Farm Life (sounds deeelightful)
You think you understand me?
He is sick, and that is surely why he started this, but he started it and now that it is begun he can’t help himself. Like bobsledding.
Well? Do you?
Why, am I not allowed to? she asks. He recoils, clenches his fist, doubles over, makes his veins stand out, grunts something. A few uncomplimentary sounds escape him. Like a bird in heat or something. He yells. They retire. They go outside. It is evening and it’s been years since that nasty business occurred (or recurred, even).
Did you have a bad dream? she asks him, last night?
No, is his response, as he refills his little mug that has inane lettering wrapped around it with whiskey. The stars are out in full. Here is an angerless world. A world before anger, unless the ascriptors mistake motion for mood. For that is all there is just now. Motion.
Where is your heart? he asks the landscape. They’ve been living together for a thousand years it feels like, because they never get into town, except to get groceries, which is way more eventful than it ought to be.
Were we presumptuous to think we could pull this off?
This is a thought from the mind of the wife. Who sits and waits, and recognizes that all things are profligate and whole, or will be in the course of time, or when time has finished running… its course.
And she remembers a dream she once had, in which she’s an ant crawling around the floor of a barn, where she can hear the murmur of pigs and cows above her, discussing something that sounds too sophisticated for her to understand, even if she weren’t an ant, but as an ant has no hope of understanding, and as an ant she wishes she were her human self, so she could walk among the pigs and cows and get up from this thick scent of ammonia and galaxies of straw, apocalyptic in scope, like a crumpled city with its freeways all twisted and enmeshed, that meanwhile stinks like shit, and converse with these pigs and cows, whom she begins—in the dream—to suspect are communists. (Thought she will naively claim that Orwell had no effect on her, to this day.)
Then her dream-memory melts into a memory of a dream where a group of humanoid socialists are executing her family, though she doesn’t have a family. Still she looks on (and tastes bile) as her family is gunned down. Bullets that seem to peel the family’s faces and chests apart as if the family’s faces and chests are made of hot rubber, but she doesn’t have a family. She keeps insisting on this, trying to remember the bit about the barn, and the huge pieces of straw, the fragment of the dream that came before. Something stinks. Overwhelmingly so. She wakes up. It’s the outdoors, here, during February. That’s what stinks, but it’s not overwhelming. Sun’s first light is a thing unto itself. It’s not a greeting. The horses (afield) make munching noises only they—the horses—can hear, themselves, amongst each other.
One doesn’t often think of horses listening to each other eat, does one?
You’re drunk again.
Yes? the husband wants to know. As if this is some crime. That he has committed. As if she hasn’t come to expect this behaviour now after how many years. Hasn’t crammed some other shit where expectations used to take up space. Like… resentment?
Pain like gravity and anguish well up beneath the feet of the drunken husband and for the first time he wants to throw his wife against the wall. Like a book that insists too much on a point that’s been made countless times (and more effectively) by all the masters that have come before.
I’ve made mistakes, he admits, but how long ago, now, is this?
How A Real Man Writes In His Diary (fiction)
Write a story in which an author (me, essentially) gets famous, writes pop songs, makes movies, and has sex with celebrities, whom he doesn’t enjoy having sex with, but rather enjoys the emotional position that the sexual relationship puts the celebrities in, namely a vulnerable (emotional) position, which no layperson ever gets to see a celebrity in. His favourite part (the author’s favourite part of the sex-with-celebrities phenomenon) is having the implausibly well-fashioned stars seated at the bar in his famous kitchen, playing with a fruit from [his] fruit bowl or running a finger along [his] granite countertop, while he sips whiskey (in the story, I don’t have health issues). He asks them questions and treats them like test subjects for the sole reason that they are beautiful, more beautiful than him, or more beautiful than the scenery, which, let’s say, is tropical. Over time, a female biographer follows him around for a year. At first the author is very cautious and doesn’t want to have a biography written (about him), but soon realizes that this female biographer shares his tastes almost identically, in a way that suggests they (she and me, the biographer and the author) perceive the world along lines thought impossibly similar, so that the author winds up trusting the biographer kind of literally with his life, and gives her license to write whatever she wants. While he, meanwhile, puts on his best face whenever she is around (although the need for this, at least in a social context, has passed), and the biography comes out good. A standing achievement that in some ways outdoes anything the author has achieved in his life (so you see I am both humble and pro-girl); and this whole time the author and the biographer (who is astoundingly attractive and prohibitively sceptical about connecting and/or devoting/depositing deep sentiments into other sentient beings) suspends her scepticism and has a romance with the author that outrivals every sex act the author ever countenanced with a celebrity precisely because it is imbued with a love generated on account of the improbability of the two persons’ mutuality (mutuality gauged as improbable simply because both the author and the biographer consider themselves unique in more senses of the word than are typically employed). But they keep the affair secret until after the biography (titled: Under The Weather for “idiosyncratic” reasons, obviously) is published.
Write this story, then walk down to the gas station to see if your money came through, then go to Jack’s and get a carrot juice. If you still have energy, read. Don’t forget to drink more water than it seems a human should ever need. I don’t need to tell you to avoid tobacco. If your stomach permits, daydream.
(heart)
Tonight you’re going to an Armin Van Buuren concert. At the concert the girl you’re with is going to ask you if you’re okay. Actually, she’ll ask you if you’re happy. The question will be prompted by your recent behaviour (pouty, detached), behaviour that she hasn’t witnessed firsthand, but has heard about from a reliable source. The source is your best friend, whom you’ve been pissing off lately by being a mopey little bitch. The parameters of your relationship with your best friend are in a state of ambiguity and stasis. You’ve always been so functional and ebullient, there’s never been a need to define them. The expectations coming from your BF seem to be a) that you desire being in the company of others, particularly he that is your best friend, and b) while in the company of others you maintain the ability to smile and sit upright and the ability to fail at insulting your longtime allies by being aloof towards them and being your old familiar self around relative strangers. You haven’t been meeting these.
At the concert you’re going to feel a lot of things at once. You’re going to feel distrust and distaste for the audience, who will swarm around you and occlude the brilliance of the music. You’re going to resent your body, a little, and its apparently diabetic need for water. You’re going to feel some pretty basic soma-lust for both the boys and the girls you’ll press up against all night, which is what it is, and shouldn’t be belaboured. Most of all there will be nothing joy. A simultaneity of infinite absence and painful happiness, touch-hunger. The happiness will commandeer all your energy centers and co-opt all your thoughts. It will be like talking to your mom, whom you’ve left behind and haven’t spoken to for years, and realizing that you love her more than all the things in this shitty life you’ve put together. It will be like reading an e-mail from your mother that says, “You might enjoy playing some of the free games on this web site..” that seems to indicate (but really doesn’t) that she has lost touch with who you are to such a gratuitous extent that the bond between you (still there, and strong) is all hurting with stretch. There will be nothing you can do, physically or otherwise, to requite the nothing joy. There will be nothing, which means nothing, and there will be life, the only kind you ever wanted, held like a carrot centimetres from your lips. And there will be nothing. And there will be nothing, pre-time. And you’ll put your hands in the air, and smile, and clench your fist, and you’ll sweat, and you’ll hate how mature you are. You’re too mature already to throw a tantrum. Or make yourself sick. You’ll miss this day.
(heart)
Are you okay?
[The stone bench makes his ass feel bony. Or, from a different point of view, it makes his ass-flesh feel watery. Either way there’s discomfort here bordering on pain. She asks; there is no magical lull in the conversations around them. A security guard is keeping watch over a door not meant to be entered by the plebeian effluvia that wander and smoke. There are many people. Seventy percent of them have dressed well for the event (designer suits, hats). Two percent of them are male and wear baggy white tee shirts. These smell—and the smell is surprisingly faint—of meal, two-day old tea bags. To combat these eight percent there are another two percent of mill-ers, who are also male, and dressed in black wifebeaters.]
I’m not sure what you’re getting at, in this context. Am I okay.
[There are teenage girls whose nubility smells (and this is not a difficult leap) like blood, and there are teenage girls whose nipples would sting like infection if they touched you. Faces that lead unsexed kids, you can see it in their faces, to think, I’d be happy with her. All I need is one.]
I mean are you happy?
[She isn’t angry or insistent-sounding when she asks.]
What are you after?
[She should know by now the answer is no.]
I’m simply asking if you’re alright.
I’m not sure. Yes? Most of the time I guess. When I’m down I’m all the way down, obviously. But what kind of question is that, though? Who’s happy?
I’m happy some of the time.
Exactly. Some of the time. But there’s no person out there who is just happy, cut and dried happy, it doesn’t exist, that’s a child’s world.
There are those people. They’re just not normal. You don’t meet them. They’re not us.
Well I guess.
Those people live behind gates, they make appearances. Some people think that makes them less real, but the truth is, it makes them much more real. Realer than we plebs. In fact, they’re so real, it shows us that we’re all fake.
Really.
Yes?
Well, are you okay?
I’m not sure what you’re getting at.
(heart)
Write a story in which a person’s actions are being dictated entirely by an entity that exists in their head. A disembodied voice that bullies this already submissive-leaning individual into… well, everything she does. And yet, suspiciously, all of the actions that the voice bullies the person into taking wind up representing the person as a totally sane and normal, even high-functioning. And all of the folks who were friends with this person prior to this person’s transformation (via intracranial vocal bullying) find that whatever positive disposition they had (towards the girl, obviously) is improved, and whatever negative disposition: reformed.
Make up characters that are sympathetic. Perhaps throw in a love story. If you can, have a scene where the main character is sitting on a bench beside the person she has ostensibly initiated her transformation for (by triggering some pretty latent psychological gear), her would be lover, and have the intracranial advisor scream something at her, some essentially good advice, that nonetheless loses its potency in the stridence of demand, but have her follow through anyway. End it there?
(heart)
So there are going to be a lot of problems with the sex-with-celebrities/biographer-in-love story, from a critical angle (maybe??) and the only way to deal with these is to build in some reflexivity. Make it seem like you’re aware of what all these problems are, even if you’re not, which you aren’t. What you’re uneasy about is having a simulacrum of yourself going around fucking celebrities to put them in a tight affective spot, for the hell of it, to exploit their guarded ontology, and then having a super hot girl who is obsessed with you, and just so happens to be exactly like you, fall in love with you after writing a successful book about you. Sure for you the impulses here hold no menace, but there are other perspectives waiting in line, looking to be taken.
(heart)
[The Armin Van Buuren concert, in truth, made him feel more than ever as if there were a whole world operating adjacent to him.
That up until about a year or two ago, he’d been living in the correct world. World one. Where everything came out good. Where, despite setbacks, international peace and harmony is eventually achieved, famine is stopped, wars cease. A world in which he, the author, is sedate and earnest and good people.
But that in the course of his becoming gradually ill, and over time, he finds himself living in world two.
In world two the author loses everything, one big piece at a time. His hopes, his dreams, they are stupid and lost. His compulsion to do good yields to a compulsion to feel good. To seek his own comfort. All he wants is to brace himself against an environment that has turned hostile, the frothy tip of every heated trident spray.
He seeks exit. But like a horse swimming around a drown city he has no idea how lost he is. How deep the water is. He bangs his feet on the tops of submerged buildings. His cries are heard by no one. He thinks he’s going to find land, that he’ll walk out onto it and shake himself off and revel in the solidness beneath him, but if he could zoom out he’d see the globe is an aquatic tomb. The things he wants: food, shelter, somewhere to fully sleep, are memories. He recognizes solipsism has always been a nightmare, but it does nothing to soothe him. Now there are only the moments when he bumps his toes on a skyscraper. His body is too dry to produce tears or sorrow. Exit. Exit. World zero take me don’t delay.]
(heart)
The intense and futile obfuscation of the impulse to simply love. The intense and futile obfuscation of the impulse to simply love constantly shot through the barrel of a relative shotgun hurt by factors you can’t blame the fucking shotgun for! It got thrown against the side of the building. It got run over by a FedEx truck.
(heart)
A glade. A pond. Wind on water. Wake up little boy, you had a bad dream.
Yesterday’s Daily Freewrite
Devin Forester wrote, The dog suffered, and, suffering, grasped for the passage of time, knowing that its heart would not ache, or mull, or beat languidly, if only the day were yesterday or years before now. The sky professed a tragedy. Limping, the dog fell out of context, and out of context disappeared. These were the closing lines of the final short story of a collection called A Tealeaf’s Imagination that Devin self-published in 2002. In his collection the word “love” was used seventeen times, the word “heart” was used twenty four times, and the word “soul” was used sixteen times. The collection contained a total of eleven stories, each one about five thousand or twenty pages long. In the first story two anthropomorphized fruits, an apple and a mango, lived a humble life among woodland creatures. The fruits-in-love lived in a mushroom house on the borders of a swamp in a very large forest. They spent most of their time indoors, trying to keep warm and to keep from going rotten. In the end, one of their putative woodland allies could not constrain herself, and, while having tea and discussing this prosaic us-versus-the-elements romance the fruit couple were having, the putative ally—who was a robin—ate the apple, right in front of the mango, who looked on with wide seedling eyes, and performed the Ultimate Fruit Mutiny, which almost all fruit that humans consume have performed long before they are sold to stores: the denudation of their anthropomorphic identities. And when the robin saw that fruit were capable of this intra-psyche suicide, she despaired, for it was not given to the beasts of the field to do the same, or so Devin had it.
The story about the apple and the mango would have sucked, if Devin Forrester weren’t so immaculately good at constructing scenes near swamps, and weren’t so erudite on the plant and animal life that grew there, and also adept at anthropomorphizing, cleverly, anything at all. And so it was, the story succeeded quite well, at least in relation to some of the other stories, which were quite different, and left one almost wishing they weren’t so different.
The second story was about a homeless person who lived in the dank and unused basement of a suburban couple’s home and went through their trash and laundry (both of which were deposited down chutes on the first floor) and lived quite happily, quite happily that is except for the sadness and discomfort that the suburban couple’s troubled relationship caused him, for the homeless person could hear, every dinner hour, the bickering and backbiting the couple kept up constantly. The homeless person had come from a happy home, and this contrasting reflection of domesticity was both upsetting and daunting in its totality, esp. in the way it commandeered all textures of waking life, for there in the wet and mildewed basement the homeless person had no other phenomena to fixate on.
The second story in the eleven-story-long compilation was the weakest, and ended poorly, with the homeless person confronting his hosts, but failing to have anything contradistinguishing to say (contradistinguishing to their present relational tones) on account of having been poisoned for so long by said tones, and the suburban couple reacting by simply kicking him out, and he the bum blinking once or twice at how much larger the world was than that not-so-idiosyncratic basement, as if this were something he’d forgotten or lost the ability to cognize there in the dark. The truth was, Devin Forester had had several better candidates to fill the 2nd story slot kicking around the hard drive of his iMac—many of which were more positive and enjoyable stories, and contained much more urbane and reflexive uses of language—but neglected to judge any of them above Piling On Lives (the story described here, named after an obscure reference to the couple’s dirty laundry) because these alternative stories, in his estimation, lacked sincerity.
In 2002 Devin Forester was seventeen years old, and in 2005 he published a novel called Miracle Fears, through a legitimate publishing house. The story was about a little girl whose experience of the world was so comprehensively unprecedented that she actually invented brand-new emotions, “revolutionized the heart-chakra” as Devin put it, and ushered in an entirely novel regime of ideation around topics like self-help and spirituality. The novel was really more of a self-help book in disguise, crossed with a treatise on post-traditionalist forms of Eastern spirituality, that, if not because its subject matter was really (as it was epileptically assessed intra-novel) new, than perhaps because it was cheerfully presented, succeeded.
And in it there was a scene:
… the boy, who was timid and lacked for protocol, encircled his arms around the waste of the prophet child as they rotated like pigs from old Earth, themselves encircled in the transport tube, that, like a thread of transparent cannula shuttled them slowly towards the city that hung like a Buddhist ornament in the active sky. Active, I say, for the sky on this planet did not look casual, but involved, as if in its thinness it could impact its floating constituents. The girl registered the feel of the boy’s embrace, and endorsed it by placing her hands over his, and rested, as she always did, in the origin of form, the moment before time. Yes, she might be human 3.0, as these ambassadorial aliens were proclaiming, but she was still human.
Was it mentioned that Devin Forester’s first novel was also a work of speculative fiction?
When Devin turned twenty two he was still a virgin. His virginity, however, had worn on him worse as a sixteen/seventeen/eighteen year old than it did now, and he was confident with the publishing of Miracle Fears that his time was soon coming.
During his teen years Devin had written essays on his virginity, and long stories cataloguing ideal mates, ideal settings for getting his rocks off for the first time, and fetishizing the female reproductive organ, yea unto the borders of derangement and criminality. It was only by doing this and by, in Devin’s own profane terms “bleeding pecker snot” several times a day, that Devin succeeded in staying sane, not auto-castrating or any of that sort of business.
In Devin’s essays on his own uninitiated sexuality he broke virginity down into several stages, stages a person grew through, as a virgin, until they were just sick of being a virgin and got laid. Devin as convinced that even kids who lost their v-card at excessively young ages still migrated through a version of these stages, or, if they didn’t, engaged a stultified and meaningless sex life. The truth was, Devin’s stages were spawned in defence of feeling carnally and spiritually illegitimate at having never done what so many others had, namely stuck his penis in a breathing living woman’s vagina. And so, week by week, he imagined the feel of a woman’s body, and imagined that when he had his own all-access pass to one of these he would go over every inch of it with both the tip of his tongue and the tip of his dick, and languor in the uncovered mystery.
When Devin finally met a girl that was willing to have sex with him he kissed her mouth a lot, and swished his not-totally-erect cock around the lips of her vagina, and, exhausted and drunk, fell asleep next to her. This was how he treated his all-access pass.
For Reasons Unknown
Fred would stand, squinting into the seven am sun, with his boxers riding up his ass crack and his groin smelling stuffy, and lean, his feet cold and pricked by infinitesimal sand on the shaded steps, to recover the news, that lay flat against the entry, on those silent mornings. Stand and sniff and get as much out of the morning as he could, then sit and expose a bare knee and shin to the already too bright sun, leaving the rest of himself canopied as he smoked a chemical tasting Canadian cigarette. This was early spring. Caronport, SK. Land of the living skies, just the one big one, where a scant index of birds made dotted lines and mapped the place. Crows. His mp3 player was outdated and contained songs he’d been listening to since he was fourteen, but he’d lost the thing for over six months and having it back was a relief.
In the mornings he listened to it, so that the world around him was tinged by juvenile songs that upset his stomach. Songs that worked only if you were at a party and sleeping with a beerfully acquiescent stranger was immanent, which Fred had never done. Fred shuddered and flicked the nob to change the song and inhaled gratefully.
He lived in the trailer that loomed oppressively behind his back, alone. The place was an ungodly mess and he preferred his porch to the indoors where he went only to cook or abandon himself to pot and video games once or twice a day. He had no job. His hair was brown and short and greasy unto abstraction. He filed his nails and flossed, he’d always done so, but he abhorred showering. He couldn’t keep his eyes open in the shower, and groping didn’t suit him. Living alone without a girlfriend was a situation that did not prompt showers.
By his third cigarette Fred felt ready to go for his stroll, but remembered that he wasn’t wearing any pants, and retreated back into the sullen interior of his tin house to collect a pair. The place no longer smelled like the home it was when his mother had lived there. The domestic alchemy of laundry, dish soap and dusty sofas had yielded to one poorly concealed rot after another.
There was a pair of jeans crumpled and deposited atop a mound of wadded-up tee shirts and streaked underpants. Fred put these on and placed the cigarette he’d been smoking into a calcified plastic cup, his “finisher” drink from the night before. On his bed there were noises coming from his open laptop. Ding ding ding. Spaced out as if to represent tentative inquiry.
Someone was IMing him. He sat down beside the computer and rested his weight on his elbow to get a look.
brandys7: hello?
brandys7: is anybody there?
brandys7: you there fred?
These had been sent several seconds ago. The dings had been in real time. Fred debated whether or not to type back. His hands hesitated over the keys. Internally a switch flipped and he resigned himself. He reached for a bottle of whiskey that was resting on the edge of a book shelf. He took a sip while one hand typed hello. He was still resting his weight on his elbow, curved around the computer, his feet on the ground. His eyes stung and he coughed.
slashie08: hello
brandys7: Fred
slashie08: you’ve reached me
brandys7: what are you doing?
slashie08: bout to go for a walk
brandys7: meet me at the tennis courts?
Fred rolled his eyes at the jolt of life he received from the invite. He frowned at the excited thing his body had become. He took another sip of whiskey. This time his eyes didn’t sting.
slashie08: yeah
brandys7: cool like I am so not doing anything this morning so right away is cool
slashie08: i was just about to walk anyway.
brandys7: sweet. uh… see you there.
Fred stood up and made as if to run his head under the sink for a while. Then he did. The water was cold at first and he gasped but felt better for it. He went to the fridge where he kept a tall glass of water and peanut butter sandwiches in cellophane wrap. He picked up the water and drained it at a gulp, then started in on the sandwiches, unwrapping them as he hurried out the door, as if he needed to hurry. He berated himself for hurrying. Brandy would take a long time, he would get there way before her and stand around like a chump smoking until he lost his voice. None of these remonstrations altered his course. He arrived at the tennis court and Brandy wasn’t there and he twisted and progressed back and forth along the gravel that lay atop the road near the bike stand. His shoes—skate shoes that were a birthday present from too long ago—let in tiny stones that he ignored for as long as he could. He smoked some more, his fingers started to stink.
He saw Brandy coming from almost a kilometer away, she was wearing the same thing she’d been wearing when he met her, a maroon tank top and skinny jeans. Brandy was a short and small girl with a cute face and lively green eyes. She tucked her hair behind her ears as if compelled by a reticent witness. She was very outgoing, but never seemed to reveal much of herself, a product of her overdeveloped listening skills.
Fred wasn’t sure when to begin waving. He had an image flash through his mind that he’d left the stove on or forgot to let the cat out of the master bedroom. Maybe both these eventualities were true, he didn’t care. He finally waved. She was all of twenty feet away now and the new question was when to say hello and start talking. If he waited for too long he would appear like he didn’t care. It would be a false pretence. He cared a lot. Brandy did not seem like the kind of girl who made bullshit worthwhile, but all girls strived to give that impression.
This was all going to blow over, Fred knew. He imagined himself stoned and playing video games that same afternoon, burying his many social mistakes in incognizance, his house feeling emptier than it ever had. The whole town a Christian mockery. He the witch. The outcast orphan. Ha-ha. There was nothing funny about it.
He imagined himself standing on his front porch again this morning, he took himself back—or forward, to the next morning. When it would all be the same again. His damned fourteen year old taste in music shuttled into his ears by an outmoded artefact. The sky, the one big one, conspiring when and where to shunt him, based on where was shady and where was not, as the day wore on.
They’d been talking for a few minutes before he let it go.
Brandy, Fred gathered, wanted to hang out. And the longer they hung out there more that Fred learned about the world. It was as if all the world had been obfuscated and he, in talking with Brandy, deciphered its code.
“Well so now you were a coffee shop employee in Moose Jaw?”
“Yes,” Brandy said, coyly, leading him.
“And now you turn sheets at that Christian hotel?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“But you don’t go to Briercrest?”
“Not yet.”
“You mean…”
“Well I might some day. I told my parents turned Christian as hell. Here,” she smiled, “give me one of them.”
Fred handed over a cigarette. They were walking in the direction of his trailer. Loose shale made swivelling noises beneath their feet. Fred read all kinds of meaning into their walk and talk, as if reading it out of a book.
My God, he thought, she’s just as lonely as I am.
He kept coming back to that. The afternoon waited, poised. Wind played like an lost melody through the tips of crops that pressed like an organized flood around all Saskatchewan towns. Tethered dogs reserved their vitality for when their families woke up. Once an hour a car drove by, and the person in it waved. The air carried a scent like a day off worry, that made it difficult to feel depressed unless the drone of that buzz-saw cut above everything. For some, it did. When they got to Fred’s porch he slumped against the screen door and unfurled the tightly bent paper. The news was of sports in other parts of Canada. Brandy sat to his right, hunched over herself, her arms resting on her thighs, one hand brought a lit cigarette to her lips. Her back looked small, almost like a child’s or an old woman’s from the angle that Fred viewed it. He adopted a similar squint, off into the distance, like he’d done on gods knew how many other mornings. Which was how he missed it when she leaned towards him to kiss him. His physiology leapt and he leapt to accommodate it, to moderate the damn thing. She had a grin on her face, which made her easier to kiss. Okay, Fred thought, so this happens. This happens.
The Boston Pizza’s OPEN sign made nervous electric noise and flitted on and off so that those driving by might have mistaken the place for closed. The road that curved past the Boston Pizza was covered in brown snow except where black ice showed. Daniel Dearborn waited for his date in front of the manic sign. He shivered in the dying of the day and shifted his weight. He was wearing Italian shoes with a pointed toe, an overcoat and a scarf. He was nervous. It was November 23, 2003. His breath was visible against a backdrop of shopping center lights and sky. In the entrance of the BP’s there was a choice between going to the Lounge or the Restaurant. All of the doors were glass; there was no welcome mat and the tiles held a film of grit. Daniel spent some of his time waiting there, his shoes made wet scratching sounds as he paced. Outside, large vehicles could be heard attempting to clear and salt the streets. Their gravely engines signified progress to the empty sidewalks. There was a warm wind. Calgary felt still and orange as the sun made last call. It was dark.
At this point Daniel discovered I was narrating this scene for him, though I was squatting at quite a distance. He narrowed his eyes, then, and glared at me as if I were no more than a camera lens. He kicked something, a clump of ice it looked, and yelled, “Is this all there is for you?”
They Came, They Cleaned, They Got Paid: An Epic in 3 Parts
PART 1: THE MAID WITH THE HARD ON POLISHES A SURFACE
in this sequence the audience is meant to latch on to the idea that a female can’t get a hard on. it’s a scene designed to disclose a literalistic surrealism, so to speak. there will be an ample protrusion jutting from the MAID’S cunch [a word signifying that weird grey area when a woman’s midsection seems to grow over her genitalia, cunt + ponch = cunch].. it is clearly an erection, this protrusion, and so the audience is led to wonder if there is a metaphor at work here, or if they, the audience, are meant to be taking this visual as literally as possible, and if so, what that all portends, etc..
PART 2: THE KITCHEN SERVANT TRIES TO FIND SOMETHING UNDER THE TABLE, BUT IN THE PROCESS OF LEANING DOWN EXPOSES HER BUM TO THE MAID WITH THE HARD ON, WHO HAS A DIFFICULT TIME POLISHING THE SURFACE THAT SHE WAS POLISHING
make sure when casting to slot a mega totally hot girl for the role of kitchen servant.. it’s also important if you’ve done your casting right for the MAID to never get naked. the hard on, as well as the cunch, must remain in ambiguity at all costs. I repeat this is a PRIORITY #1 MANDATE that the cunch and the hard on [inevitably a prop, in case I actually had to tell you] be obscured by clothing at all times. interest from the MAID in the KITCHEN SERVENT needs to be demonstrated, not consummated. and never explicitly. the MAID with the hard on could be pining for ice cream. or for her puppy back at home. or for a party in which upwardly mobile lemurs distribute affection by writing down their feelings on pieces of note paper and passing the papers around. for all we care. the only thing sexual about the MAID is that she has a hard on. but girls don’t get hard ons. okay?
PART 3: EVERYONE FOCUSES ON THEIR JOB LONG ENOUGH FOR THE BOSS TO COME OUT AND WRITE THE CHECK
people going into this are going to be convinced that the first line of the title, ‘THEY CAME’ is a double entendre and are going to be winking and nudging each other waiting for you the filmmakers or producers to wink and nudge at them by having a scene in which one of the cleaners does in fact come. but it’s important that this never happens. the important thing with PART 3 is to illustrate that tension of a decently unambiguous nature (remember, though, females don’t get hard ons) is IN THE AIR but is not being CONSUMMATED. that’s the whole point. they came (as in physically arrived) they cleaned (just that) they got paid (you see the pattern)
Earthbound
This is the story of a song that begins humbly. It is the story of what it means to mean well, of mothers who choose to begin life, of lives spent well and wrapped as gifts only when they are ended, when cloth enshrouds the descending casket, it is story of thin, white notes. The song is weary, it is returning home. The song is breathless, it dies finally in the arms of its maker. The song is you, the song is me. The song sums up and the song dissolves. The song is unsingable, unhearable. No wracked shell, no crying body expresses it. The song fits nicely in a three inch cherrywood box in the chest of this young man who walks now up the lit thoroughfare, slowing his gait to take in the banter of the three scarred black men who sip their chai tea and nip from flasks and speak profoundly on the girls their lives have left behind. He overhears, “for years I gained the happiness of another man, guiltily sneaking a thought of her during the day when I paused in my work.” These men will talk the day through and the night through; they have never stopped even as the clear purple tune of our cherrywood song will not cease in its too-small box, for the song needs the constriction, and the boy, whose complexion is angelic and blessed, cannot attend to its overabundant thrumming for his footsteps have slowed again to hear the mucous play of a baby girl from underneath a door. I spy with my little eye something that is orange. I spy with my little eye something that is peach. I spy with my little eye something that is colored like the early morning. The pants of the boy listening in from the other side of the door. Presently, he knocks and the door is opened by long wet eyes. Mom’s not here, out at the store. She begins crying, the girl, swaying with the open door, back and forth like a lost sailor. It’s because I cannot play eye-spy properly. All of my guesses are no.
Typical Troubled Collegiate Mind Story From BD @ Age 18
1.
A cake to commemorate Leslie’s third birthday. All white icing and carroty beneath. Leslie regarded the frosted rectangle and all of the kids around the table. Most of them were older than her, they intimidated her. There were many mothers in the room, too, because Leslie’s mother was popular once. Leslie appeared to suck the whole situation in, sated not at all by the enormity of the presentation. This flood of smells and expectations lined the girl’s tiny nose with celery-brown bruises. ”You’re supposed to blow, dear, not suck.” Leslie wasn’t listening, or rather, as would always be the case, wasn’t yielding to the suggestion. Instead she did what came if not naturally, than defensively. She peed on the cream cheese icing, which was so encrusted the urine pooled on its white surface before soaking in to form daunting daffodil smudges. But how was it accomplished? Not without dexterity, as you may have guessed, and a fantastic dispensation of it at that, for a three year old.
2.
When Leslie was six years old her parents hosted a funeral reception at their suburban home. A young boy, Josh, had frozen to death chasing his dog across a thawing pond. The neighborhood was devastated. The crowd gathered into the Kingston basement, which was larger than it need to be, where Darla, Leslie’s mother, had made a spread.
Leslie, who missed the funeral, discovered suddenly a myriad of individuals in her basement. When she was seen her mother explained to her it was important she be on her best behavior, sensitive to the pain of the grieving family, and all that. Leslie nodded solemnly, less in concession to her mother’s dish of deportmental precepts than in endorsed cognizance of her basement’s transformation. Before Darla was able to finish with her daughter an extempore prayer meeting was called into progress by a fiercely chinned gentleman. Silence became the chief export of this convergent company. Probably not a good thing, and Leslie’s father, Nathan, feared overmuch. Leslie, however, did almost nothing. Only this: when everyone else breathed a solemn amen Leslie breathed, “fart, fart, fart, fart.” When it seemed like the mischievous? non compos mentis? child was going to be good, she said a lot louder, “fart, fart, fart, fart.” The room went silent. Reverential eyes opened and fixated on the girl, who was a nanoscale of bad hair, who said, as impressively as she channelled a ballsy disgorgement of piss three years ago, “Fuck grief.” Said this into the silence her doughy chorus of ‘fart’ had cleared. Nathan went white and flew across the room to his daughter, where he picked her up and escorted her willy nilly to his room, where he hesitated before intoning harshly that such things are better left unsaid, and delivered a few no-hearted swats to the front door of Leslie’s ass. When Nathan came downstairs it was much later in the afternoon and he assumed everyone to be gone. Instead he was confronted by the very man who had begun the prayer meeting in the Kingston basement, none other than Pastor Cole.
“What can I do you for, there, pastor?”
“I think we should speak about your daughter.”
“How’s that?”
“Her behavior is distressing.”
“You’re telling me.”
“What are you doing about it?”
“What can I do? She’s six.”
“The Bible advocates spanking.”
“I do that.”
“Perhaps not enough.”
“Listen, pastor, I’m not one of your parishioners. We don’t really believe the Bible in this house.”
“Well you know what the Bible says.”
“No, I don’t.”
“It says ’spare the rod…’”
Mr. Cole seemed to forget the rest.
“If it says ’spare the rod’ than what are you telling me not to do?”
3.
When Leslie was nine years old she developed a pain in her back which, egregiously, failed to autonomously? decamp. It, the pain, was hypothesized to be autochthonous of a lump, a lugubrious dumpling wedged anecdotally in an unreachable batch of pudge. It’s because you are always hunching, was a postulate thrown around for a while. It’s those clothes you wear, was another. Leslie might have said, What? This lavender, long-sleeved, turtle-necked, inhuming fabric. After a month Leslie was discovered crying into a pillow. She was later told, It’s because you’re maybe a little, I don’t want to be the one to say this, but, well, pulvinate. Leslie might have protested or she might have not. The pain remained unmotivated to desist. Then one night Leslie went to a dramatic movie and in one of the silent parts hurled an enormous rock at the screen. The theatre was small enough and the rock big enough for the resultant rip to handicap further viewing. For a few minutes swells of classical music continued to elucidate the irrevocable poignancy of a heavily emotive reunion. Even the kids could not deny feelings of abandonment, as if their lover had pulled out, set his ordinarily charismatic hair afire, and sprinted elsewhere, leaving traces of ejaculate to rim their neglected ovals. Folks in attendance, though Canadian, were not averse to murmuring, loudly enough for Leslie to be unable to ignore, You just don’t do stuff like that. The pain in the girl’s back, however, was gone. Leslie might have said, You just don’t do stuff like that.
4.
The Internet, as it became more and more available, became an outlet for Leslie’s predispositions to bear out, which her parents allowed and attempted to ignore, except when it became impossible, such as the times when they were telephoned by a friend of the family.
“Is that Darla? Darla Kingston? Do you know what your daughter did? It was the rudest thing. I noticed in my e-mail I was tagged by your daughter in one of the blogs she’s been writing. I heard you all were making progress with her, and I thought, I don’t know why, but I thought this would be some kind of a nice gesture. I began reading the blog, which was really a story, a story about a…”, the voice on the other end seemed to be having a difficult time, “a plump blond. It kept referring to the main character like that. Plump blond. Well, I didn’t think anything of it, even after, God help me, I noticed the first name of the girl in question was Pam, until I realized I was the only one tagged. It’s worse, you have to understand, than just being e-mailed a nasty letter, because now everyone in our network…”
Calls like this were not uncommon. Often Leslie’s insensitive gestures as perpetrated online were worse than calling Pam Harris on her weight. These acts could not be properly referred to as indiscretions, for there was nothing thoughtless or misjudged about anything Leslie did. Darla didn’t ask her daughter why anymore. Instead she pointed out to her daughter with a varying degrees of vehemence that what she had done was “not funny” forgetting to realize that humor had never been the point.
5.
The interviews following any one of Leslie’s offenses, which were yearly or bi-yearly affairs, were unproductive. When it was simply Leslie’s parents conducting them Leslie would offer nothing. When it was a registered psychiatrist or therapist Leslie’s answers to the therapist’s questions would prove less helpful than her silence.
“Why do you think you act out like that?”
“Let me answer your question with a question. What do you think it means to be the best band in the world? I mean, what does that even mean??”
“I’m sorry, I don’t see what your behavior has to do with music.”
“I didn’t say it had anything to do with music.”
“Is there a connection, Leslie, that you’d like to explore here?”
“No. I’d like for you to speculate with me on what it means, the features that the ascription in particular signifies, whatever they may be, make a list if you want to, to be the best band in the world.”
“Well that’s not really what these sessions are about.”
“Different bands say it sometimes. They say, ‘We are the greatest band in the world.’ It doesn’t mean record sales, it doesn’t mean how much money their tour makes, it doesn’t mean how cute their dancers are. What does it mean? It’s not a qualifiable qualifier, and yet it’s employed mercilessly.”
“I’m going to have to insist we talk about your destruction of private property.”
“What about it?”
“Are you aware it’s a crime?”
“Like as in, ‘That nail polish is a crime, girl?’”
“No, like as in, ‘Throwing a rock in a theatre is a crime.’”
“I’ve never seen a law against it.”
“Laws, my dear, are painted in broad strokes.”
6.
The hours Leslie spent alone, it might have broken your heart, the sheer number of them. You wouldn’t imagine her anthropoid disposition, replete with its interoceptive impelling, to govern her even distantly given her record of so defying the standards of interactional emboli. And yet she cried often into her pillows, wetting them and heating them, working herself up and walling herself in. Though the soreness (and lumpiness) of her posterior vertebral column would crescendo, Leslie renounced her impulsive ways for a time. Her parents acknowledged this as the girl ‘growing up’. In ninth grade Leslie penned a definitive poem on the matter of her various infidelities against the human race. By eleventh grade the crises were all but in the past. The content and apparently apologetic attitude of Leslie’s poem, by her parent’s cruelly firm conviction, was hopeful.
7.
In high school Leslie fell in love. It wasn’t supposed to happen, indeed it wasn’t likely to happen. For three years, marking her concerted efforts toward civil immersion, Leslie was all but incommensurately outcast. Then, at the start of her thirteenth year of institutional indoctrination, a boy held the door for her and smiled toothily. He lumbered instead of walked. He was similarly body-typed as the girl to which he exhibited basic courtesy. The two of them were tall, and long haired, and built like a half-giant. Leslie looked at the boy as she went into the school, and cursed herself preliminarily for the warmness she knew she’d feel, below and in her heart. That was the first day of school.
On the second day of school Kenneth opened the door for her again, this time introducing himself sheepishly. The two of them followed one another to the water fountain, then Kenneth insisted Leslie go first, so Leslie did, bending laboriously, accommodating as best she could the swelling in her back. Almost visible, she thought it, though you wouldn’t detect the lump amongst her nakedness, nor even if you felt for it with your hands.
When she came up she tucked her hair behind her ears and stayed by the fountain to watch this boy hydrate himself. The two of them entered class simultaneously, drawing stares and perhaps a bemused giggle. By the fourth day of school they were bantering at one another during lunch, Leslie giving him that look, the look that says you’re already in the clear, boy, just keep running. That this look had any effect thrilled Leslie beyond reasonableness, as it thrilled the blond oaf she would grow to dote on. They talked about the things they liked, the things they couldn’t stand. More often than not they talked about the things they couldn’t stand. Two months later Leslie was resting her head on his chest, looking up at him and receiving kisses, the two of them sprawled in the inclusive turf. Kenneth’s penchant for devotion was discovered at last, and by a girl who, tenably, needed it most.
8.
Over halfway through the school year, after Christmas break, which the two kids spent doing that stuff they’d previously restricted themselves from imagining, Leslie and Kenneth were making out in the back seat of Kenneth’s marooner. They called it the marooner because it was both maroon in color and isolating in ramification. After a while Leslie decided she had something to say.
“I can’t do this anymore.”
“What?”
Kenneth gazed inquisitively at his bride, ready to be hurt unimaginably, and indeed Leslie’s face, her eyes in particular, should have told him to run. He might have asked, What is it? Leslie might have said, Exactly. The two of them stared at each other for a very long time before Leslie reached behind her back to pull the screwdriver from the waistband. Leslie didn’t plan it out very well. She guessed he wouldn’t pull away from her, but she also guessed he would stay still, which was a silly thing to bank on. Her initial pass, surprisingly strong, wedged the screwdriver into the side of his face, sticking into his cheek at an odd angle, ousting gore plentifully. She could hear him screaming, and he squished her in his mad rush for the door. Leslie sat in the car watching her husband drip blood all over the school parking lot, watching him cry, watching his neck muscles bulge and contort as he waged a miserable skirmish against looking back at her. Someone noticed him and ran over to him and Leslie could hear him ask, Is she gone? Is she gone? No one knew what to say or what to do. The screwdriver was hanging precariously, lodged perhaps more than superficially, and when it fell from Kenneth’s face it evicted a plasmic spill.
Leslie wanted to know how she felt. Could she joke about great bands and ambiguity to the therapist this time? And the tumor, was it benign again, or gone completely? And the poem? Was it still true? She looked up. The sky made as if to answer. Things fell away.
Vertigo Slut
Chapter 1: In Which The Character Is Introduced, His Actions Are Revealed, And His Humanness Fails To Show Through
Andrew James Rouchard would be the last person you’d expect to fuck you on the roof of a downtown apartment building, then toss you off the edge.
Andrew James Rouchard was a charming, attractive, out-going accountant, who lived in St. Paul.
When Andrew was at work, he drank coffee. He had a jar of pencils on his desk. He had a picture of his ex-wife there too, and of their kid, who was in Atlanta now, possibly addicted to whatever drug moderates the symptoms of ADHD. The kid was a girl. She had weird teeth. She got her teeth from her mom, so to hell with both of them.
Andrew loved to fuck girls on the roof of the apartment building at which he was resident. He loved to feel the slap of their ass against his thighs. Sometimes he played his iPod while he was banging them. There was an iPod dock on a table near his favorite spot. He played songs by Sam Roberts, No Doubt, and, when the going got rough, Daft Punk or something trancey. Chicks would bust nuts for sure.
But Andrew didn’t stop with sex. No, the slick intro and outro of penis to vagina did not satisfy him. Oh sure, he got going pretty good, but nothing finished him off like finishing off the bitch he was railing. He’d position her at the very edge of the roof (the better to back that ass up) and just when he was about to come, when he and she were about to come in tandem, he’d deliver an over-hearty thrust and off the edge would the young miss go. Her body not yet registering what her mind knew to be certain death below. Her pussy wet as an thirsty elephant snout, her nipples as hard as arguments with academics, a sea of semen showering her descent. For on the roof would be Andrew, hand on his cock, pumping spunk like a monkey on cocaine, wringing lifewater from his hose like a fireman trying to save a life, yelling, “I fucking win again!” as the love of his night collides with car and breaks in more pieces than a fourth-grader can count.
The second time he fucked a chick on the roof and bumped her to doom he realized it was a more complicated business than it seemed. Cops, and all that.
Chapter 2: In Which The Two Policeman Who Begin Tracking The Character Are Introduced, And The Character Gains Infamy
“That pussy has been exalted,” Tom said, examining the body.
“That pussy has been destroyed,” Mike agreed, and they solemnly high-fived each other.
“This guy is one sick fuck,” Tom said, his eyes roving a scene revealing an absurd amount of albino lipstick and a lot of hot body.
“Man or horse?”
“It is a ballswhack of pecker snot,” Tom agreed.
“Wanna get a beer?” Mike asked.
“Yeah. After seeing something like this, I need a beer.”
The two cops went to a local bar called The Garage. A modest establishment, geared towards bikers but friendly enough towards the uninitiated. Sitting at the bar was Andrew James Rouchard. He was drinking a beer.
The cops sat down next to him, ordered beers, and having little else to do, turned to Andrew and said, “Have you heard about that sex crime up the way?”
“Yeah,” Andrew James replied, “I actually live in that building.”
“Scary, eh?”
“Yes,” Andrew agreed, “but did you see that pussy?”
“Fucking wrecked her, didn’t he?” Tom agreed, and they all three high-fived each other, slowly, like tired slaves to some ancient obligation.
“We’re investigating that one,” Mike informed Andrew.
“Oh yeah? Any luck?”
“Naw,” Mike answered. ”The damn thing was just too crazy, we had to get beers.”
“I can’t drink too many, though,” Tom said.
“Tom has a heard condition,” Mike clarified.
The three sat and drank for a while, every once in a while mentioning the thoroughly used woman who lay in pieces up the way, or citing in unambiguous terms the sheer quantity of spew that coated her, crisping in the afternoon sun.
“I almost envy the guy,” Mike admitted after a while.
“I almost envy the girl,” Tom said.
No one said anything for a couple of minutes. Then Andrew said, “Listen, if you guys want to see the roof, if the warrants aren’t through or whatever, I’ve got a key, we can go up there and just check it out.”
“Well,” Tom said, holding his beer at an angle and examining it like an intelligent man might, “that makes no sense whatsoever, flies in the face of every protocol I’ve ever been taught, and identifies you as a prime suspect. But… I have been drinking.”
“Ah, what can it hurt?” Mike asked. ”We know Andrew here isn’t the guy. We could grab some beers along the way.”
“Yeah there’s a liquor store a walk away.”
“Wouldn’t even have to drive…” Mike cajoled.
“Done,” Tom said. And so it was.
When the three got to the roof, they all sat down around a table that was there and began drinking. ”Hey, an iPod speaker thing,” Andrew said. ”I’ve got one of those…” and reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the device that fit so wonderfully in the dock.
“It’s like sex,” Tom, who was quite drunk by now, slurred. ”Just like… a fuckin cock in a slot.”
“That’s true…” Mike said, kindly not leaving his partner out to dry.
“A little true, I guess, isn’t it,” Andrew said.
Then there was uneasy silence for a few minutes.
“Well,” Mike said, getting up, “I think I’m gonna take off. There’s plenty about this case that still needs to be investigated. Tom, you coming?”
“I think I’ll just stay and drink a bit longer with Andrew,” Tom said, his knees appeared to be quivering.
“‘Kay, suit yourself man. See you later.”
“Yes, yes.” Tom said impatiently.
Andrew stared into Tom’s eyes as Mike left. As soon as the door closed behind Mike the two of them were on each other like one covertly gay middle-aged cop on a sex addict who couldn’t get off without sending his victims to body-shattering deaths. It was a beautiful thing.
They kissed for a while, urgently, tearing at each other’s mouths while their hands fumbled for each other’s cocks under the table. Tom finally had to break from the embrace, he was panting so hard, panting that turned quickly to grunting.
They undressed then, as quickly as it is possible to do so, and Tom presented his bare ass and leaned against the table, trembling, awaiting the heat and bulk of Andrew’s perfect dick.
“Not here,” Andrew whispered and gently guided Tom to the edge of the roof.
Tom was reaching behind him, trying to find Andrew so he could guide him in, but Andrew batted his hands away and let Tom wait. Let Tom hunger.
Moments later, Tom’s whole body covered in a sheen of restless sweat, he felt it. Andrew. All of Andrew. Tom coughed, “Yes.” His voice was hoarse with desire.
They fucked like it was the end of the world, and when they were nearly finished Andrew pushed Tom clear of the building, and Tom fell, fountaining ball juice that seemed to rise to meet Andrew’s, a viscous clash of dick dribble, the final point of contact between these two men, who might have lived and loved one another for the rest of their lives.
The sound Tom’s body made when it landed atop Andrew’s previous victim coaxed yet more face paint from Andrew’s empowered ween. ”I fucking win!” Andrew screamed, “I fucking win!”
Chapter 3: In Which The Character Wins It All
They arrested him at his place of work. He was led forcibly from the building to a car on the streets. Mike was standing near the car, looking grim. When he saw Andrew he mouthed, “You fucking ruined that asshole!” Then pantomimed a high five.
Andrew James Rouchard managed to nod before his head was shoved into the cop car.
The courtroom was large and smelled like wood chips and decision. The arbiter, the Honorable Miss Ange, was shockingly young, black, and had blonde hair.
Andrew’s trial was expedited as the people of St. Paul were demanding justice be done upon his head. Andrew was by now infamous. There were many names for him. Vertigo Slut. Bi in the Sky. And if justice was come, Andrew would have said, “Hell yeah!” But instead justice had arrived, and Andrew was not happy.
Andrew never spent much of his money, so with all his savings he could afford one of the best criminal defense attorneys going. Jack ‘The Black Asshole’ Jones.
“Here’s what I want you to do,” Andrew told Jack one day, when they were conferring about the upcoming trial, “I don’t want you to defend me. I’ll plead non-guilty, but only if you can set up an Exhibit. You know like Exhibit A or Exhibit B. This Exhibit has to involve me fucking that sweet-ass Miss Ange on the roof of the courtroom. You know, to prove… that it’s impossible to shove somebody off the roof while you’re doing them from behind, or something.”
Jack ‘The Black Asshole’ Jones had stared at Andrew then, mentioned the possibility of pleading insanity, and then shook his head.
“It’s impossible.”
“Goddamnit Jack I thought you were the best.”
“I am. But… you can’t fuck the Judge on the roof of the courtroom.”
“Not unless you set it up somehow.”
“I’m not that good,” Jack insisted. ”Nobody is.”
“You have to try.”
So Jack did.
It was a long road. First Jack had to prolong the trial, free up some of Andrew’s rights during the trial period, then arrange a blind date between Andrew and Angie at a local restaurant.
The Judge was more lenient than could have been imagined. She often said things like, “Well… it flies in the face of everything I’ve ever been taught, evinces a total disregard for the sanctity of the law, the will of the people, and the office I hold… but I’m going to allow it.”
She was going to allow a lot more than that soon. Allow it right into her pussy, if you know what I mean. Allow a sweaty fucking phallus. Can I get a hell yeah? Can I get a high five?
Anyway, the date went well. Andrew was a charmer, and ripe sexual tension occurred within seconds of anyone’s eye-contacting him. Within a few minutes Miss Ange was sold like Paul on God.
That night the two of them went to the courthouse roof and made it hard. So hard. Andrew whispered, “I won’t throw you off, baby, don’t worry.”
And Miss Ange said, “Just fuck me hard. Just fuck me.”
So Andrew did. My goodness did he ever. It was poetry. He wrote a fucking poem on that ass. He glorified it. Her pussy was so wet it could have fed Africa. Then at the last second, just as his glans were flaring like a vodka bottle in Vegas, he pushed her off the edge.
But this time, she was hanging on to his sides. Andrew lost his balance and the two of them tumbled to the courthouse steps. Writhing like two horny snakes. Blowing so much livestock up her valley, it’d make a farmer feel like a millionaire.
When they hit the steps they found they were both still alive. Hurt, but alive. The courthouse was not the tallest building in St. Paul.
“Want to get married?” Andrew asked, out of breath.
“It’d be the manly thing to do,” Miss Ange said. ”I think you just fucked a baby into me.”
It was true. Her honey pot was brimming.
“Let’s call him Larry,” Andrew suggested.
Then they kissed.
Her God
I was going to heaven on Monday. The angels’ call had been gentle and soothing in my head for days.
I decided to go for a final meal to a restaurant on 14th and Bannock. The meal turned out to be stuffed portabella mushrooms smothered in an improvised hollandaise that I failed, bleakly, to admire. I’d special-requested the dish, so I was prohibited from complaining. The waitress’s name was Shirley Forester. It must have been her second or third day, for no mannerism I disclosed put her at ease. I ate in front of a window onto which black gobby rain plunked. I commented on Shirley’s hair (complimentarily) and had a strange urge to ply about her home life that I suppressed. The clarion call of the cosmos high—sonorous and nerve-wracking melodies—made maudlin my every attempt to be casual about this dying business. The angels’ voices were the opposite, upon consideration, as soothing.
I, a Midwesterner, did not do ceremony, which was what this intra-cranial symphony amounted to. What’s worse, I was not given to know what it would be like in heaven. There was no manual; I had been afforded no chance to warm up to the idea. The Bible was patently false when it came to foreshadowing our mansions that sounded like tutoring programs. Prepared, individualized, etcetera.
Either the Bible was false when it came to the afterlife or I was in for a few unpleasantries, for it relayed a good deal about worship and praise and naturic phenomenon of potentially conflicting varieties converging about a chair on which God—a bewilderingly physical entity despite His infiniteness—would, very much physically, sit. A position was open up there to be seated to one or the other side of Him, which I had not applied for. I only prayed I would not have to watch my son Jordan (deceased, now, long ago) parched and crackling in some inconceivable torture, begging for a single droplet of water, serving out his timeless penance for having drank himself to death (all in one go, suicide). How many leagues from grace would I fall if I were to, from my abundance up there, deliver even one small drop? A simple gesture I had been waiting unendurable splices of earthly time to extend. A straightforward kindness perhaps forbidden where I was Monday-bound.
The restaurant where I ate was called the Waterloo, which did not match the its street name, as noted. I sat there. My ass at this point in life was bony beyond sight of repair. There were many that I’d have liked to say goodbye to. At the risk of some hypostatic forfeiture, I will tell of a man I admired for many months now. A rugged, Quebecois whose bushy hairs made me want to reach out and tug on them. He waited every Sunday morning at the base of the steps, in front of my apartment. Many days it was snowing or sleeting or making itself bad, of outdoors I am speaking. He presented his arm and so doing minimized my risk of sliding or hurting myself or/and expediting these admittedly beautiful voices in my head. We would walk then to the neighbourhood chapel, my arm in the crook of his elbow. Sometimes we were abashed to be noticed, like kids in an era characterized by sepia tones or no photography at all. It was—I knew this from reading and television—a ritual that made us too lucky, really. We paid no attention to this good fortune. One could have easily put the dance to song. Maybe heaven would be a warehouse, a cutting room, a place to patch and edit one’s life into the cold (yet lively) narrative one imagined it to be all along. A middle-aged woman shouldn’t have been thinking this way—and in a way I’m wasn’t thinking this way—which was fine, because I wasn’t middle-aged. I was being called up early. It saddened me.
I should like to have said goodbye to Bruce, but didn’t think that I would have time. I was informed by the incrementally increased volubility of that ambient celestial orchestra my ETA at the gates. Almost certainly sooner, it became clear, than Monday. The louder the music got the closer I became to indoctrination into something totally other than this.
My time with Bruce came after I had fallen into despair. I’d made a mistake with a boy, during that time, and acted unbecomingly for a woman. Bruce and the neighbourhood chapel were my anecdote to the actions I’d taken while in despair-mode. They did not anaesthetize the blunt distress that was the atmosphere of my apparently few days of post-Jordan life, merely made up for mistakes made while I was, let’s say, a little less immune to the poisons of that atmosphere.
I’ll never forget what Bruce said, the adult thing he said when I told him about Jordan. He said, “That is a different order altogether of concern.” He stated it matter-of-factly, and made me feel much less alone. I lay awake some nights wondering if it was sin that I fucked the brains out of a silly boy and would not touch this kind man. Wondering if the choices I was making signified a lost mind. I studied nightly the good book. In the end, it was a simple concession. I could brook no more porousness in relation to my boundaries. Except now I am due to report before St. Paul. And all there is is porousness. So much so I truly do not know where I begin. The funny thing about this is the light—is the way that I am drawn toward light—a septic clarity that makes fugitive a healthy want for blurs. It strikes me that there are so many others, confused this way. The mystics have it quite wrong. It is not all people and things that are gratuitously one with one another. It is the helpless and bled-out, that have no choice but to mingle.
A screaming over-technical sound that conciliates finally, amounting to a human voice. I realize I have been wrong. About how much have I been wrong?
“Ms. Forester. Ms. Forester, follow my finger. You’re going to be fine. Everything’s going to be. I just need to know are you—”
“—is she awake?”
“awake?”
My Friend Thomas
Tomas and I went to the theatre to see the Dark Knight. We were sitting side by side with our dates when Tomas started rumbling and stinking. Huge, swooping farts. Like an airplane landing. It continued. For all the world, it sounded as if he were on the can, undergoing the most painful and intense bowel movement of his career. People were looking. Giggling. Cursing. You’ve got to be kidding me, some said. After three full minutes someone said, You’ve got to be kidding me.
One day Tomas stayed overnight at my house. The next day Tomas was wanting to drink, but my mother doesn’t allow underage kids to drink. We had bought an eighteen of Bud and were eager to get at it. After a few hours of playing video games in my room, Tomas heard my mother say goodbye to the house and close the front door. He waited maybe two minutes before bursting out of my room yelling, “The whore is gone! The whore is gone! The whore–” My mother was in the kitchen, making us lunch.
Tomas and I were at a vegan restuarant. We’d finished our meal and our drink, a burrito and sweet watermelon soda, and were ready to pay. I asked the waitress if she could change a hundred and she said, yes, she could. By the time the waitress got back Tomas and I were in the middle of a conversation. I had been complimenting him on his drumming skills, and he was just saying, “Thank you,” when the waitress returned with our bills. “You’re welcome,” she said. Tomas turned to her and said, “I wasn’t thanking you you stupid fucking bitch.”
The other day Tomas and I were taking in a little local entertainment at a cafe on main street. That evening Tomas noticed a girl that he might be interested in dating. She was tall and skinny, had short hair and small breasts. It just so happened I knew her, so I introduced him. A few days later I heard they’d gone on a date, and Tomas had made his move. “How did it go?” I asked. “Not bad,” Tomas said. “We were making out on the park bench, and that was fun. After a while I leaned closer to her and said, ‘It’s so good to get with someone like you. I feel so close to be being bi-sexual when I’m with you.’”
Tomas and I were at the grocery store when a child dropped a looney. Tomas reached down and picked it up and put it in his pocket. The child was confused for a moment, then began to cry. The child’s parent was nearby and saw what Tomas had done. He came over and said, “Give my child her looney back.” Tomas said, “Give my ears their quiet back, bitch.”
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