Youtube Killed your Television and Other Irrelevant Details

"Are you going to break up with me?"

Jennifer kept saying that the night before, and honestly, I'm not sure if she put the idea in my head, or if it was already there festering, and her words were just a water can hovering over the emerging daisy of my discontent. I don't know how it happened, but by that morning, I started to think how nice it would be if I did break up with her. By lunch, I had my entire speech planned, to be presented after dinner.

We should have had something less red and sloppy for our last meal as a couple. It's my fault for wearing white I guess. I never wear white. I don't know what got into me, but the 8 dollar clearance t shirt I ordered online came with a free white t shirt that said "You Tube Killed your Television," and I mean, come on, that's cool, I had to wear it.

Her lip was quivering before the hostess brought the menus. I hadn't even said anything. I thought, in fact, I was doing a fantastic job of pretending that nothing was wrong. I'm not the type of person to break up with someone on an empty stomach.

"I'm going on a diet as soon as the weekend is over," she sputtered.

"That's fine," I said, encouraging, but not so encouraging so as to inspire an evening full of "does this scenario make me look fat." The point was sort of moot in the first place. Jennifer had 99 problems, but being overweight wasn't one of them.

She nervously continued on and on, but I was distracted with thoughts of all the things I would be able to do once I'd ended this two year debacle with Jennifer. It was fun at first, obviously, all relationships are, but now it seemed like the good times only served to punctuate the bad. When was the last time we went a whole week without her crying on my kitchen floor because I'd failed yet again to prove my love to her in a test I wasn't aware I was taking? Last week she locked herself in the bathroom for four hours because I didn't punch the guy who held the door open for her into the movie theater. Without Jennifer on my back I could get a little reading done at night, go out to the bar with my friends, have a few flings, and maybe, when I was good and ready, meet someone new that I could really like. Someone with a little tougher skin. My friend Jed's girlfriend used to date women and sometimes they go out to the bar together to pick up girls. I was thinking that maybe I could find a girl like Jed's girlfriend, when all of a sudden the check was in front of us, and I knew it was time to cut to the chase.

I reached across the table, took her hand in mine, and looked deeply into her eyes. "I don't want to see you anymore," I said.

Her face contorted into a horrified, frozen expression, like there was a skip in the dvd of an M Night Shyamalan movie. Then suddenly she lurched forward, and with no explanation, vomited an entire bucket of churned up, cheap mall restaurant vegetarian spaghetti. It slid around on the booth's countertop and splashed directly onto the logo of my new white tshirt, so that it was unclear to anyone reading what exactly did what to who's television.

Sometimes when something out of the ordinary happens, the audience protocol is to do their best to pretend that they haven't seen anything unusual at all, but when the event is as explosive as this was, things move beyond the norms of common politeness. The people simply couldn't help their dramatic reactions. One woman backed away from her table and screamed. A young adult with a green mohawk in the corner yelled "Fucking wicked!" The wait staff huddled together near the kitchen, none of them daring to cross over to our side of the restaurant, lest the "closest person to the mess needs to clean it up" rule go into effect.

I couldn't think of anything to say.

She got up from her side and stood next to the booth, bent over, clutching her stomach. "Now I don't feel so good," she said, unnecessarily.

"I uh..." I think I was going to say something about a napkin or a doggie bag, when she suddenly heaved forward and doused me with a fresh batch of red, chopped up noodles. They looked and smelled like the blood and brains of our shit storm of a relationship, and the entire date seemed to me the making of some allusive but profound metaphor. It was inside my shoes now and splattered across my glasses. I tried to wipe them off on my shirt but it only spread the stuff around.

"There's no WAY she ate that much spaghetti tonight," someone from across the room yelled.

"What did you do to her anyway?" A female voice said.

"Who said he did anything?" the man she was with replied. "Maybe she's just sick."

"He broke up with me!" Jennifer screamed, and once again vomited. This time there could be no doubt that something magical was at work, given the amount of food spewed across the restaurant compared to how much spaghetti came with a single dinner serving. I wanted a sip of something, but chunks of green salad floated in my Coke glass.

"How could you break up with her in a restaurant!" Another woman bellowed, irrationally.

"That doesn't make any sense!" Our waiter said, coming to my defense. "What, should he have done it in an email? On her machine?"

"Well I hope they don't tip you one cent," the woman retorted.

"He shouldn't have done it at all!" Jennifer cried out. "I was going to change! I'm going on a diet next week!" She began hacking dry heaves of air so violently it made the paper napkins on the surrounding tables sigh.

The entire restaurant was in an uproar, everyone blurting out their opinions about the merits of our relationship at once.

"You don't need to go on a diet honey. You look fabulous."

"Should have done it at home bro. Now the whole restaurant smells like a gymnast's locker room."

"Girl, you are too good for him!"

"The joke is about gymnasts penchant for bulimia. Stomach acid. It has a distinct odor."

Honestly, I didn't know what to think. Finally, the manager came over and tapped me on the shoulder with a plastic gloved finger., standing as far away as his arm's reach would allow. "I'm sorry but we will have to ask you to leave."

"But I..."

"There will be no charge as long as you take this hysterical woman out of here immediately."

I thought about my car's upholstery. Sure, I didn't exactly drive a Jaguar, but I'd always made a point of keeping it clean. And what about breaking up with Jennifer and attaining my own independence?

"What am I supposed to do with her?" I asked the manager.

"We suggest," he looked at the rest of the wait staff, who nodded in unison, "that you try to work it out."

It's still unclear to me how this happened, how the decision had slid so limply out of my vomit covered hands and into those of the patrons at this cheap mall restaurant, but there it was, and in the moment, I couldn't help but obey. Jennifer had overheard everything and was beginning to regain her composure now. She licked her fingers and daintily smoothed her hair away from her face and behind her ears.

"We agree," the restaurant said. "You made your bed. Now lie in it."

In a trance, on legs moved by some otherworldly agent, I took Jennifer by the elbow and led her to the door. I opened it for her and she gracefully walked in front of me, one heeled foot in front of the other. "I will be going on a diet next week," she called out to the restaurant behind her.

The boy with the green mohawk couldn't have summed it up any better. "What the fuck does dieting have to do with anything?"

4:51 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

The Sunday Afternoon Book Club

I'd been away at college for the last several semesters, so when school eventually ended and I came to live back at home for a spell, I think I'd forgotten that my mother was prone to moments of bat-shit insanity. I stared at my laptop, presumably looking for a job, but more likely mindlessly surfing the internet, when she came barreling into the room, a feather duster in hand and a wild disposition.

"We've got to get this place spic and span by Sunday afternoon! The girls from the book club insist on meeting here, in this house, so we absolutely positively have got to get the place sparkling."

I sighed, dramatically. Mother and I were hatched into two very different worlds. Her mother, my grandmother, was an imminently neat woman, forever clad in un-run panty hose and prude ironed frocks. She kept a house of immaculate precision, filled with priceless Vases (pronounced: vaaahs) and sparkling faucets. She produced three daughters, my mother was the youngest, all of them afraid of leaving any dust in their shadows. They were the type of girls in grade school that would raise their hand to tell the teacher she missed a part of a letter when erasing the chalkboard, lest the mark gnaw away at their intestines for the rest of the lesson. It must be that the cleanliness gene burst wide open and skipped a generation, because I had no such preoccupation. I may very well be the messiest girl I have ever met in my entire life. There are a number of stock philosophical questions that I have never bothered to ask myself. For example, I don't wonder what mysterious land missing socks go to in the laundry. Obviously, there's stuff lying around everywhere, shit gets lost. I don't hate hate hate when people squeeze from the center of the toothpaste. I don't even know what that means. I see no point in making a bed that you're just going to crumple up the next night anyway. If you drop a piece of paper, sweep it under the couch with your foot. If you spill water on the carpet, no need to bolt from your place in front of the TV in a blind frenzy, it's just fucking water. Grape juice can wait for the next commercial break.

Years of this kind of behavior first infuriated, and then eventually broke my poor tired Mother. I went away to college, and Mother slipped into a comfortable level of "functioning alcoholic." She managed to keep a decent enough house while I was gone, but when I returned, depressed and jobless, open books strewn on every chair and dirty socks on the floor, I was pleased to find that she was too tired to argue, until, all of a sudden, Mother erroneously decided she needed "friends" and the utopia was broken.

"I had that dream again," Mother said. "The one where I open a mysterious door in the house and find a whole new room. I always think to myself, 'Oh. Well I'll just put everything in here.'"

"The dream means that you seek order in a world full of chaos," I say, with authority, in the hope that my undergraduate degree in Psychology has not gone to waste, although I can't say that I ever learned anything about dream interpretation in school.

"The dream means," she corrected me, "that if you want to keep living here for free, you're going to help me make this place presentable for the book club women."

So we started polishing every surface furiously, sucking up pieces of lint covered cough drops, tiny screws and candy wrappers. I didn't want to move a single piece of clutter for fear of what I might find lurking underneath. There were layers upon layers of neglected, thoughtless living. We've been here since I was born, and before that, who knows. The stains were like time travel. There was blood on the rug from where our cat Judas had kittens that would require some kind of industrial strength solvent. There was the blue paint splattered on the plastic sink in the laundry room from an attempt at tie dying – cleaning a room meant for cleaning, by the way, seemed absurd to me, turtles on top of turtles all the way down – but it was important to mother. There were certain things (like afterbirth) that, after scrubbing for hours on end, looked exactly the same as when you started. This was to my mother both unfair and completely inconceivable.

"I'm doing the best I can," I told her. "But to a certain point, there's nothing I can do. It will be apparent to anyone who enters that people do live here."

She collapsed into a spasm of tears on the ground in front of me.

It's true. Other people have houses cold and sterile, with furniture on display like art in a museum. I remember kids from my school that lived in the neighborhood across the tracks that so cruelly illustrated the economic divide. We were, literally, from the wrong side of the tracks. The houses on the other side were new and clean and boxy. They had both a living room and a "family room." We just had a living room, with the TV setup in the center like a sacramental shrine. My friends from Girl Scouts tried to explain to me the purpose of their living rooms, which I never did fully grasp. It was generally the first room you walked into. It had a painting, a fireplace maybe, a couch and a chair, not really meant for sitting, but certainly it was anatomically possible, and one other defining aesthetic feature. Rebecca's parents had a piano set up in the corner, for example, that no one was allowed to touch. The Tarpening's had a gigantic moose head mounted on the wall. Around Christmas the moose wore a Santa's hat, and that's how one could tell that this family knew how to let loose. The "family room" is where they kept their TV and the comfy American couches. "But why is it called a living room if no actual living takes place?" I begged them to tell me.

"Why does dirt always stick to us?" My mother sobbed. "Why does it roll off of everyone else, but cover us like a magnet. What's wrong with us?"

I had no words of consolation. The houses and skin of my friends from the other side appeared covered in a supernatural layer of Teflon. The grime rolled off of them and landed directly on us. And yet we persisted. Mother told me, with her words anyway, that I had free reign to throw out anything "trashy and unnecessary." Throw out the bits that reveal an eccentric personality. Carve away the parts of the rock that aren't an elephant.

I learned that my mother was a compulsive collector of two things: bath salts and baskets. I would open a cupboard and a literal avalanche of whicker wear would come toppling out in front of me. She had baskets with and without ribbons, with and without handles. Pink baskets for Easter alongside pine green for Christmas. Baskets shaped like chicken, mice, and hearts, without a god damn thing in any of them.
The bath salts were mostly confined to either bathroom, but my god, they were stored in every conceivable storage place, where people keep toilet bowl cleaner and plungers (relocated to the front closet, she informed me) and they came in all varieties of colors and elaborate packaging.

I mistakenly thought my mother would have a sense of humor about these things. I realized instead that her penchant for collecting was a deep seeded belief, fundamental to the core of her existence, so that an attack on bath salts was an attack on her true self. It started when I casually threw a basket or two in with the plastic bags of trash, and found the next day that they'd been plucked out of the garbage and placed back on the overflowing shelves, my authority to throw things out grossly usurped by what I considered a crippling neuroses. I began pensively, light-heartedly, with the bath salts.

"I believe your bath salt needs have been met," I chuckled.

Her eyes glazed over, a woman entranced. "Aren't bath salts wonderful?"

"Sure," I agreed. "Do you ever use them?"

"Oh, you're not supposed to use them with the jets running in the tub."

So that explained it. They were an exhaustible resource that was never exhausted. I resolved to take as many jet-less baths using the salts as possible before the Day of Judgment, and implored mother to do the same, but that only solved part of the problem. There were still the thousands of empty baskets, the various irreplaceable knick-knacks, and the remaining bath salts ("Some of them were gifts!" she argued.) The compromise we came to was both ridiculous and sad, but the woman I was dealing with, it had become clear, was not wound up quite right. The useful items in the front hallway closet - coats, shoes, umbrellas and sports equipment - were thrown carelessly in the garbage. In its place, the mad woman and I filled the empty baskets with bath-salts and began shoving it all into the closet, floor to ceiling. And after a week of this shit- scrubbing, crying, vacuuming and forgiving, the day had come.

The women from the Sunday afternoon book club were something worse than the most ghoulish beast from any of your childhood nightmares. There were four of them: Grace and Heather, who were practically twins, but, you know, not, Margaret, the oldest, and Sandy, the ring-leader. Sandy stepped in first, with coral fingernails, a pale blue ironed dress shirt, pearls, white Capri's, and beige pumps. Her hair, like her name, was the color of sand, done up just so, but casual. The woman appeared to spend all of her off time bathing in sea salts, draining any life out of once bold colors into something utterly un-offensive. The others trailed in behind her, similarly dressed with the usual variants in hair color and handbags, but still, no one could deny they were a book club unit. They could go on tour. They could open for the Rockettes.

How on earth did Mother get mixed up with these wretched women, I wondered, and then I remembered her whispered words to me when they pulled into the driveway: "the internet." So it was a blind date, and also, I quickly surmised, a "tryout."

The emailed mission statement provided by the group had informed me their book choosing methods. They met every other week, alternating between moderns and classics. Last week they'd read something about a sisterhood and their Ya-ya's. This week: Jane Eyre.

I promised myself that beyond the obsessive week of cleaning, I wasn't going to get involved, but at the last minute, in a late night frenzy I plowed through the novel, taking care not to vomit on the more romantic excerpts and flowery language. And now here I was in my Sunday best, my fingernails cleaned, standing taut in the doorway, awaiting sentencing.

My mother was altogether a mess. I could see her hands shaking ever so gently under the weight of the metal tray, four perfectly portioned glasses of iced tea, sweetened with Splenda, as an asterick dictated the group doubled as diet buddies. No glasses for us, I couldn't help but notice. Would we be drinking our tap water in the kitchen, with the help?

"Charming place," Sandy said.

The others echoed faint praises.

"Lovely."

"Adorable."

"I love the serving tray."

"Oh, well it's so nice to have you," Mother stammered, followed by her trademark trail of nervous laughter. "I thought we'd sit over here," she tried to motion to the couch with her elbow and damn near spilled the refreshments on our newly whisked couch. I rushed over to relieve her of the thing, set it on the coffee table. I'd been holding my breath since they got there, and cursed myself for taking the pasteled women so personally.

"I'm her daughter," I explained.

"Oh," Sandy said. Her eyes were darting back and forth in the place like the scope of a sniper, like Robocop, in pearls. I watched them land on a neglected cobweb in the far corner of the living room. Her nose scrunched. I thought I heard a beep beep beep getting faster and faster in the distance as she honed in on her target.
I saw the next in line, Margaret, actually take a white linen hanky out of her pocket, place a pointed finger underneath, and ceremoniously sweep the trimming of the forbidden closet next to the front door, examining for dust.

Was this really happening?

Mother too sensed the scrutiny and must have concluded we were failing. I thought her head might explode from the pure weight of disapproval, the oxygen being sucked out of the room by the poisonous women. In that moment, I cursed myself for letting such an event come to pass. I wondered what had driven her to such a ridiculous need for approval from her peers. I should have come home from school to visit more often. I should have encouraged her to become one of those mothers at the club, in a halter top, assuring her twenty something daughter and her daughter's friends that she still knew how to party. I shouldn't have left Martha Stewart and The Food Network as her sole caregivers. I blamed myself.

"Shall we?" Mother motioned to the couch, although something told me these women would never put their Macy's Day Asses on our doomed, mismatched sofa set.

"Hmm," Heather, the last in line said.

"Not just yet," Sandy agreed.

I took a closer look at the copies of Jane Eyre nestled under their fitness club toned arms. They were all the same size and printing, mint condition, and not a single spine broken on any of them. What the hell kind of book club was this?

The collective focus of the group turned suddenly towards the doorknob of the forbidden closet, exhibiting a kind of preternatural understanding of our weakness; a sixth sense for suburban shame. Grace turned to Sandy, who gravely, knowingly nodded.

"Let me just hang up my jacket," Grace said, taking the paper thin, completely gratuitous thing off of her shoulders.

"Oh no," I blurted out, despite myself.

"Let me just take that for you!" My mother screamed, a string of panicked obscenities.

But it was too late. Sandy's deviled hand reached around the crystal doorknob, as if covered in scales, as if possessed, and triumphantly swung open the closet door. As expected, out rushed a sea of baskets and bath salts, pummeling the Sunday afternoon book club women. Pink and purple and blue salts caught on the sharp edges of whicker and came spilling out on top of everything.

The women shrieked and cried dramatically, which I must admit, I found more than a little amusing, until things got a little out of hand, and events suddenly began unfolding quite unexpectedly.

A kind of supernatural black clouded funnel swooped out of the closet and began whirring through the living room. It overturned vases and squirted dust and jelly on the walls. It crushed ashtrays full of lipstick kissed cigarette butts deep into the carpet. The women's pastel clothing was splattered with the forgotten grime of twenty years worth of living. It frazzled their hair and re-stained their bleached teeth. It made all of our clothes go out of style.

"Jesus Christ!" Sandy cried.

My mother, aghast, stood helplessly in the center of the room, the eye of the storm. "Ladies, I can explain…" she started.

A totally preposterous thing to say, I thought, because of course she couldn't explain. There were no worldly explanations for anything that had taken place in our cursed living room for minutes – possibly days. The storm of filth grew gigantic hands and pushed the women forcibly onto the porch, where they ran wildly to their cars, screaming and shaking, begging for their Christian God. And then, as suddenly as it had come, the thing, whatever it was, sulked calmly back into the closet and politely closed the door behind it. Mother and I looked around the room that was, mere moments ago, clean, and was now a devastating disaster.

"Well then," Mother said, and sank defeated into the couch. "I didn't like Jane Eyre much anyway, did you?"

"Pssh," I said. "An orphanarium? Please. And what was that bit about Rochester dressing up like a fortune teller just to find out what the maid thought of him? People in old times were stupid."

Mother stared across the room with a far off look in her eyes and nodded sadly, although I doubt she was actually listening to me. "Xanax?"

We each took one and sucked it down with the one glass of iced tea on the table left unturned from the tornadoes erroneous fit. I pulled out a cigarette and sucked the thing down furiously. When it was finished, I looked around and saw the closest ashtray clear across the room, lying face down in the carpet.

"Mom, I'm just going to put this out on the floor."

"Oh honey," She sighed and put her feet, clad in dirty white pumps, up onto the coffee table. "Of course you are."

9:51 PM - 2 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

The Three Christs of Detroit

"I'm really happy about the direction my life is taking right now."

I made my face smile and nodded.

Charlie and I were supposed to leave the hospital on the same day, but then instead I left two weeks earlier. He had to stay later because I set the trashcan in the bathroom on fire, and the attendants all thought he did it. Either way, we made a promise that we would go to each other's houses once we were out.

Now we were both free at the same time. Charlie called my house on the phone and invited me to his new apartment. It's only one bus ride over from our neighborhood to his, so my parents let me go by myself.

Charlie'd been living in his apartment for nine days. He must not have had time to unpack everything, because the rooms were almost bare except for all the moving boxes and a few other items. Charlie sat on the couch and I sat across from him on a green armchair that I was very fond of, because I like green. In between us was a rectangular table made of wood, with a plate covered in breadcrumbs and two white socks underneath.

"I got a job at the Perry Drugs plant. It's called picking, do you know what that is?"

I said I didn't.

"It's putting price tags on all the different products and then putting them in a bin on a conveyor belt. And then they get put in a truck and sent to different stores."

"Oh."

"I had the most product priced out of anyone else in my hiring group my first week."

"That is very good."

"It feels really good to get back into the swing of things."

I didn't understand what he meant but I said "yeah."

He yawned and put his bare feet up onto the couch.

Once, I was walking up and down the halls of our ward when I wasn't supposed to. I looked inside Charlie's room and saw something he didn't want anyone to see. He was sitting in the center of his bed holding a big stuffed bear in his lap with the head ripped off. He reached inside the head, shoving handfuls of stuffing in his mouth and swallowing them. I stood in the doorway staring and he started yelling at me to go away and to leave him alone. I didn't leave though. I just stood in the doorway instead. It didn't make sense to me why anyone would eat the inside of a teddy bear like that, unless they thought it was made out of real bears. But even then. "You promise not to tell anybody?" He said to me, after awhile. I said yes. He had never talked to me before, but after that we were friends.

I'd been looking out the window, thinking about the past and rearranging the cloud formations in my head, so I didn't notice that Charlie fell asleep while we were talking. I wondered if it was a little rude to nap during a conversation, but decided against it. He was still wearing his glasses. When he got to the hospital he didn't have any glasses of his own, so the hospital gave him some. We all wore the same colored clothes, and everybody in the hospital that didn't have glasses before was issued the same pair of thick black frames. Now they were tilted on his face and I thought he looked sort of funny.

The trouble started when it came time to decide what to do with myself. I was a guest before, but now that he was no longer "present" in the traditional sense, it was also as though I was a burglar or a trespasser. The thought made me shift around awkwardly and squirm in my seat. If he woke up he might be angry I was sitting on his chair, because he bought the chair with his own money and the invitation to borrow it was not meant to extend indefinitely.

There was a cat in the room but its situation was completely different from mine.

No, I decided. We are friends, why should he mind me sitting in his chair? Everything was definitely as it should be.

To prove the point to myself, I got up to get a glass of water from the kitchen. I had to search through several cabinets before finding a glass, and by then I realized I wasn't thirsty, and I considered there could be a problem with the plumbing and I might cause a flood. I sat back down on the chair.

He hadn't stirred once since the episode started. There was nothing wrong with his face, except for those glasses, which anyone would tell you are completely useless when the eyes are shut. I considered taking his glasses off for him and setting them on the table. He would be happy to not roll over on them in his sleep, and maybe he'd think of me when he put them back on his face. "That boy is very considerate," he might say to himself. "He did the right thing."

I decided instead to put the glasses in my pocket and take them home on the bus with me. He would wake up blind and confused and wonder where on earth they'd gone. It was a very funny practical joke. "You really had me going! You have a great sense of humor and a free spirit." With these and other calculations in mind, I put on my shoes with my breath held in tight and quietly exited the apartment.




The next morning I got permission from my parents to take the bus across town to Charlie's apartment. I'd planned to give him back the glasses and find out if he thought my joke was funny. I was surprised to find the scene I walked into did not at all match the one that existed inside my head. I quickly realized that improvisation would be in order, which I hate. I stood in front of the door and waited.

"You've got good eyes. Maybe you can help me find them."

He was moving around the apartment very fast in a way that made me want him to stop doing that. The moving boxes were spilling out objects in all different directions, and the green armchair was tipped over with one of the legs broken off. I didn't like any of it.

"I just don't understand," he said, shaking his head. "I had to miss my doctor's appointment this morning because I couldn't drive anywhere. I was going to call you but I couldn't see the goddamn number on the telephone."

Then he started talking in this big loud voice, even about things that had nothing to do with me. "I burned my hand on the stove trying to make soup. I haven't eaten in hours and I'm starving. God is against me and wants me to suffer, I know it!"

Charlie had trouble with certain ideas at the hospital that made no sense. He believed in a lot of mythical people that lived very high in the sky, where it's cool but not too cold, and also others that live way below the surface of the earth, where it's too hot. In the hospital they explained to me that some people believe in things that you can't see or understand in your head, but that doesn't matter. The important thing is that they stand for other things that do mean something. I wish people would just believe in the first thing.

"I'm going to kill a cow. I've looked everywhere! And it's not like I left them someplace. I haven't left here since last night when I was with you, and I know I had them then. Somebody's been here."

I was about to reach down into my pockets to hold the glasses around my hands, when something caught my attention. I paused and sniffed at the air. "Something's burning."

"They know exactly what's coming!"

I thought he hadn't heard me and was about to repeat myself.

"You know the end is closer than they think, right?"

I didn't understand at first that the question was directed to me. Then I tried to think of something to say.

"Oh my God, they almost had me. Christ almighty. They pumped me up with all those drugs and they sat me in that circle with the plastic chairs and the coffee and those nurses with the benign smiles, and they did everything they could to make me forget. They even came in here and tried to steal the essence of my gift for seeing the truth, the glasses, but no. They missed the mark because they thought too literally, My Son. I don't need a prescription to see that demons are everywhere."

Charlie called me things like "my son" or "my boy". I think it's funny because I'm older than him by four hundred and sixty two days.

"The Devil is in everyone, and he followed me into this apartment. He crawled in through the cracks in the door, do you understand?" He started screaming the words now. "DO YOU HEAR ME?"

I wanted to say that I understood a little but that on the whole he was overreacting, but the smoke alarm went off and the noise sort of scrambled up my brain.
From the living room I could see flames rising from a dishrag caught on fire on the kitchen stove.

"Did you remember to turn the stove off after you made soup?"

He leaned against the wall, slipped down to the ground and hugged his knees up to his chest.

"I said, did you remember to turn off the stove." He didn't respond again.

I watched the cat from the day before run underneath the couch and hide away from the smoke. His pupils were thin slits and his head was dodging back and forth.

Charlie mumbled something in the corner but I hadn't heard him over the sound of the alarm.

"What?"

"Please go. Leave me here."

"Oh." I thought about my next sentence carefully. "Do you want me to take the cat?"

This for some reason made him stand up straight with a bright red face. He picked up an old clock that had come spilling out of one of the boxes, and with his arm pulled back stiff like a catapult, hurled it at me from across the room. His aim was very bad on account of not having his glasses. It broke into thirty-seven pieces against the wall behind me, sending the cat running across the floor to hide under the overturned green armchair.

"Get out Son. They've already brought the fire to me. They'll come for you too. Either you're their target or you're one of them. Get out!"

It confused me why Charlie thought someone else had started the fire when it was his own fault, or how he could possibly confuse me for one of "them," and I considered telling him these things. By then, however, the flames had enveloped the entire kitchen, and any confusion I had about the situation was dismissed for the more immediate task of getting out of the burning apartment.

It was only once I was out in the fresh air that I realized, given all the commotion, there had been no time to return the glasses as I had originally planned. Things hadn't gone as hilariously as I had hoped. The ringing noise from the smoke alarm was still in my head and the feeling got inside my chest somehow. I looked up at the window of Charlie's apartment, then over to a trash bin standing next to me on the sidewalk. I looked back up at the window, than back again at the bin. Inside my pocket that day was a folded up bus schedule I'd already memorized, two rubber bands tied together in a double loop, Charlie's glasses, and six quarters for the bus. With my left hand, I transferred the quarters from the right pocket to the left. The rest I threw in the garbage.

I thought again about the cat. It was true that he responded to the question of saving the animal by throwing a clock at my head, but still, it's not always smart to trust people who have spent time in hospitals. However much they believe their ideas to be right, it is still possible they are wrong.

In the end I decided against this reasoning. It was his cat and his apartment and he must know the situation better than me. By then it had started to rain slightly, and it was probably an indoor cat that wouldn't have liked to go outside in that kind of weather anyway.

10:28 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Sweep Me Up, revisited

I met Travis just a few months before he died, at a coffee house, of all places. It was the summer I collected bottle caps off the sidewalk for no reason and stuffed them in my backpack. I did this until the front compartment was bulging out so nothing else could fit, and I compulsively through them all away, weeks of work wasted. The whole thing made me depressed so I turned off the street suddenly into an unfamiliar building.

There were people everywhere, drinking coffee, all so typical. I was going from ashtray to ashtray, pathetically smoking down the ends of half-finished cigarettes from a lighter I borrowed from a beautiful woman behind the counter. I didn't even get the idea to start smoking until I realized how badly I wanted some excuse to talk to her. Oh, Gwen from Germany, with the flower tattoos up and down the pale white flesh of her arms and her ridiculously porcelain face. It's funny how she turned out to be so horrible in the end. So utterly uninspiring to talk to and even worse for the other thing. But not now, another time. I was starting to tell you about how I met Travis. It just goes to show that in the present we have no possible way of knowing the future.

I spotted a snubbed out cigarette still three-quarters still in tact, and the discovery brought with it the kind of satisfaction I imagine normal people feel when they accomplish real feats in life, like painting a fence. I lit the cigarette and leaned back in the chair as I exhaled. For a moment I was happy, but like all emotions, the feeling was fleeting.

I thought the table with the ashtray was unoccupied, but it turned out to be an illusion. Travis turned both himself and his chair around suddenly to face me, and it was clear I'd been caught red-handed. He looked down at the ashtray and looked up accusingly at me.

"Hey," he said, and I was startled by the nasal quality of his voice. "What the fuck, I was going to smoke that."

The people at the table next to him who he'd been talking to abruptly stopped their conversation and focused all their attention on the situation at hand. That's something I really hate. Some incidental thing happens, something that has no relevance to any of the big questions about life or the universe or our alleged place in it, and suddenly everyone around has to immediately involve himself, whether it concerns them or not.

"What's going on? Do you know her?" one of them said.

He didn't answer them, and I took it as a testament to his character. He understood that this was between him and me.

I shrugged my shoulders and took another long drag on the cigarette. Of course I knew I was guilty, but in this type of situation it's a mistake to show weakness. "Sorry man, I thought you'd left it."

"Yeah, I left it so I could finish my sandwich. Now I want to smoke it."

"Well, I already put my lips all over it, can't I just have it?" I hoped he was a germaphobe, it was the only angle I could think to play at the time. I was working with incomplete information. I would find out later that not only was Travis not a germaphobe, he was the kind of man that would pick something out of the carpet that might be weed or might be a crudded up piece of lint, put it in his pipe, and smoke it, just in case.

One of the girls at the other table scoffed when I said this. "That is so rude," she said to the man next to her. Travis, on the other hand, seemed to be grappling with the proposition.

"Yeah but it's my last cigarette," he said, this time with none of the agitation in his voice he'd originally started the conversation with. He was looking at me and smiling.

"Do you want to share it?"

The loud obnoxious girl piped in for the last time. "Travis what are you doing, we were all going to play that word game."

What, a word game? Who were these douchebags Travis was hanging out with anyway? He seemed to be thinking the same thing.

"Let's just go across the street to the bar and get a real drink, they have cigarettes there and I know the bartender."

So we left the aforementioned douchebags in the dust. On the way out the door I walked by the counter and gave Gwen her lighter back. She said thank you in her thick German accent and for a second it turned my insides to liquid. Then I remembered I'd be getting a free drink, and I forgot all about romance.

"I'm Travis," he said, as we made our way out onto the street. It had been raining and all the different colored lights from the city were reflecting wet watercolors off of everything. These streets had been made for bustling activity, but that night there were hardly any occupants. There hadn't been for many years.

"I just met those kids," he continued. "I was looking to mix it up a bit tonight but I wasn't finding anything I wanted. I was bored out of my mind, thanks for saving me. What's your name?"

I told him my name was Mary, which is a half-truth. I'd been calling myself Mary, because I think it sounds virginal, and somehow, for no reason I can think of, I think that it's riotously funny. Then I really started to lie on the charm.

"I don't have any money."

"What, you, no money?" he said sarcastically, eyeing me up and down.

I'd been wearing a variation on the same outfit for the past 3 weeks, more or less ever since I got off the bus in midtown. I had more clothes in a garbage bag in a locker, but I just liked to wear the same thing. I'd sort of "run away from home," which I kept as a kind of secret that no one cared to know the answer to anyway, but this was the first time in my brief adventure I'd actually been called out. Did he know, I wondered? I started to say something, but he cut me off before I opened my mouth.

"Anyway, it doesn't matter; we can use my check card." Then he mentioned for a second time: "I know the bartender. His name is Jim."

We walked inside and sidled up to the only two empty stools. I threw my backpack on the bar with a thud, and Jim turned around to greet us with a dirty glass in his hand. He was rubbing out the inside with a white rag and all I could look at were his gigantic forearms. I thought about how every second this man wasn't winding up to punch some poor sucker in the face was a second of his ultimate potential going to waste.

"Hey there, what can I get you?" he asked. Then he turned to me. "Who's your lady friend?"

I can't stand that kind of treatment, but it happens to me constantly anyway. Somebody get the President on the phone, this creatures got a vag! I've never understood why I can't just be a person. I cut my hair down to the bone and leave every speck of dirt under my fingernails I can possibly collect in a lifetime to try to downplay the event, but it always gets brought up anyway. Oh, well. It's not Jim's fault. It's probably mine.

"This is Mary, she thinks that my cigarettes are hers." Travis turned to me. "What do you drink?"

Whenever this question gets brought up, I think of a church marquee I passed on the road once that read "LET JESUS DO THE DRIVING." I imagine everyone taking their hands off the wheel and wildly crashing into each other, cars careening into ditches and babies thrown out of car seats screaming for their mothers. Still, I like the sentiment, and thus, when it comes to ordering drinks, I let Jesus do the driving. He filters his decisions through me.

"I'll have a Johnny Walker Black on the rocks," Jesus said. It must have been because someone else was paying.

"You are a woman after my heart. Make it two, and a pack of Marlboro Reds." The moment was profoundly religious.

And then Travis started talking. I would learn that this was the defining trait of his personality. He would tell you about every thought that came to his mind, and every side thought the original thought inspired, and on and on, like a wind-up toy that only stops when it falls over on its side or its path is abruptly halted by some obstacle. I needed someone like this in my life, desperately. My tongue has been in a jar on the mantle my entire life. I swear, I've never had anything of much importance to say. In my fantasies everyone is deaf and thoughtful and we all carry around little notebooks. In this world everything that needs to be said has to be written down, and I finally have a voice. I decided having a friend like Travis would be the next best thing. All would be required of me was the occasional well placed question and a few short answers.

He was in the middle of telling me how much he liked to have nice things. How it was a terrible crutch, to always have to have nice things, and how sometimes people thought he might be a little gay on account of being such a snappy dresser, but of course, we all knew better than that. He pulled his foot up out of thin air, plopped it on the bar and started to tell me how the soles were made out of real Goodyear tires, which meant they had excellent traction. "And the reason I'm so flexible is because--"

But I interrupted him because I was curious about money. Where does it come from and how do people seem to have so much of it? "What do you do for a living Travis?"

"Who me?" he said. "I plumb."

"You plumb?"

"Yeah, I'm a plumber. I used to work for my father, but he's a bastard. We don't talk. He doesn't have my new cell phone number, but he's always calling my friends drunk in the middle of the night trying to charm the information out of them. Luckily he's a total jerk-off and isn't at all charming or he'd find me. I joined up with a rival crew. He hasn't found out about that yet either, as far as I know, thank Christ."

He stopped talking and looked at me with a certain expression that could only mean trouble. We were on our fourth drink each and I could see that glassy look taking over his eyes, even through his designer framed glasses. I think I even started to grab my backpack in order to make a quick exit. I seriously thought it was all over then.

"Speaking of which," he said, speaking of what I'm not sure, "You've got a beautiful face. Why don't you do something with yourself?" He leaned in closer and rubbed the top of my shaved head with his hands, still holding a cigarette. The whole thing was dangerous and exciting.

So I decided to kill the moment and get it over with, and if it was going to be a problem, then it might as well be a problem right then and there, while I still had a few of my senses left in me.

"Look Travis, I'm queer." I was watching his eyes carefully. There was a flash of something, for just the briefest of seconds, and then it was over. I still have no idea why his reaction was so particular with me. I usually don't care. Maybe it was because we were falling in a kind of love.

He pulled his hand away and took a drag off the cigarette. "Yeah, well, no shit," he said, exhaling. "Do you have a girlfriend?"

"Nah it's not like that."

There was a pause. He lit another cigarette in his mouth and silently handed it to me. It was like we were dancing.

"Well anyway, you should wear more green. You'd look good in green."

And that was the end of it. The subject never came up again for the rest of our time together.

We sat at the bar talking until our words turned into incomprehensible slurs, and then Travis started giggling maniacally at some joke I wasn't privy to.

"What's so fucking funny?"

He leaned in close to me and whispered something in my ear. "I'm flat broke. There's nothing on my debit card at all, I forgot I already blew my paycheck this week. We haven't got a nickel to our names."

I liked where this was going! I could smell an adventure looming in the distance. "Well, don't you know the bartender? Can't he just put it on your tab or something?"

"Oh I don't really fucking know him, we just talked about bowling and Armani or some shit once. He never remembers me. I was just trying to impress you. I'm totally full of shit." He started laughing again and I couldn't help but join in. "I'm so fucking gay, I swear," he giggled.

So we were both liars and crooks to varying degrees and the whole thing was hilarious and sad. It would take someone with cunning to get us out of this one, and I reveled at the opportunity. Now was my chance to show Travis what sort of man I was. I looked around the bar and noticed the other occupants for the first time that night. This was not a bar for young people. It was a place where old people go to sleep after work and never wake up. Every surrounding barstool was occupied by a variety of hicks and lowlifes, intent on drinking until last call. A rowdy pool game was in session on the other side of the bar between an assembly of bikers clad with various degrees of leather and identical long gray beards. I racked my brain for some kind of foolproof plan. I surveyed every door. There was a woman's room, a men's room, and the entrance. I saw Jim and his enormous forearms talking to a group of out of focus lumberjacks at a table in the corner. It was all coming together.

"I've got it!" I said. "Let's sneak out the front door before anybody notices."

"Fucking awesome," Travis agreed.

And then, with brilliant precision, we tore out of our perches and stumbled blindly to the exit. Travis tipped over his barstool and caused a ruckus getting out of his seat, and I got tangled in the straps of my backpack before we managed to stumble through the doors, but even with our many errors, we made our escape without any repercussions.

The city streets were wet watercolors just the way we left them, and with the high of our crime bursting in our lungs, we ran the entire three blocks home to Travis's apartment. I stayed that night, and didn't leave for another three months. He had a flair for interior decorating, but when I got there all of his plants were dying. Strangely enough, it never occurred to me to water them until after Travis was already dead.

Whenever Travis had any money, we would act like assholes and spend it all on drugs. The rule was nothing chemically addicting. We didn't want to have a bad time when the drugs ran out, and they always ran out. LSD, mushrooms, ketamine, GHB. These were all commonly available at the after hours gay club around the corner from our apartment. Travis expected me to know everyone there when we first went inside, because I was allegedly like them, but he didn't seem to understand that I didn't know anyone. He was the only one in the city I'd talked to for more than a few minutes since I'd arrived. I just know that all cities are the same, and where there are gay men, there are drugs. They know how to party, and everyone's nice when a Madonna remix is playing in the background.

Travis insisted to me that he used to be industrious, but when I started living with him, it seemed like he hardly ever went to work at all. We'd be counting out change to go to the gas station to buy cans of soup before he'd finally break down and go out on a job for a few days. I was in no position to complain. I was like a concubine under Confucius. In exchange for picking up food wrappers and listening to Travis's lofty ambitions, I got to live in his apartment for free. What would have made it really sexy is if there was more than one Concubine, but it was difficult to imagine. She probably wouldn't have smelled right and then one of us would have eaten her.

One night, we were lying on his couch in various states of undress doing ecstasy. We were smoking menthols, which I ordinarily hate, but somehow the drugs have a way of changing things. Usually, we felt restless and sad, like there was no point to anything, but that night was different. We were full of self-worth.

"We should make a movie," Travis said. It sounded like a totally fabulous idea because we were brilliant and creative and funny and interesting. Surely we could write a movie and produce it ourselves. We would make millions of dollars and live this life whenever we wanted to, instead of only for brief stolen moments.

"Yes, yes," I said. "It will be about a girl who is both a vampire and a cavewoman. She'll wear plastic vampire teeth all the time, even when she eats, and her vampire cavewoman tendencies will tear her entire family apart."

"That sounds a lot like you," Travis said, rubbing the top of my head from his spot on the floor on the couch in front of me. I tilted my head back. Everything somehow sounded like music, including the soft hum of the stereo playing in the distance. The album was finished and it still sounded like music.

"I don't wear plastic teeth," I said, an eternity later.

"No. I was actually wondering about your family."

Drugs are a gateway to another dimension, but not in the way people imagine. They just make you think differently. It's not that Travis didn't care, but when it came to my past, usually I never offered, and he never asked. The subject of me was not very interesting, but tonight somehow things were different. I pulled my tongue off the mantle and placed it ceremoniously in my mouth.

"I left because they didn't understand me. It was me, my brother, my sister, and my mom. My dad lives in Indiana with his new wife and it's like my mom never got over it. She just goes off every day to be a secretary thinking that if she buys enough groceries and watches enough Martha Stewart that we'll all be some big family again. Why does it matter? Why does she need to be what television tells her she's supposed to be all the time? It drove me crazy. It drives me crazy. Why does anybody live their life according to these bullshit rules that don't matter? I've never felt that way. Never wanted to. She could never understand that. I know we loved each other, but, for the last twenty years, we've been nothing but strangers."

"What about your siblings?" He started rubbing my left hand and I reached down for his right.

"They're both older. My brother is great, but he left me alone with them as soon as he turned eighteen. I was only twelve and I don't think I ever forgave him for that. He was the only sane one left. Now he's in Japan working as a male model drinking green tea and having interesting conversations with other attractive Americans or some shit, I don't know what he does there, we hardly talk."

The concept of a male model is of course funny and Travis and I both laughed out of our noses at the concept.

"Are you serious?"

"Yeah my whole family is beautiful. My brother just took the opportunity and ran with it, but my sister, God, it made me a little sick. She's so pretty, Travis. She has these perfect teeth and long blonde hair that she combs one hundred strokes a day, and everyone who knows her says, 'God Sarah, you're so beautiful. You're so beautiful.' And that's all she's ever been and all she ever will be. My whole life she thought I was sick and gross because I didn't jump through hoops like she did. The whole lot of them. I'm an alien left on the doorstep, I swear."

"She probably looks just like you," he said, looking up.

The statement reminded me of my body in space and time and the thought inspired me to run to the kitchen for some water. I paused at the stereo system to change the CD to something worthy of carrying us to heaven. "Kruder and Dorfmeister?"

He reached for a cigarette on the table in front of him. "You'll have to sweep me up off the floor with a broom," he responded, which I took as an affirmation. I came back to my place on the couch as the bass line started and we each took a swig from the water. Amazingly, I found that I still wasn't done talking. It was the night of a thousand miracles.

"The beauty comes from my mother's side and I take after my father. I had horrible acne all through my teens. And then I broke my back playing soccer in middle school and had to wear a back brace for five years."

"That's a long time."

"It would have been less, but I re-broke it twice. I wouldn't listen to anything anyone ever told me."

"You are the baddest lady in this living room."

He always qualified and I loved it. But then, I loved the birds and the trees and the grout between the tiles in the bathroom that night.

"I saw Andy at the coffee house last week," Travis said. "He said my Dad called him again. He said that he kept rambling on about how much he loved me. Then Andy got bored and hung up on him, and my dad called him back and told him he was a dirty kike and to rot in hell."

"I didn't know Andy was Jewish," I said.

"He's not. My dad's a fascist."

"Jew's don't believe in Hell anyway. Of course, I guess if there's a Christian God than that's where he's going."

It all seems so obvious sometimes. I wasn't going to say anything but I was glad Travis did. "People are stupid. Don't they know that the universe is infinite and we're all in the center, rotating around one universal idea made out of love?"

"They'll come around," I said.

It' s a beautiful memory to look back on because I'm certain I believed it at the time.

"Maybe I should call my dad," Travis said.

"I should call my mom."

We let the music reverberate through the room and wash away our empty affirmations. It all felt so real in the moment, but it would be gone by the morning. There would be creaks in all of our muscles and we'd be hungry. There'd be no food in the refrigerator and the plumbing would leak again, and Travis would be too girly to fix it even though that was supposed to be his fucking job, and then he'd remind me that I'd never worked for anything in my life, and it would be sad because it was true, and we'd part ways in the morning grumpy because the chemicals in our brain that made us so happy the night before had been depleted, and we never wanted it to be true. Then we'd start it all over again. Until one of us was dead of course. Then the monotony would be broken.


You probably think it was the drugs that killed Travis. Normal people always assume they have it all worked out. If only we weren't such hooligans. If only we'd stayed on the straight and narrow. Well, you're only partially right. It was the drugs that killed Travis, but it's not what you think. It's a thousand times worse.

There was a city-wide power outage and we'd spent the whole day in the apartment like caged bats. I was reading one of Travis's only books, about the history of China. It said they were sad but now they're rebuilding. Travis was smoking pot voraciously and trying to invent candles out of nothing in preparation for the evening, but, of course, it was ridiculous.

"Let's go to the bar," he said.

"Which one? We can't go back to Jim's, we stole all those drinks."

"Son of a bitch." He was pacing the room with the joint hanging out of his mouth like a cigar. It had a distinct odor. Whenever I smoke pot I think something really bad is going to happen. That's why I only do it every couple of weeks, so I know for sure that it's not meant for me.
"Give me a hit," I said. He handed me the joint and I sucked the smoke down into my throat, and then puffed out my cheeks for no particular reason. It's just what I always do. Travis said I didn't know how to smoke pot correctly. Pothead's think it's some kind of fucking science, apparently.

"Let's go to that guy Tom's place and buy some cocaine."

"Tom, you mean Keith's friend?"

"Yeah, the one with that big hunting knife that he kept sharpening in the corner at Keith's apartment." Travis exhaled and his entire face was enveloped in smoke, for a second he looked like Santa Claus. "Man, that guy is the sketchiest of drug dealers. I thought for sure he was from the Australian Outback or something until he started talking."

"I didn't go to Keith's that time, you just told me about him. He sounds nice."

Keith was lord of the gay drug scene underworld, forever clad in Hawaiian t-shirts. He had a little white dog named Star that he loved like it was his daughter, and he was always talking about his sick mother, both of which I took to mean he was a compassionate person. She must have been about a hundred because Keith was in his late fifties himself. He also had a bizarre asymmetrical haircut and wore a tiny studded diamond in his left ear. He was some kind of gay pirate magician that pulled magical drugs out of his hat whenever we came around, and visiting him felt like going to Disneyworld.

"Well anyway, he said he deals all sorts of other stuff and he told me to contact Keith if I wanted anything from him."

"I thought you said we were broke."

He looked like a boy with a secret. "I was saving up for these five hundred dollar pair of sunglasses, but they'll probably go on sale."

"That's fucking stupid," I said. I took one more hit and felt the creepy sensation of unrest slowly take hold. "Cocaine is against the rules buddy. It's addicting."

"Rules shmules!" He started pacing around the room gesticulating like a madman. "The power is out; it's like a snow day, only in summer. On a snow day you throw the rules out the window." He was like a small child sometimes. Simple things made him happy. "Plus we don't have enough money to become addicted to coke."

The argument had no merit, but Travis was the boss. He bankrolled all of our adventures and he called all the shots. Plus I always wanted to do cocaine. I heard somewhere it makes you chatty, and I thought maybe I had some more interesting things to say.


Tom lived exactly halfway between our place and Keith's in a little townhouse on a horrible side street. Really all the streets are horrible, yet somehow Tom's seemed the most horrible of them all. Maybe it was because his yard was the only one with no grass on the lawn. There was just a mound of dirt instead, filled with dangerous pieces of scrap metal protruding at all different angles. Again I got the feeling something terrible was going to happen. I guessed it was because I was still a little stoned. Travis knocked on the front door and I started looking around the place anxiously for cops hiding in the bushes.

"Will you fucking relax?" he said to me.

No, I was not prepared to relax at that time.

The door swung open and there was Tom, living up to all of my grotesque expectations. He was short, surly, and full of muscle. He was wearing nothing but sweatpants and was covered in sweat from head to foot. His skin was the color of a light amber beer and he had no body hair anywhere. This made me guess that he was a fag, but not the nice kind. The kind that really could possibly be child molesters. And he had the damn hunting knife in his left hand.

"Get inside," he said, pointing the knife down the short doorway leading into his living room.

There were two other guys there, sprawled out on the furniture in their underwear, decadently fanning themselves with feathers. You probably don't believe me about the feathers, but it's true. The room was filled with candles that seemed to have been burning for days, the way the wax was melted. There was bad techno playing somewhere far off and the entire scene had the kind of disorganization you would expect from people who make their living selling drugs and consequently testing out their products.

"Sit down," he said, pointing his knife at the couch. The three cats that were there jumped up and ran out of the room at the gesture. They seemed as terrified as I was. "Did Keith say you were looking for some blow?"

"Yeah, just an eighter." I knew Travis; he was trying to sound casual.

Tom picked up a towel off the ground and wiped the sweat off his chest and the back of his neck. "Jesus Mary Joseph it's fucking hot, isn't it?"

How oddly religious. It was then that I noticed all the pictures on the walls. Jesus of Nazareth. A bad rendition of The Last Supper. A big painted mirror that should have said "Budweiser," but actually depicted the Virgin Mary. These things alone should have been enough to send me running for the hills, but it was worse. So much worse. First I noticed the handgun sitting on the speaker across the room opposite from me, the barrel pointed pretty much directly at my face. Then there were the brass knuckles on the end table next to the couch, and, finally, the homemade wrecking ball hanging off the knob on the front door. Tom caught me looking at the last weapon and slyly reached for it.

"Oh, check this thing out," he said to us, and started wielding the thing around above his head. "It's a sock filled with pennies and it will fuck you up. I had some trouble before with some people, but next time they come around, I'll be ready." Then he suddenly let go of the beastly thing and it crashed into the Virgin Mary mirror, sending the shattered pieces down all over one of the other guests.

Travis and I were horrified, but everyone else acted like this was the most hilarious thing that had ever happened. "Holy shit, Derek, did you see that?" Tim said, to the one that wasn't covered in blood and glass shards.

The afflicted guest who I later found out was named "Bubbles", responded. "Jesus Christ, Tom, that was awesome!"

Why we didn't pull anchor and run out of the place screaming for our lives at that exact moment is beyond me. Was it politeness? I always knew social conventions were a crutch, but you never stop to think they might someday conspire to kill you.

Finally, when everyone was done gut-laughing, Tom turned to us and said, by way of explanation I guess, "We're tweaking just a bit this evening, but you know, it's a blackout."

Looking back I think it was a detriment to our cause that he said that. It made us think that we had something in common. That we all agreed the purpose of life was to hang out and have a good time.

"So hey, about that stuff?" Travis chimed in.

"What's with your girl?" Tom said, but without actually looking at me. "She doesn't talk?"

"She's not my girl," Travis said. "We just hang out."

"Oh, I see."

He stared straight at Travis, took his hunting knife, and ran it down the length of his tongue. He had the precision of a surgeon. It left the finest trail of blood, and when he was done, he turned around and spit it out directly into Derek's face and now twenty percent of the humans were covered in blood. This caused another fit of laughter from all of them, and I shot Travis a terrible 'I told you so' look.

"Hey, listen," Travis started, "If this is a bad time or wha—"

"Oh no sweetheart, it's not a bad time. I'll get you your drugs, just chill out a second, the both of you. Do you guys want to smoke some pot? Hang out with us for a few?"

It sounded like a question, but really it was a demand. I was about to refuse the devil substance politely when Bubbles suddenly darted across the room over to my space on the couch and shoved the bowl into my face.

"I don't want it," I said.

"Come on, dollface. It's a blackout!"

Did I miss something, was this a federal holiday? Then he literally pushed the bowl into my mouth and lit it, and the chorus of high-pitched laughter started all over again. It was like an overblown anti drug video from the nineteen-fifties in its sheer absurdity. I mean, forcing someone to smoke pot, who does that? Somehow - I guess because tenacity always impresses me - I submitted to the ridiculous peer-pressure and inhaled the stuff deeply.

"Look at her," Derek said, pointing and laughing. "Look at her cheeks."
It felt like Homecoming under the bleachers.

I handed the bowl over to Travis. He touched my hand momentarily in the transfer and leaned over and whispered in my ear. "It's all right Mary. When we get out of here, we'll have an excellent story to tell."

My fucking heart. Can you hear it breaking?

The bowl went around the room a million times and never went out, like an everlasting gobstopper. "What's the deal with this pot?" Travis finally said. "It tastes funny."

Bubbles had gone into the other room and turned up the happy hardcore playing out of a cheap battery operated boom box, and they were all dancing around like sweat drenched maniacs. Tom never once let go of the knife. He was dragging it seductively across the chests of his two friends.

"We've decided," said Tom, a little out of breath, "that tonight is a good night to die."

My stomach was starting to feel like it was being hollowed out by something sharp and the blood was rushing to my face. I knew what had happened before they even said a word. I probably only had about five minutes worth of sanity left in me, and god only knew how much of the stuff I'd actually taken.

Travis was a little bit slower on the uptake. "What, what do you mean?"

"Elllll Esssss Deeeeee," Derek said. He and Bubble started to kiss with sloppy tongues and I saw that Tom had been staring at Travis with bad sexy eyes for I don't know how long.

"We need to get the fuck out of here," Travis whispered to me, and that's the last thing I can say about the night with any certainty.

The room was a million degrees, I know that. Everyone's bodies were glowing in the candlelight like Greek statues touched by God, and the walls themselves were sweating. The music exploded in front of my eyes in a kaleidoscope of stars, but none of it was beautiful. The stars were surrounding me and crushing me. I could hear voices; somebody was yelling, but the sounds echoed in my ears and I couldn't make out what they were saying. And then Travis was trying to pick me up and carry me to the door, but my body was weighted down and there were one hundred thousand other forces against us. Looking back now I can remember chunks of the conversation. It was Tom and it sounded how a dog might sound if barks were words. You don't want to play with us sweetheart? The flames from the candles were swirling all around me and I thought the room was on fire. Fuck you mother fucker.

"The room's on fire," I said. Or thought, I don't know. "We have to get out of here." The point is that nobody heard me.

Then I heard Travis saying something like, "No man, hold on, no don't, stop," and then there was the gunshot, and my face was covered in blood.

But it happened in slow motion. The bang from the gun was so loud all of our heads exploded like balloons. It was like it wasn't happening there at all. It was an echo from some conflict in Africa involving people I didn't know doing things I couldn't see. I wiped the blood out of my eyes slowly and deliberately. Later I did the calculations. That made at least eighty percent of us covered in blood. I think then I thought it was glue, or confetti.

"Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck," Derek was saying.

Shut the fuck up Derek. Shut the fuck up. It happened, okay? it fucking happened.

I looked over at Travis and saw his head tilted all the way back. There were blood and pieces of brain on the walls and I looked down and saw a tuft of his hair resting in his lap.

"No, it didn't happen," I said. I started picking up the pieces of hair and flesh I found scattered everywhere and tried to put them back in place. I was like a small child in a sandbox with very dirty hands. "See I'm putting him back together again," I kept saying. It was an art project. Everything was shining and glistening in the glow of the candles.

"Where the fuck is Bubbles?" Derek kept repeating. "Where did that son of a bitch go?"

Suddenly I was like a very drunk person who thinks they're totally fine to drive because they can remember the alphabet. 'Travis will want his stuff when he wakes up,' I thought. It was all very clear. 'He'll want his keys and his wallet and his cell phone.' I started trifling through his pockets and transferred everything he had from his pants into mine, which incidentally were also his. I dropped to my knees in front of his feet on the ground. 'And he'll want his shoes with the Goodyear soles on them too.' I slid off my own sandals and put his on my feet. We were the same size.

What the fuck are you doing bitch? Tom was saying to me. He dragged me away from the limp body on the couch and threw me into the center of the room.

"What are we going to do with her?" Derek said.

Tom kicked me hard in the stomach and my body folded in half on the ground. They were both kicking me, and I swear I didn't feel a thing. I was trying to protect Travis's stuff in my pocket.

I must have passed out, because when I came to the fire was out and the world was running in real time again. All the lights were back on, the drugs were out of my head, and I was alive, lying on a couch in Keith's apartment.

"Everything's going to be alright," Keith kept repeating. He was running around the room frantically closing all the curtains like the place was surrounded with binoculars. Most of those guys were meth-heads and it made them paranoid of everything. They called it "Tina," but it was fucking crystal meth. "Everything's going to be alright."

But I had no sense of right or wrong. I was completely numb. I looked down at my hands. You could see that he'd tried to wash them off with a washcloth or something, but there were still remnants of blood on my fingers and up the entire length of my arms. It was like a dream that I was slowly waking up from.

I went to talk and realized my bottom lip was swollen to the point that it impaired my speech. "Tom," I mumbled. "Tom shot Travis in the head last night and killed him."

Star the dog ran into the room like the world was still filled with magic and butterflies. Keith quickly picked him up to try to quell the emotion.

"Tom? No, it wasn't Tom," he said. "Tom doesn't believe in guns. It was Bubbles, and he's gone. I don't know what happened. He must have been confused. Nobody's seen him since last night."

The news was underwhelming. As if it mattered. As if anything mattered now. My head was throbbing; it felt like the worst hangover of my life. "Did they bring me here?"

"Yeah, they did, they were practically dragging you down the hallway by your ankles. You're lucky they didn't kill you, Mary." Keith kissed his dog on the nose and set her back down on the floor. "Now we just have to keep you alive."

"What do you mean?" My mouth was moving but I don't know what mind was controlling it. It felt like I was watching the conversation unfold on television.

"Tom and his crew? They're no joke. They're some of the toughest guys in this neighborhood, and they're fags. Who knows what they're capable of. And they don't want to go to prison. I convinced them that you wouldn't talk. So that's it. This thing with Travis? It never happened. Nobody knows you went over there but you two, right?"

"Yes."

"Then that's the way it stays. If people come around and ask questions, you tell them Travis disappeared in the night during the blackout and you haven't seen or heard from him since. The important thing is that you don't know anything. I know you might be upset or angry about this, but revenge isn't going to bring him back. You just have to forget about it."

Revenge? I didn't know what that meant. Every part of my body ached and I had a sick sensation rising up in my stomach, but other than that there was nothing. He could have been talking to me about baseball. I reached down in my pocket and pulled out the keys I'd stolen from my dead friend's corpse.

"I'm gonna go," I said, and stood up. It sent a shooting pain through the small of my back, but I was more or less indifferent to it.

"What, now?" Keith said. "Hold on, I want to give you something." He went into the kitchen and I shuffled my way over to the front door. That's when I noticed I was wearing Travis's shoes. It was a scene from a French film.

Keith came back to the living room with a plastic bag in his hand and handed it to me. "Here," he said. "I know you guys don't have anything."

I looked inside the bag. At first glance it looked like a fifth of Jack Daniels, a pack of cigarettes and a box of crackers. It was some bribe.

"Just stay out of sight for a couple of weeks, you know? Have you thought about going back to Illinois?"

"I'm from Wisconsin," I said. There was a pause. "I haven't thought about anything."

I went to walk out the door when Keith started shouting at me: "What's wrong with that kid Travis? He's been hanging around here for weeks, flirting with my guys, acting like some big fucking tease, like he's too good for everybody, talking shit, saying stupid things. Was he even gay or what? Straight men that like to fuck with my guys don't deserve any favors from me, you understand?"

I hated Keith and I hated this city. I hated his sick fucking mother and I hated his sick fucking friends. I hated his fucking dog and his fucking haircut and everyone and everything else in this sick fucking world.

But I was too sick myself to argue. "I'll see you later Keith," I said, and walked out the door.

The unaffected feeling lingered on for days. I was a shell-shocked victim from a senseless war whose victims had long since been forgotten. Travis's phone rang a few times, but I ignored it. It could have been Keith, or it could have been Bubbles calling, as a courtesy, to inform me he'd decided to kill me after all. On around the fifth night, when I'd gone through half the bottle of Jack, I decided to plug in Travis's phone and check his voice mail messages.

The first one was from his father. "Travis, it's your Dad. I know you've been working on Mike's crew. I got your number. You little fucking shit, I found you."

The last sentence stuck in my ear and stung like a bee. It felt like he was saying it to me. He sounded old and pathetic, and he was slurring his words. He was wrong, too. He didn't find him. He was too late.

The next two messages were from bill collectors. The last was from our friend Andy, and it was left that morning. "Mary, I don't know if you're even going to get this message, but I need to talk to you. I know what happened. I'll be at the coffee house tonight until ten. If you don't show I'll stop by the apartment tonight."

I was drunk and I didn't know what else to do with myself, so I put on Travis's shoes and walked over to the coffee house.

Andy was sitting at a table by himself, reading A Tale of Two Cities. He was in college and still had hope for some kind of future. This made us all a little resentful and we kept him at arms length because of it. When he saw me, he got up immediately and walked around the table to hug me. It was an embrace from a dead fish. It didn't mean anything.

"Can you believe it?" Oh my god what happened to your face? Were you there? Christ Mary, I'm so sorry."

I decided to play dumb, because that's how I looked and felt and it seemed like the thing to do. "Why."

He sat down at the table and pulled me down next to him. He was whispering in my ear. "I've been hearing rumors about what happened to Travis. That he owed thousands of dollars and some thugs shot him for it."

I was barely listening. For some reason I started thinking about my brother and sister when we were all little kids, before Dad left. We were riding in a wagon and he was pulling us down the street. I was having a temper tantrum because Dad wouldn't get inside the wagon and let me pull everyone. I was too little, he said; I couldn't handle the weight.

"It's true, isn't it?" he asked. "He's not still alive, is he?" I could see a glimmer of hope in his eyes and he was getting anxious.

"No, it's true." God, people will believe fucking anything you tell them. "He's dead."

He took one of my hands in his and the gesture made me sick to my stomach. I wanted to run out of the coffee house and then out of the city and then out of the country until I was at the bottom of the ocean where no one would ever try to console me with cheap sentiments ever again.

"He was in love with you, you know."

I thought I didn't hear him right. "What?"

"He never wanted you to find out, but now that he's gone I thought you'd want to know."

I'd have rather he hit me in the face with a brick than to hear that shit. That's what it felt like anyway. The weight of the situation was slowly starting to creep up on me and I thought I was going to be sick all over the table. Travis was in love with me the whole damn time and I never even told him my real name. It's like he made me forget everything I hated about who I was. I thought there was plenty of time left for us; that he'd learn everything eventually. I remembered picking up the clump of hair from his lap like it was nothing, like he'd just dropped a pencil.

I swallowed hard and then I was back at home with my family. It was Christmas and I was six. I'd gone around the house picking out random items and wrapping them up to give to my mom and brother and sister. 'Aw, and this is my necklace that she wrapped up and gave back to me,' my mother said, and they all laughed, and I hated them for making fun of me.

"I have to go."

"No, come on Mary, wait," he called after me, but I wasn't listening.

I was out on the sidewalk facing the bar we went to on our first night together. It had rained again and the city streets were wet watercolors. It was beautiful and I felt my body lunge forward and vomit all over the distorted reflection I was casting on the pavement. I wiped the drool from the side of my face and made my way blindly to the payphone on the corner. The earpiece on the receiver was caked with bright blue gum that stretched out from its cradle as I picked it up. The receiver felt lighter with the absence of a ring-tone. I looked around hopelessly. Every direction smelled like Urine.

Vomiting made me feel drunker than ever. I thought I knew of a working payphone on the next block over, and decided to walk over to it. My stomach felt a second away from overflowing, and I held it in place for the whole trip so my guts wouldn't fall out.

The Gum chewer left no stone unturned. The coin slot on the second payphone was caked over in the same blue stuff. I picked up the receiver and the dull tone sang into my ear like a lullaby.

"Hello?" I said.

The operator read her script special for me.

Deposit fifty cents, please.

"Mom? Mom, are you there?"

Her voice hissed and crackled. I was a drunk lunatic, nothing more.

"Mom, it's Molly."

Please deposit fifty cents.

"Mom, can you hear me? I'm in Detroit and I want to come home."

4:16 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Inconsiderate Demons

Everything about that day was different. Work had seemed to drag on even longer than usual. I was tired and restless. Ordinarily I ride my bike to work, and there's time to ruminate on life and take in the scent of the neighborhood, but not on that day. I had to work at the main office in the city, which meant I'd have to use the public transportation. My wife Jean and I shared a car to cut down on expenses. We wanted to start a family someday, and there was a lot planning to do. We always considered ourselves responsible people who loved and respected others. We certainly never expected anything like this to happen to us.

I was waiting patiently, when a mysterious figure in a large black cloak approached, as if out of nowhere, and sat down on the bench beside me. His face was completely obscured by the heavy hood he wore, and in fact it almost seemed as though there was no face at all, just a cavernous black hole leading to the depths of something resembling Hell. I imagined flames spewing out from the pit and setting a passing lamb on fire. The thought troubled me. I shook my head several times to rattle away the image. This was a sprawling metropolitan area, and certainly there were no lambs around.

"What are you reading?" He said, in the voice of a rabid dog. It felt like elbows dragged across gravel.

I was shaking, I had to steady my voice and remind myself there was no such thing as demons. I looked down at the open book sitting neglected in my lap. "Of Human Bondage." I tried to sound polite.

The man scoffed, and I watched as a squirrel across the path vomited onto the pavement and keeled over in agony.

"I'm not a fan of reading myself," he flatly stated.

Suddenly I had a headache; I wished he would leave. I wanted the bus to come and leave him here on the park bench forever. I noticed his cavernous face was turned to me. He expected a response.

"Yeah I guess," I said meekly. "Reading's not for everyone."

"I mean what's the point! All the good books are made into movies, and all that other stuff is useless junk anyway."

The man had been leaning in quite close now, the black hood of his cloak just inches away from my forehead. It smelled like sulfur and rotten eggs, and I resisted the urge to put my hand over my mouth or start gagging directly.

"I guess you're right," I said. It was a humiliating defeat, because I didn't actually feel that way.

I looked up to see the bus rounding the corner of Jefferson on its way to pick me up and take me away from this recent unpleasantness. The man also noticed and let out a grunt of recognition. It made a passing rotweiler whimper in fear as it passed us, and I thought the owner may have even whimpered as well.

"Say Pal," the man turned violently again in my direction, "a girl is sick, I need twenty dollars to get her medicine. Can you help me out?"

The question was confusing. I tried to make sense of it as the bus neared closer.

"I don't understand," I stammered, "Where is she, should we call the—"

The man stood up and leaned over me on the park bench. "Didn't you hear me? I said a girl is sick. Do you care about little girls, or do you want them to die without their medicine?"

The bus had come to a stop, but the man stood defiantly in front of the door, essentially demanding a second, inflated fare for my only shot at getting home. With a trembling hand, I handed the man a crisp twenty dollar bill. Slowly he reached his arm out of his deep pockets, and I nearly fainted at what I saw next. The man stretched out an entirely skeletal hand, complete with ivory knuckles that clanged together as his fingers enveloped the cash. The creature quickly shoved the money back into his pocket and took off down the sidewalk, hunched over in the opposite direction. I jumped onto the bus like a man hurled off of a sinking ship, my heart beating rapidly out of my chest.

* * * * *

When I arrived home, I was surprised to find my wife Jean in a similarly inconsolable state.

"I mean it was just the oddest thing," she said again, shaking her head. "This thing that stood behind me at the bank gave me the coldest feeling. He was unusually short, no more than four and a half feet, and he wore an oversize red robe that covered his entire body. The back of it was so long that it dragged behind him. Oh I tried not to judge Harold—"

I held her hand across the kitchen table and looked in her eyes. "I know. I know."

"--But then he tapped me on the shoulder, and it sent a positively gruesome chill down my spine. And his voice! Every syllable felt like it was scooping out the inside of my brain with a rusty spoon."

"What did he say?"

"He said, oh something like, 'Excuse me ma'am, may I please go ahead of you? It's important that I make this cash transaction immediately. I have to go straight to the shelter from here to dispense the money to the homeless.'"

"You know something Jean. I'm beginning to suspect these strange individuals are not acting in the service of others at all."

"Oh but Harold, that's not all. When I allowed him to go ahead, after all what possible choice did I have, I saw for just a moment, peaking out of his red cloak--"

"What was it?" I asked, on the edge of my seat.

"--A slimy green tail!"

The events were simply too fantastic to wrap our heads around. We sat there for a moment together in silence.

"And when I got home and you weren't here I called Julie in a panic, and she told me that a strange looking man in a large cloak insisted to her that she give him her morning paper at the diner."

"What possible reason could the man give for such an intrusion?"

"Apparently, he insisted he needed the paper immediately to check the want ads for a missing puppy his friend found. He said the puppy was waiting in a van outside with a friend, but Julie never saw the puppy or the friend."

"Did she give the man the paper?"

"I believe she resisted at first but eventually consented. I mean of course, these men are terrifying, what on earth could she possibly have done?"

I got up from my chair and began pacing the room frantically. Jean's eyes followed my path anxiously.

"Please tell me, what are you thinking?"

"I think that these creatures, whether they're men or something else entirely, are first and foremost inconsiderate liars. You know as well as I that it is in our nature to be loving and trusting, but in this instance, I believe the good people of this community are being grossly taken advantage of."

"Yes, but what can we do? Julie told me that the man in the brown cloak became quite insistent after a time."

"We must stand firm! Demon or no, there are certain conventions of common decency that must be followed for a society to function properly. Not to mention the obvious lying. When your stranger left the bank, did he turn left towards the shelter, or right towards the red light district for booze and women?"

"I don't know. He was gone by the time I left."

"Well I'd be willing to bet," I declared. "I'd be willing to bet."

Not a moment later, the doorbell rang and we jumped out of our chairs at the sound.

"Are you expecting anyone?" I asked. It was nearly eight o' clock by now, and we were not accustomed to late night visitors.

"Maybe it's Julie. Maybe something horrible has happened."

Jean went to the door as I followed closely at her heels. She swung it open and immediately let out a shriek, then quickly stifled it with her hands.

"Look, Harold."

At the door were two more heavily cloaked creatures of the night. One man stood so tall and thin he was forced to cock his head awkwardly in order to see through the entranceway. The other was as short and stout as a small German child. The taller figure spoke first. Its voice came out in hissing gasps of helium escaped from a balloon.

"Good evening," it said. "We've traveled a long way, but now several people from our home are very depressed and need our counseling on some important matters."

The other one spoke now, in a conversely low, conversational drawl. "We'd like to come inside and make a series of long distance phone calls."

Jean looked at me, and I realized that my courage and very manliness was on the line. I was not a person to be idly taken advantage of. I was a person of integrity, with conviction, a firm sense of self, and more importantly, a firm sense of what was rightfully mine.

"Take your pity party somewhere else boys!" I found myself boldly declaring.

The two hung their heads meekly in unison.

"We just… really need to make some phone calls."

"Not here you don't! This is a friendly neighborhood in a friendly town, and we don't appreciate being taken advantage of."

The two were even more hunched over in despair than before. The tall one was nearly bent in half, the shorter practically a puddle on the floor.

"It would be better if you just let us use the phone," the short one said.

"In order to counsel our friends' depression, many miles away," the taller one added.

I felt Jean's body tense up next to me and I knew she was about to speak. "And if we don't?"

She looked beautiful to me in the porch light, her anger working like a powerful aphrodisiac on my senses.

Again the creatures looked at each other and shrugged. "I don't know," said the tall one. "We just think something really bad is going to happen."

Jean and I were filled to the gills with bravado and courage, and these idle threats had no effect on us. I began to shut the door in the solicitor's faces, when the shorter one suddenly put its foot out to avert the action. The foot was a flesh covered brick with curly black hairs made out of wire, and I wanted to puke all over everything at the site of it.

"It's better if you just let us make the long distance calls like we asked."

Then he lifted up his hood and looked me straight in the eyes. The face was as terrible as anything you could possibly imagine. He was a man with the flesh of his face shaped into the snout of a giant rat. The eyes were yellow and hideous and stayed fixed on mine, momentarily hypnotizing me. I found my way back to my senses and made one last attempt at slamming the door shut on them for good.

"Good lord!" Jean said.

The two of us were panting in unison. I could hear both of our hearts beating at once. Something otherworldly was coming over us. Jean walked up to me slowly and put her arms around my heaving shoulders. Our bodies felt warm and full of life, and she had a fire in her eyes that had been noticeably lacking in our marriage for the last several years. She kissed me on the mouth and told me I was strong. I told her she was beautiful and we went to the bedroom together.

* * * * *

It was dark and I was on top of Jean, lovingly kissing her neck and pushing myself slowly inside of her. I was a dark proud knight at a javelin contest, the obvious victor amongst a sea of inferior men. Jean had her legs wrapped around me like a clever snake coiled around an oak tree.

"Maybe well have a child," she panted in my ear.

The idea filled me with a vigor that put the experience over the top, and I allowed my seed to rush out into her anxious womb.

I pulled myself out of my trembling companion, and suddenly, as though one movement punctuated the other, a violent storm erupted in our bedroom. A swirl of clouds circled above the queen sized bed we laid on naked together, ripping a hole through the space-time continuum, as well as the plaster of our newly painted, porcelain colored ceiling. A ferocious wind ripped through the room and sent loose papers flying everywhere. Jeans hair flew wildly around her face and I held her naked body close to me for protection.

You have unleashed the demon seed, a voice said, more horrible than all the others, as if coming straight from the bowels of Hell. Jean and I looked around the room frantically for the voices source and found nothing. It was booming out of the storm above our heads from some supernatural amplifier.

"What are you talking about?" I screamed. "Who are you, what do you want?"

You were both confronted with a series of tests on your character today, and ultimately, both of you have failed. Cursed demons asked you for kindness and charity for others. First you obliged, out of fear, but soon your selfish ways and poor personalities overtook you, and you refused help to those that are most unfortunate. You, who have so much, refused the advances of my subjects, who have so little.

I felt Jean's body shake as she sobbed in my arms. My mind was racing with what possible course of action to take next. The manliness I was able to conjure earlier in the evening at the front door was all but lost on me now. I tried lifting my arms and found I had the strength of something less than a little girl. I went to talk, but my throat began to close up. I too began to cry.

"Please," I begged him, "spare us. We didn't know!"

Oh you didn't know! The voice condescended.You didn't know the little girl was sick? Or that the friends of the unfortunates were depressed and needed long distance counseling? Did they not tell you these things in the plainest of English?

"You don't understand," Jean wailed.
I was struck with a violent pain, as though my very flesh was burning off. I could see by Jean's thrashing about that she was struck with a similar ailment.

"We thought they were liars!"

The voice chuckled at our misery. I went to hold my hands to shield my ears from the horrendous noise, and found my arms had turned into appendages entirely more awkward. I looked down and discovered that my entire body was covered in slick black feathers, tightly woven into the skin, as if to envelope my entire being.

"Oh god Harold, No!" Jean shrieked to me, in a voice entirely not her own.

The woman I once loved was rapidly shrinking down into a pale, hairless beast, unknown to this world. Her hair fell off in clumps around her head, and her eyes bulged grossly out of her face.

You Harold, the voice began shouting once again, Shall be doomed the life of a pitiful half-crow, half- man, with a never ending compulsion to provide small acts of charity towards others, coupled with a complete ineptitude of resources or charisma in order to do so. To you Jean, I assign a similar fate, in the shape of a hideously ugly beast, so pale and misshapen that no amount of makeup or plastic surgery could ever rectify it. I have made you both so appalling that you will even be repelled by each other, and from now on will find no solace or comfort in each others company.

Despair filled the room in the shape of thick black smoke. I had so many questions. I tried to talk, but my shiny black beak felt awkward to control, and my new vocal
chords strained in the novelty of their use.

"But why? Why do you punish us so severely?"

Why!? The voice bellowed. The question appeared to make it angry and the bed shook violently in response. Why?! Did Job ask God why he sent down the plague and killed his family? Did Jesus ask God why he forsake him on the cross?
Even knowing he was wrong, it seemed fruitless to try to argue the theology.

My work here is done! The voice shouted, conclusively. It is accomplished!

The winds died down, and the storm swirled immediately away almost as soon as it had come. Our gasps and cries were the only sounds left in the room. I turned my new head slowly, awkwardly, and looked at Jean. The face looking back made me want to flap my wings and fly as far away from her as possible. It was more than just disgust at her physical appearance that repelled me. It was something deeper; a kind of ugliness in her personality I never knew before existed. She appeared likewise repelled by me, and with our new arms and legs we rolled off the bed on opposite sides.

I pulled the dark green sheet off of our bed and wrapped it around my quivering body. Jean moved silently to the closet and pulled out my black terry cloth robe, several sizes too big, thankfully, as it was large enough to pull over her bald, offensive scalp.
Without another word to one another in this lifetime, silently, swiftly, and with deep sorrow, we left the bedroom and retreated out into the black, uncertain night. Jean chose to go out the front door, as I hobbled, with half-human, half-crow like movements, ever so pitifully out the back.

5:48 AM - 3 Comments - 8 Kudos - Add Comment