half-closed. His fingers tapped the butt of the rifle.

He started the car, and Rich didn’t readjust his seat or even acknowledge the renewed motion of the car. Holland stared intently at the trip counter, waiting for the ten-mile mark to click by. Out here, even the static was beginning to peter out, not even a trace of signal left in this post-event state of malaise. A general wearing away of even the signs of life, the skeletal frames of houses and cars that littered the landscape of the outer rings in the wasted lands. Over the land, its shroud: the sky its in pallor, an ironclad abyss that held the land like a jealous lover.

As the minutes passed, uneasiness settled upon Holland, as the badlands rolled by, meeting his gaze with a perceptive madness that crept through the veneer of his sanity. Holland gripped the wheel, the sweat returning. Cold. The tiled floors, tasting of illness, the restraints as they dug into his flesh, Holland would scream until his throat was buggered, and then would mouth uselessly. Holland closed his eyes, counted to ten. He thought about the mantra. I am the earth. I am the fire. I am the wind. I am the north wind.  He looked over to Rich. He still tapped, the tempo now increased. Holland licked his lips. “What were you saying? Earlier?”

“Oh. That.” Rich smiled. “Something from a philosophy class. Nineteenth century Russian philosphes and their particulars, or something. Bronislava Mihailov was a favorite is all.”

“What’s his deal?”

“It’s…odd. You see, it all revolves around this idea he had, which was that the persistent state of man was one of pain with a particular attention to the physical aspects of such suffering. Bronislava Mihailov thought the best way to expedite the misery of existence was to increase it exponentially, until the point when society would simply boil over and destroy itself. Ironically the theorem was developed years before the common Russian nihilist movement, and though Marx, more then Mihailov influenced many of those writers, they freely stole from his methods. The end point for Mihailov was not a worker’s paradise, but rather a point of implosion, where weak were tossed aside in favor of those strong enough to wreck the society they were to rule over. Of course,” he smiled. “There were good reasons for his views sinking into obscurity.”

“Yeah, I suppose there were.” Holland looked down as the trip reader ticked over to ten miles. He stopped and grabbed a tracker and the hammer. Only eight more, after this one. Only eight.

I am the earth. I am the fire. I am the wind. I am the north wind.

           

Say one thing for the event, the cataclysm, the decimator, say that it altered the world it had left behind, shaped it with the malformed hands of a monsoon cripple, brokered power and combined armaments that blasted the land. It twisted it from the familiar to the alien as it had done on this rock ridge, shooting up from the ground in a roar, a cave rising from the baked land, its stalagmites and stalactites becoming the rows of the orchestra, just as the odd rocky carapace was the crescendo. On the cobbled maps of the Internal Investigation Service, the formation was known as the lion’s head. Cracks above the gapped maw below resembled eyes, squinted at the sun above with undeclared suspicion. The earthbound structure was visible from almost forty miles away, one of the few raised plinths of exceptionality in the wastes. Holland always was excited by it, a speck of interest, in a desert of nothing. He’d make an extra stop after the fifth tracker to examine the beast. I am the earth.

Holland stopped the car short, Rich jerking forward. He laughed and slapped the butt of the gun. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” Holland climbed out of the car. Slowly he picked his way to the mouth of the cavern, gazing into the velveteen blackness with a certain sense of awe. He called out inhumanely, hoping for a response in kind, forgetting Rich sitting in the car, but receiving only the callow echo from the lion’s bowels. Holland sat a particularly worn down stalagmite, wetness squelching on the plastic of the radiation suit. He closed his eyes, feeling even through the radiation suit a chill breeze wafting from the recesses of the cave. He breathed in. I am the wind. I am the north wind and-

“It’s real nice here.” Holland tore himself from the darkness, glancing round to find Rich looking outwards to the expanse of the wastes, his arms on his hips, and the gun strapped across his back. He breathed in, seeming to inhale the world and all its intoxicating poison. His breather sighed as it cleaned the air. “Real nice.”

“Yeah. It-“

“This was once a river. A lake. A sea, an ocean, a never ending cascade of azure brilliance stretching from one end of the earth to the other.” Rich turned to face Holland, shadows overtaking the lion’s share.

Holland put his hand over the clear plastic of his radiation suit. “Um…wha-“

“Bronislava Mihailov predicted that the water would engulf us, that the natural state of man might be suffering, but I don’t agree. It’s peace. The peace of the drowned. Silent and calm. At rest in the embrace of the ocean’s current-less depths. You see, Holland. I am the water.”

Rich took the gun from his back and began to load it. Holland raised his hands “What are you doing?”

“This land will be washed away, its salt expunged by blood. I will bring a flood upon these planes such as has never before been seen. I am the water, Holland. And what are you?” He raised the gun smiling now. “What. Are. You?”

He fired A small hole appeared in Holland’s forehead followed seconds later by explosive expansion from the back of his head, spraying his blood and brains across the stone of Lion’s head. And all Holland could think, even as the bullet ripped through his synapses was I am the North Wind and all its eccentricities.

Rich lowered the rifle slow, stepping forward to get a closer look at the carnage of his first expedition into the strange. “I am the water” he whispered. He dipped hid index and middle fingers into the man’s blood, licking it off as he gazed into the man’s face, wondering what he had been. He knew the purge must begin with him, had known since they’d been assigned to work together, and most likely, he told himself, had known before that even, on that level of his mind that was the water, that was the tempest and swells.

From the car he took the trackers that Holland was to erect and brought them to the Lion’s mouth. He stood in half shrouded darkness, a mania encircling his mind as the cool breeze whistled up from the depths. A violent shudder overtook him, and Rich writhed, his left hand knocking against a stalagmite. He looked down at the back of his hand, a torrent rushing through and upwards from the craggy etched markings of this chasm. Rich reversed his hand, watched as the blood began forming droplets on from his skin, before falling with a terrific temerity onto the perched earth. He grinned and raised the trackers and dashed them into the black spaces. The trackers clattered on the stone, as faint as whispers in a cinema, just before the film commences. Rich smiled to himself, and turned away from the chasm, hand still watering the ground.

The car purred, Rich looked back at the rocks, and cackled. “I am the water, the great purifier of these damned lands.” He drove off directionless, unsure of where he was going and certain there was no way back. In the distance, the wind howled a cry known to a thousand orphaned wolves and injured beasts. And to the cacophony of loss, Rich added his own subtle lilting.

The wind was emotionless, the howling and whispers just its movement and the imaginative flourish of men. It was no more moved by the man’s death as it had been by the hundreds and thousands of others it had seen on this spot-or was it some other? For to the wind all places are one place, a construct of unknowable depths and laughable heights, broken by neither ocean or river. It was all places, all times, never quite dying, but rather receding, or simply skipping out of town for an hour or a day. It had no shape, no conscious, no thought even, yet, as it blew through the brittle hair of the dead man, through the hole in the back of his head. And suddenly the wind changed, and grew, and became something other than itself, as thoughts began fly through the air.

In the plains he ran through grass, immaterial and all too corporeal, fingers trailing in the sickly golden sheen. For a brief moment it almost looked edible, the contamination not readily apparent as he knew it would be on closer inspection. And so, he did not inspect but only ran, forever onward, to that unreachable place where the tall grass gave way to nothingness. Full-tilt, he galloped and whooped, a heaviness he’d never noticed till it had lifted. He gazed down upon the waste, and saw-

A rabbit with six feet hobbling. Wind swept nothingness. Mountains. Poised lakes. A medley of images and stew of sounds that made him gnash his teeth and cry only to discover his voice was a low howl of anguish, cast across untold miles. He was over wire lines in North Dakota, turning tremulously into canyons, flicking the hair of a woman lunching outside, beyond the contamination zone, her skin beautifully lively and breath soft and unnoticeable. He was everywhere and nowhere, and all the time unaware of his body crumpled in the mouth of the lion, too busy trying to escape the new state of his existence.

But there was no point in running, for he was everywhere and all things, and soon he stopped and stayed perfectly still, but was in perfect motion. He had no form, no hands or mouth, no feet. Gradually, over the rocky mountains, and rocking a swing of some empty yard, he realized what had occurred. Stretching himself out, over the land, and the rivers, over the plains and the peaks, he spoke with that new voice.

“I am the North Wind, and all its eccentricities.”

Libraries

                                                            I

            Did you know that Newton, Massachusetts has a large population of fluent Russian speakers? Did you know that Lexington, Massachusetts has a large Chinese speaking community? Did you know Hopkinton, Massachusetts is one of the least diverse areas in the whole of the state?

            Actually, you probably didn’t, and in all likelihood you didn’t care. But these facts illustrate my point, which is that you don’t actually need to look at census figures and the like to work all of this out. You need only visit the local library, and take a quick nose around. Even if the library is almost deserted (though I can tell you that most libraries, even in the middle of summer, are quite busy) you can learn a tremendous deal just by looking at what they have for offer. If the DVD’s contain a high proportion of foreign and black and white films, you can tell they have a deal with the Criterion Collection and get such films at a steal. If there’s a large amount of science fiction and fantasy, you can tell that there’s a librarian of a nerdy bent. If they have a lot of Mervyn Peake or current “blood and guts” fantasy, you can tell that the librarian with a nerdy bent is also sadistic.  

Really, there’s no end what you can find out at the local library. And I speak from experience. I myself spent all of last summer (well most of it) driving round Eastern Massachusetts and going through the various libraries.

                                                II

            It was the summer of hunting, which really began in late spring as school was in its last throws. My constant companions were Sarah Vowell, by way of audiobooks, and the harsh commandments of the GPS system. The speed generally weighed in at five to ten miles over the speed limit, which to my mind, and that of every other motorist seems to be more recommendation than a hard and fast rule. Of course, in eastern Massachusetts there is the library system, so really the hunt was more fictitious (I love word play) than it at first seems. I could have just ordered the books I wanted and have them shipped to a closer library in a few days. But I was bored, as many of my friends seemed to fleeing our town just as I was set to stay, and I, like all of my generation, have a demand for instant gratification, and so I began the Great Hunt.

            The hunt stemmed from a desire to reread the books of George R. R. Martin in preparation for the fifth which came out in July of this year. I myself had only begun the series recently, junior year, but it had been well ahead of the HBO show and the widespread media attention,  so I remembered the series as more or less readily available. But I hadn’t counted on several hundred other fans all getting the same idea or a torrent of new readers eager to circumvent the show that had brought them to these books. And so, to my dismay, I saw a torrential de-Martin-afication of the whole library system, except for remote pockets were lending was either unheard of, or unused. And so, I began to hunt for them, in small poky libraries that saw few visitors outside their general purview.

So It's Come to This...Me Using My Terrible Script

This is a script I wrote. It's incredibly, painfully mannered and not very interesting. It also contains a brief instance of profanity, use of alcohol (though all characters are over 21 and its England so the drinking age is 18 anyways). Also there is some "suggestive" dialogue, but really, it's not as much as say Jersey Shore, so I don't really see the need for anyone to get fussed about it. By the way, to the...speaking generously, two readers, I've been posting a lot of previously written material this week due to a preponderance of essays (which is the correct collective noun for those wondering), but that should all be over with tomorrow. So, Enjoy?

Title card

LONDON TRYSTS ARE LIKE GERMAN WINE

Ext. the Hills of wales

We open on a shot of TREVOR'S face. He is frazzled, shadows under the eyes.
Trevor

I've been on twenty, no thirty-four blind dates in the past two months, and, um, about seven-teen speed dates. See, I have a premier this week and I don't want to go alone again. I know that sounds shallow, but the last time I did that, there were alot of rather unflattering comments, and I want to avoid that, and at the same time, maybe meet someone, but, (he coughs) that's not going so well. The last time I met an interesting girl was two years ago.

INT. The Tattered Crown Pub

The pub is fairly typical, two seated areas plus the bar. The carpets are deeply worn, a combination of wet mat, ashtray and urinal cake. Right now the movie is intent on bell on the hostess stand. Abruptly the HOSTESS rings the bell, and there is a clamor. The movie cuts to one of the tables, the outline of a woman at the edge of the frame. Trevor tentatively approaches and takes the seat opposite her, extending his hand.

TREVOR

Pleased to meet you.

The woman lets out a sigh, and does something with the pen on her paper. She makes a gesture with the other hand for him to move on. Trevor looks affronted.

TREVOR

What is that?

WOMAN

I'm telling you that in thirty seconds you've already managed to bore me. Now could you move along?

TREVOR

No. I can't just move along, I have another five-

WOMAN

Four.

TREVOR

Four minutes here.

WOMAN

Then can you wait quietly?

TREVOR

I could, but I have to tell you, I find you oddly hostile, for no discernible reason.

WOMAN

Do you know how many times I've heard Pleased to meet you or Hello, today?

TREVOR

Probably as many times as I've said them, so what?

WOMAN

It bores me. Repetition.

TREVOR

So, just because I didn't come up and say something like "I'm Trevor, my mother was arrested for torturing mice with a chadiner and Wagner", I'm immediately discarded as a potential mate?

WOMAN

Which opera?

TREVOR

What?

WOMAN

Was it Percival?

TREVOR

That, that was fictitious, it was nothing.

WOMAN

It's not nothing, it was actually an interesting point.

TREVOR

No it wasn't, it was insanity. Look, can we get back to the topic.

WOMAN

Why bother? Right now, you're interesting, and if you persist, you're going to be boring. So, why don't we leave together, now, and try to be interesting.

TREVOR

If your buying.

WOMAN

How chivalrous.

TREVOR

I don't believe in chivalry, I've known too many men and gone out with too many women.

WOMAN

(extending her hand)

Amanda. For fun, I predict the way people are going to die. I think you're a drowner.

Trevor, stunned, gazes at her. Amanda gets up and lights a cigarette. She smiles at him.

AMANDA

See, wasn't that more interesting?

Trevor shakes his head, astonished.

TITLE CARD

"NOW, TELL ME ABOUT..."

AMANDA

So, how is the search going?

ext. the waterfront

Trevor and Amanda are walking down the promenade. It has recently rained, and the sky overhead threatens more. They are wearing slickers and under her arm Amanda has an umbrella.

TREVOR

It's going as well as expected. I've met no one, I've made an ass out of myself, and I'm in the process of entirely reinventing lonliness. I think it'll be a big hit, you know, with the bi-polar and depressed people.

AMANDA

If only you still lived in New York, you'd make a fortune.

TREVOR

Yeah, but then I'd worry about that money ruining my misery.

He stops and leans over the railing and looks into the river below. Amanda is beside him, drumming her fingers on her arm.

AMANDA

Don't worry. Money just feeds misery. My father killed himself three days after his net worth hit half a billion pounds.

TREVOR

Yes, but wasn't that because of his mistress's tell-all book?

AMANDA

Mostly, but he was always a depressed person. For my fifth birthday he got me a prescription for Valium.

TREVOR

Do you still do that creepy thing on first dates? Where you guess how people will die?

AMANDA

Sometimes. If I don't want to sleep with him.

TREVOR

I wish I'd known that back then. I wouldn't have tried so hard.

AMANDA

And I wish you'd let me know you were trying, you might have gotten somewhere.

TREVOR

(laughs with a bitter edge)

Now that I doubt.

Trevor turns around and looks at the people passing them. Amanda leans over the railing, lighting a cigarette. Trevor points to an executive type lounging at an outside table.

TREVOR

What about him?

AMANDA

(without turning around)

Rage stroke, forty-five.

TREVOR

Would you sleep with him?

AMANDA

Well, not long term no.

TREVOR

Why don't you come to the premier with me?

AMANDA

You know how I feel about those things.

TREVOR

Yeah, but how about as a personal favor for me?

AMANDA

(she takes a drag on her cigarette)

You also know how George feels about them.

TREVOR

What? Him? I'd rather have that priest from Deliver Us from Evil as a friend.

AMANDA

Should I know that?

TREVOR

(shrugs)

I just don't understand why you put up with him. He's loathsome. He's some Stalinist nutjob, I'm surprised he hasn't massacred  the entire readership of the Daily Mail.

AMANDA

So? Your a Marxist whackjob, and I still take these walks with you.

TREVOR

I'm not a Marxist, anymore, it's too hotheaded and violent

AMANDA

What are you now?

TREVOR

A nihilist.

AMANDA

(laughs)


They start walking again, heading now into town.

AMANDA

So, will I see you tonight?

TREVOR

Whose throwing the party again?

AMANDA

(exasperated)

Martha.

TREVOR

Well, then I suppose I should.

AMANDA

Good, I'll tell her you'll be there sharply at seven.

TREVOR

Is that when your going?

AMANDA

No, I can't make it till gone ten.

TREVOR

What? Your going to leave me with all those strangers for three hours?

AMANDA

It'll be good for you. Just remember to smile and make eye contact.

She hails a taxi and gets in quickly, waving to Trevor. Who looks off forlornly at the disappearing taxi.

TITLE CARD

THE EVENINGS SLIDE INTO OBSCURITY

EXT. the sien view of here

The cafe is quiet now, as rain pours down, as the overhang bows in its center and the rain trickles down. Most of the customers are inside, in the dim, intimate glow, with steaming mugs of coffee. Outside GREGORY is waiting, tea in a china saucer and cup. By the cup is a slim manuscript with a crinkled and slightly stained cover page. Trevor, looking damp and disheveled.

Gregory

Tell me, in America does thirty minutes count as late?

TREVOR

Only if the other person calls you on it.

(He sits down)

So, did you finish it?

GREGORY

Yes.

TREVOR

(After a few seconds)

And?

GREGORY

I've never though you were much of a writer.

He points at the manuscript.

GREGORY

This cements that interpretation.

TREVOR

Must you always be so judgmental?

GREGORY

I must, though, if only so that one day I might be free of your pedantic little stories.

They look out together at the rain pounding down onto the asphalt.

GREGORY

It never used to rain like this when I was young.

TREVOR

Back when all round here was green fields.

GREGORY

Laugh all you like, but its non-the-less true.

TREVOR

That's climate change for you.

GREGORY

I don't believe in climate change. I think its god wrecking his vengance on this godless world.

They stay their for some moments, before Trevor picks up the manuscript and leaves.

GREGORY

(calling out to him)

Have you seen Amanda recently?

TREVOR

(turning to face him)

I'll be seeing her next week. She's trying to get me to go to some ghastly party.

GREGORY

Well, if you see her, can you tell her I'll return the scarf as soon as I can.

TREVOR

Um, will do.

Int. Holy Cow! Fine Indian Cuisine

The scene opens on a table cluttered with glasses and plates, mostly finished. The restaurant is mostly empty, the waiters are waiting for the group at this table to finish. At the table is CLIVE, a slightly balding man of early middle years, MISCHA, his current girlfriend, an attractive younger woman. Across from them Trevor sits, still sobbing wet, his manuscript by the G&T he's still nursing. Clive picks up his own glass.

Mischa

Did you like the reading?

Trevor

Oh, yeah, I though it was, uh, great. I really liked the one about castration.

Clive

She wrote that after I ran over her dog.

Mischa

I loved that dog. Do you what he did after that? He bought me a leather dog collar?

Trevor

What?

Clive

I thought it was a bracelet.

Mischa

You bought it at a pet store.

Clive

Alright, so I bought it when he was alive.

Trevor

That is incredibly insensitive.

Clive

I have no claims to sensitivity. Indeed my whole career is based upon its absence.

Mischa

Don't encourage him, really, he can be a softy when he needs to.

Clive

But only with clients.

Trevor

Isn't that who you should be the least soft with?

Clive

Are you joking? Authors are delicate little things.

TREVOR

And here's me thinking we're all supposed to be like Hemingway.

Clive

(laughs)

Hemingway felt that way towards the end.

TREVOR

And I'm no Hemingway.

MISCHA

You should let Clive read your book. He's a lousy man, but a great editor.

CLIVE

And I won't tell you I'm not curious.

TREVOR

Yeah, well, you can keep on being curious, I'm not ready to share it with anyone but my current editor and my shrink.

MISCHA

Do you talk about your book in therapy?

TREVOR

Of course, wouldn't you?

CLIVE

I don't think so.

(He takes another sip from his glass)

Seriously, though, Trevor, I think you should consider finding another editor. Gregory's a little

MISCHA

Conservative.

Clive

No, he's a lot conservative, I was going to say a little harsh.

TREVOR

I need that. It's why I have a Freudian analyst. I can't deal with the unconditional positive regard of those Harley Street nuts.

Clive

I don't actually think there are that many psychiatrists on Harley Street.

TREVOR

It was more about the cache of the name.

Let Slip the Dogs

Looking back, I notice I have frightened eyes in most photographs taken in the backyard of our old house. They have the wide and vacant look of marbles worn smooth and glassy after years of neglectful misuse.

I remember, the swing would leer on rusty hinges as I slowly undulated back and forth, glassy eyes languidly rolling every few minutes to the fence on my left.

            Screech.

            Screech.

            Screech.

The fence there was made of a grey and faded wood, rising out of the lawn. Running my hand along the surface of one or another, I once came away with a splinter lodged deep in my palm. After examining it, my dad informed me we’d have to use some tweezers. He turned on one of the stove’s burners low and put the instrument in the flames. I started to cry. I was never courageous, not then, not now.             “Don’t worry, I’m just sterilizing them. It won’t hurt that badly.”

In the doorway I spy Matt, the scorn on his distorted to something biblically horrible through my tears. Dad tells to go upstairs and Matt scoffs, then turns around. Dad comes over, takes my hand and forcing it palm up, my fingers clenching. “Jesus Christ! I can’t see the damn thing with your fingers in the way. Just unclench them already.”

I sniveled, and did so, immediately regretting it. Pain shot through my hand. I screamed, snot and tears streaking my cheeks. My dad cursed. I think I heard Matt laughing upstairs. I might be making that up through. My hand throbbed where the burning metal had touched it.

After that, I was always nervous about touching the fence, even now.

Every afternoon, as I played outside, always on the swing, my glassy eyes rolled over the field of green metal squares stretched between each pillar of wooden posts. It was scouting out the enemy territory. It was the necessary result of the last few years, of all the memory I had of in that yard.

Screech

Screech

Scree….

RUFF!

A vicious guttural growl explodes from the other side of the fence. My swinging halts and I nearly leap down the small hill heading towards our house. The splash of gray and orange fur screams towards the chain of the fence. Jaws appeared in the melee of color, sharp and white, perforating the air around them with a clear sense of malice. I sit on the edge of the cracked leather swing, waiting, till the torrent subsides. Slowly, the jaws retracted, till Rusty, the Dragon of out neighborhood in the guise of a menacing sheepdog, retreated to prowl his domain. Uneasily, I begin to pump my legs again.

Screech.

Screech.

Screech.

Rusty’s owner was one of the black sheep of the neighborhood. A hard distinction to earn in place as strange as suburban Pennsylvania, where ran the gambit, from the meticulously groomed to the obscenely overgrown, and with houses that managed to, even in their cookie cutter nature of their design, be as distinct from one another as the people who lived in each. Ours was a restrained house, with average and unattractive plants that were pushed right up against the plain gray paneling of the house: Juniper bushes and creeping hollyhocks. An overall conservative feel, at odds the liberalism of my parents and family in general, but quite in keeping with the general nature of the col-du-sacs off Lamar Drive.

Our house was on a low hill, with second hillock rising about half-way into our back yard. On the crest of this hillock, my parents had built a jungle-gym, for us, a small slid and a jetting red rail where three swings, two old and leather, one bright blue and plastic. Around the play set, was a thicket of trees, that must have once been a small forest, before the developers had come. The west side of the house, shady on even the brightest of summer days, housed the compost pile and my dad’s tool shed. Separating the front yard from this side, was a red painted all wood fence, along, with a gap to accommodate a path leading up to the back yard of one of Matt’s friends.

But the next-door neighbor’s were a different matter. The woman who lived there had a son older than even Matt, and only about twenty years younger than her. She was single, a smoker in a world were that was fast becoming amazingly uncommon, whose yard was a tangled mess. I can never remember the plants in their front yard being anything other than unkempt.

Some days, I would see the woman on the back yard stoop, a couple of concrete steps that led into just about everyone’s backyard, with a water-pistol, smoking. When Rusty began to bark, she would spray him, between the eyes, ideally. I looked on amazed as the monster whimpered, and ceased, if only for a short time, its barking. She blew out a puff of smoke and in that moment she was beautiful to me. Anything that would have quieted him for even a moment seemed terrific right then.

Among the children of the neighborhood it was common gossip that the woman owned a snake, a python that Matt claimed to have actually held. He told me it was almost fifteen feet long, and could swallow any child whole.

Once, Matt had come home and gleefully told me and Same that the python had gotten out and had eaten a kid in the col-du-sac next to us. “He was gone in one gulp,” he said, opening his mouth wide and making a swallowing sound. I didn’t sleep that night. But lay awake, with Matt snoring in the top bunk, worrying away the hours until dawn.

I never knew much about the woman next door first hand, but I did know Rusty, and for that I always held a dark resentment towards her and her son. Inside, I hated them for that beast, who made each moment of play, one of anxious preoccupation, who darken even the brightest of days and the created storms of the most calm weather.

RUFFRUFFRUFFRUFFRUFFRUFFRUFFRUFF!

In a furious gait, Rusty mounts the fence. His paws rest on the top, struggling to leap the fence, his jaws now clearing it and ripping the air. I scream, pulling the fear from inside me and expelled it one prolonged gasp of terror, as I throw myself from the swing, screeching as it swung, the seat twisting into a noose, the swing set itself becoming the gallows. I rolled and hit the ground running, looked back to see Rusty almost over the fence, scrabbling to follow me and slowly slipping as his claws scratched against the metal.

RUFFRUFFRUFFRUFFRUFFRUFFRUFFRUFF!

I don’t stop running till I feel the rug burn on my hands as they rest on the cool surface of my bed, my head in the pillow, silencing my screams.

             Not so long ago, I learnt that my family is partially responsible for the psychosis. After dinner, still gathered around the table, talking about this and that, we came to the topic of Rusty.

            “Oh god,” my mom said, shaking her head. “I remember when they first got that dog. Carla had apparently ordered it from this trainer, and he came with these special instructions. She came over and told Mike to spray him between the eyes whenever he started barking.”

            My dad was laughing. “Yeah. We used to keep a super soaker by the deck and Matt would spray him. I usually would use the hose. It drove him mad”

Later that night I went to my bookshelf and took out St. George and the Dragon, rereading it, wondering how to slay the dragon that lived next door. A few ideas occurred to me then, but none of them stood up to light of the next morning.

After that fear simply became the routine of my life of outside play, constantly checking to reassure myself that the dragon slumbered inside. 

In the years since, looking occasionally at these vacant eyed pictures of my childhood, I wonder how such fear could be drudged up from the simply barking of a sheep dog. In retrospect it seems bizarre, as it was only his form and function that possessed him to behave in that manner of vicious assault. Indeed he might even inspire now a glimmer of compassion, his instincts of herding animals and of wide-open spaces so at odds with the clumped confines of suburbia.

I almost feel sorry for Rusty, copped up in the small yard, with nothing to herd but stubborn children. Intellectualizing Rusty makes him seem less the demon of fiery doom, but the Lucifer that Milton envisioned, something to stir not or ire or fear but the measure of sympathy they require. And yet…I still believe on that primeval level that Rusty was a beast.

Thoughts I had While Going to Sleep?

Age 8

            What will I be when I grow up?

            Will it be exciting?

            Is there the possibility that it could get in the way of my social life?

            Why would I care?

            How come every episode of Power Rangers is the same?

            If my big brother burns the nose off a Woody toy, should I call him Sid?

            Why are the people who live to either side of us odd?

            Do those Danish Soldier toys want faces?

            Why is Frodo so whiny?

Age 10

            What will I be when I grow up?

            Is being Indian Jones a profession?

            And is being afraid of snakes required?

            Do I need a time machine for that?

How come every five episodes of Dragon Ball Z could be condensed into one?           

Is my big brother going to die from going down the hill on a piece of wood attached to roller skates?

Why are these people still our neighbors?

If I talk to my toys, am I insane?

Would Batman ever fight Superman? If they did, how badly would Superman lose?

Age 12

            What will I be when I grow up?

            Will girls find it exciting?

            If they do, do my odds of survival go way down?

            Can I find a job no one has an opinion on?

            How come every episode of every anime is the same?

            Is my little brother always going to be this annoying?

            Why does almost no one live near us? Are we difficult?

            How do I stop my parents selling my toys in a yard sale?

            Why am I still worried about toys?

Age 16

            What will I be when I grow up?

            Will it require more work than school?

            If it does, will doing a mediocre job hurt my chances of advancement?

            If so, would I be better served just striving for the middle?

            How come every season of the Sopranos is the same?

            Will my brother be chiller after he starts college?

            Is it ethical to steal our neighbor’s dog?

I Hate Baseball

I hate baseball.

            Whenever I see it on a television I become very tired and somewhat angry. The tired I don’t think I have to explain. If I wanted to do surgery without a local anesthetic, I would certainly suggest either baseball or cricket be playing, because even if I woke up in the middle, I would be unable to actually gather enough consciousness to feel pain. And even a really short baseball game takes at least five hours, plus commercial breaks. (A cricket game will last three days, plus commercial and meal breaks).

            I used to live in Pennsylvania where there was only one-way to prove you were manly (well, that pre-adolescent idiot version on manliness): Sport. At first, I tried martial arts, but I gave up on it after two embarrassing weeks that told me, 1) I would never even be able to touch my toes and 2) that flexibility is apparently important to every aspect of martial arts, so realistically, that wasn’t going to fly. Also, they place undo emphasis on being “good” and “adequate”, which I found discriminatory. I wanted to sue, but my parents wouldn’t given me an advance on my allowance (although, come to think of it they never gave me an allowance period) or access to my college fund, so once again I was foiled by lack of money.

            My second attempt to become an athlete was slightly more successful, and that was in the arena of baseball. It wasn’t successful, I should point out, it was if anything pathetic. I kept using the little t when all my teammates were hitting pitches. It doesn’t help my build is more suited for less “athletic sports” like magic cards, competitive Star Craft, Pokémon, things like that. I really shouldn’t have been playing baseball, at all, but there was a huge push in the neighborhood to do so, or at least that’s how it seemed to me. Because I’m pretty sure everyone played baseball. There was a horror of teams. The only people I knew who weren’t on a baseball team were the same people who loitered on the playground well into their teens and the ones who attend conventions wearing Spock ears or Spike Spiegel hair.

Now clearly, I should be in one or both of those groups, not on the dirty diamond in my sadly sagging dirty-white pants and that pathetically cheap t-shirt with the Montgomery logo on it, which was Montgomery with a baseball, on fire, below it. And in front of me, is the goddamned tee, and ahead of me I can see the pitcher, who even at eight has that pitcher look down, he’s bored and he’s sorting of fidgeting and kicking the dirt. Behind me, I can hear my coach cursing me and all of my teammates mocking me, and so I hit the ball, and it flies…right in front of the pitcher. So he picks it up, and throws it to the first baseman and, without even running, I am forced to do the walk of shame back to the dug out, to the very end of the bench where I just slumped down, and hoped no one sees me. I’m wondering how much Spock ears cost.

But, the liability I provided to the team was offset when my coach discovered something I was really good at, which was getting hit with the baseball, so that the team would get a walk. And so that I would be punished for being crap at baseball. Of course, that was mostly implied, but generally you don’t construct a strategy that involves one of your players getting hit unless its football or you hate them.  So the next time I went up to bat, my coach told me that I shouldn’t use the tee, and that I should step into the pitch, which seemed weird to me but I though, well he’s the professional. He wasn’t, of course, he was a dick, but I was eight and sometimes pretended I was Buzz Light-year, so I didn’t really have the where-with-all to figure that out. So I did what he told me to, and I got hit. And it really hurt.

It also worked, so this kept going on, week after week, until my dad finally came to a game, and saw that whenever I went up to bat, I’d get hit. And my coach would seem really happy, and my dad, being a scientist, put two and two together quite nicely. And on the ride home, he seemed pretty pissed, and I didn’t really talk to him because he was mad about something I’d done, so instead I just almost motionless, playing Pokémon Yellow…which is so nerdy, I don’t even believe I’ve done it.

So, the next day I was all ready, I had the pants, the shirt, the hat with its mesh backing, and I was waiting in the car, until my dad came out and explained that we weren’t going to practice, and that actually he’d taken me off of the team. Which made me really excited. Because now I could try and capture Mew Two, despite also being terrible at Pokémon.

I should say, before you leave this story with the impression that I am a member of the non-cool clique of Freaks and Geeks, that haven’t played any Pokémon game in almost seven years. I’d also like to point out that until about ninth grade I played on a string of highly non-competitive soccer teams, which prepared me for both losing and Sky1 Sports. However, I haven’t played baseball from that day to this, and the only time I’ve watched it was in 2004 when the Red Sox beat the Yankees. Although, living in Massachusetts at that time made it almost impossible to avoid baseball. Since then I’ve created a 1950’s style nuclear bunker, in which to weather the annual storm of baseball mania. It hasn’t helped my grades any but so what?

To Err is Human...and I am All Too Human

I apologize to the non-existant readers, but I again find myself short on time, yet eger to post something. Therefore, I’ll invite you to read yet another dreadful creative attempt. Oh the fun it’ll be. Warning, this is…terrible. Enjoy.

Intents and Purposes

            She’d been on the back stoop all afternoon, starring at the red fence between the neighbor’s yard. At first she’d been reading, but now the book lay beside her. She’d barely moved for five hours, listening to the house and the family inside: Mom setting the table, dad coming home, Dave bursting the door open, a half muted fight then the door slamming, and a car screeching away.

            No one had been out to look for her yet. They probably thought she’d gone to Mary-Beth’s, not an unreasonable inference, she thought ruefully, given recent behavior. She’d spent all last weekend there, although she wouldn’t tell anyone but Mary-Beth the why.

            Before she had come outside, she met her mom on the stairs. She’d hidden the book behind her back and hugged the railing. Mom pushed by with a mountain of freshly laundered clothes. Mom asked in passing, “How’s Jacob?”

            In her ignorance, she said, “Fine.”

            They’d met in cross-country, both of them middle of the pack runners too lazy to meet mediocrity. He’d complimented on her latest dye-job. She’d liked the way his smile only ever touched the right side of his mouth.

As time went on, they began to become more verbose in these rear guard conversations, discussing just about every detail of their lives at one point or another. Each day presented an hour or so of mostly uninterrupted conversation.

Sometimes, Ms. Corelli would hang back to yell at them and the others, most of whom were actually doing their best. One day, she’d directed her malice at the pair of them, saying, “Jacob and Miranda, quit the flirting.”

Miranda would return the scowl, but with her head lowered. She perceived herself as somehow better than flirter. But Jacob would smile. It’s how she learned his name actually. It was a topic that they’d skipped too often and had become embarrassed about.

Later, after the groups of girls and boys had showered and changed into seasonable clothes, they talked again. They were all filing out and drifting apart, into groups expecting rides, or desiring a chat, the seniors going off as loners or joiners, laughing it up to freedom.

Miranda leaned on the bike stands. She was scouting for her mom, when he came up behind her. She jumped, then laughed. He smiled. He took up a position next to her.

“Waiting for a ride?”

“Yeah.” He wore flannel. She could have guessed that. He probably had Nirvana in his tape deck, that or Soundgarden. She bet he would sing along. She cocked her head and decided she was okay with that.

“I can give you one.”

“Oh, thanks, but my mom-“

He cut her off, “Say no more. I know how…particular parents can be.” His smile didn’t dim. “But, how about telling her you got a ride for tomorrow?”

“Sure.” She tried not

He waved to her as he left, “Catch you later.”

The next day she rode shotgun in his Dodge Dart. It was black turning to rust. Halfway through the ride, he awkwardly wrapped his arm around her shoulder. She didn’t stop him. She smiled to him when he dropped her off and he saluted. Her mom was waiting inside.

“Who was that young man?”

“Jacob.”

“Is he nice.”

Miranda opened the fridge, grabbing the cider. “Yeah.”

Mom had been smiling. She would always like Jacob.

They’d gone on their first date as a double, with her friend Thomas and his friend Mary-Beth. Miranda had never met the girl before, and watched as Jacob and her interacted. She would have laid money on them being exes.

Jacob for his part was cordial to Thomas, who didn’t look happy to be there. He kept fidgeting; his eyes kept looking at the door. He didn’t talk much to Mary-Beth.  She talked at him. She was peculiar that way. She liked the inanimate. She discussed with herself fashion and fiction, whole Thomas nodded and feigned some understanding.

He kept looking from her to his hands to the door.

Miranda worried about this. The miscalculation both had probably made. The effect it would have on the evening.

On their way to the theatre, they rode in near silence. The boys were in the front, switching stations as announcers roared in and droned out. They had similar enough taste in music for a denetente to be reached, but the girls in the back had no such bridge.

They sat still and would sometimes look at each other than glance away. Miranda compared herself to Mary-Beth. She was prettier. More alternative. Much more like Jacob, and in odd ways. Where he had his half smile, she had the Gallic shrug. They talked in the same open manner. They laughed almost in unison at the same jokes.

She looked down then back, and saw Mary-Beth examining her, then looking away. They scooted one another all the way to the theatre and built their first impressions almost gradually.

Miranda decided that she didn’t have to worry.

Mary-Beth, or so she later told Miranda, had decided they’d be friends. She also liked the dye-job. It was the first and last thing they said to one another the way their.

At the theatre the girls sat in the middle, with the boys flanking them. Jacob had his arm around her shoulder.  Thomas was scooted to one side, his eyes still glancing at the door. Mary-Beth would look from the screen to Miranda, a smile playing on her face throughout the movie.

As they left, she whispered to Miranda, “Wasn’t that awful?”

“Yeah.”

“Next time let’s go to Plaza.”

Miranda just nodded. She was unsure of this arrangement. She didn’t think she liked Mary-Beth.

The ride home was silent, save for the radio.

Later, Thomas told her never to set him up again. They stopped talking after that.

Jacob did sing to the music when he drove. She’d learnt that on their fifth car journey.  He turned up the volume and started his singing. She put her hands over her ears, but smiled at him. He grinned back and turned it down, apologizing. He wasn’t brutish about the dial. If she asked he’d gladly change the station. But she never asked.

“Come on, pick something. Something you like.”

“I like this fine.”

“Don’t bullshit. It’s bad for you.”

“I’m not bullshitting you. It’s fine.”

“Please, I know you don’t like it, so change it. What do you listen to?”

“I don’t mind. Just drop it, god.”

He’d give her a grimace, and his grimaces, unlike his smiles, touched his whole face. “If you’re sure.”

“I am.”

She sat in the front, of course. Jacob always had his arm around her. She liked that. It was always warm and reassuring. Her other boyfriends had never managed to acquire the knack for this particular skill. Their arms were always crushing her. Smothering her. She’d wriggle out from under them and there would always be that hurt look in their eyes, as if she was rejecting them.

Sometimes, mostly on Wednesdays, Jacob would give Mary-Beth a ride as well. She sat in the back, the middle seat. Her arms were spread like a Kraken’s over the front two seats. She’d stick her head out, bobbing between them, and Jacob never put his arm around her when Mary-Beth rode along.

Miranda tried to be cordial. She rarely managed it. Mostly, she was quiet. Mary-Beth would choose the station, turning it at will, and laughing at Jacob’s protests.

When they rod alone, Jacob would always stop a few blocks from her house. They’d make out before driving the rest of the way. He told her he’d feel weird doing so outside her house. When Mary-Beth came along, he’d drop her off with only a brief kiss. She’d watch from the curb as they circled the cal-du-sac. She’d bite her lip and wave as they passed, receiving two smiles and a wave in return. She’d always wonder if they stopped a few blocks before Mary-Beth’s.

In the evening, when he called her, she always almost said this. She’d catch herself, though, and replace it with something colorless glossed over in a minute.

Miranda began hanging out with Mary-Beth almost by accident. They shared a study hall, one with Miranda friendless and Mary-Beth bored. Eventually, they gravitated to each other. Familiar was better than nothing.

Besides Jacob, they shared only one thing at first: The margins of their papers.

Mary-Beth called herself a doodler. Miranda called her an artist. The drawings would sometimes overflow the margins of her paper and become embroiled in territorial wars with her notes.

Miranda for her part had inherited her brother’s main vice, writing song lyrics there. On the page her writing was calligraphic, but in the margins it was cramped.

They admired one another’s amusements; they talked like water, slow in parts furious in others, tearing apart interests and activities only to discover that, really, they liked each other.

Outside of school, they bummed around, Mary-Beth introducing Miranda to the car her parent’s had gotten her. It was clunker, a Lincoln Towncar from the early eighties. They goofed around. They went to the 7-Eleven, were thrown out of the Home Depot for playing on the dollies, viewed movies at the Plaza. She started splitting her rides home between the two of them.

Miranda didn’t have many friends, and there were few as similar to her as Mary-Beth. Slowly, they became nearly inseparable, to the point where only Jacob could wrangle one from the other.

He began then to adopt what they mockingly termed the “puppy-dog voice”.

“Come out with me tonight! I haven’t seen you in three days.”

“That’s ridiculous.” They still ran at the back of the pack. They still talked to one another. But something was flacking off.

Last Friday, Jacob had taken her to a show, a remake of something smart and terrible, turned dumb and glitzy. The finish was Hollywood, but the workmanship European. It was a disappointment to Miranda, who’d seen the original a few years ago when it had come to the Plaza, with Dave, back before Dave started to become crazy. She’d been scared, then, and her brother had guided her through it. Now she was angry. And Jacob couldn’t figure out why.

He kept asking, and she stalled him.

She never wanted to tell.

He put his arm on her and she didn’t shake it off. But when he let her out, she bolted.

“Goodbye?” He was indignant.

Inside, she called Mary-Beth.

“Can I come over?”

She spent the rest of the weekend there.

On Monday she broke up with Jacob.

She got up from the stoop, the book loosely clutched in her hands. She opened the back door and nearly silently walked up the stairs.

There was music coming from the dinning room, a laugh, then someone falling over. More laughter.

Once upstairs, she went to her parents’ room and grabbed the cordless. She punched in a number and waited. She tried to find the reason for the abrupt shift. It was so hard to articulate, but she’d known it from the second that his arm on her shoulder had become so heavy.