Blessing; snow. The sounds that don’t wake me up
in morning.
Little taps on eyelids and hair cells with tips of fingers,
little sweeping hands on ivory keys.
No one heard the Fugue in the night when he died.
Little pricks of blessed snow: It was the sounds
that didn’t wake me up.
That night in muddy water he imagined the piano by the window
and his wife’s scarf wrapped around his granddaughter’s head.
The first Christmas she decided not to trust;
her faith washed away like his life in the river.
Japanese chants trickle by and all she can understand
about a blessing
is the snow, a winter to end all.
Little slender fingers around mallets don’t pound out funeral melodies
but songs mimicking the way water moves.
All tears will be different, frozen. All rain drops become their own
when it’s cold enough.
The simplicity of Japanese folk songs is the ominous quiet
before the gusts and crashes of night;
the kind of silence one feels he must grab hold of.
The piano by the window swells with tiny frozen notes
that come through the window and melt into the wood.
Who taught his granddaughter to play this box? She sings
of cities, her fingers a flurry to rest on a black-and-white landscape.
She’s sorry about the ice. Or, she wishes she was sorry about ice.
But she lives a winter without the burdens of a birth she never found all that
fascinating.
Little Japanese blessings nestle into the scarf woven into her hair,
the Western canon shaken off like loose flakes that dissolve into the floor,
swelling the wood in obscure ridges like Braille for bare feet.
A death she foresaw.
Rolling the plastic baby Jesus over on her tongue
to discover the gustations of a miracle,
she leaves the table of a dozen people who fear they might have
consumed sacrilege.
Little hands clap together to spark an epiphany;
all she can remember is that her grandfather was too young.
The look of a river with a million plastic dolls floating through
all she knows is religion let her grandfather die too young.
She only wanted the blessing of moving water.
The only blessings are frozen.
Little farmer folk songs ring through the trees,
a peasant’s queen
steps into the river, her Christmas dress unfurling,
a blossom in the muddy water.
Wading to where her grandfather should have died
on a faithless holiday
all that kiss the surface are little rimy blessings.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Welcome to Lancaster's
my life hasn't even been kind of productive as of late. It's a shame. I wrote this a long long time ago. It was inspired mostly by all the weird looks I get in grocery stores and my friend's job at Wal-Mart.
Condoms, a fire extinguisher, and calamine lotion.
She ducks her head.
I have to hold back a laugh.
Debit or credit, I ask.
Is he really that much of a freak, I wonder.
I chuckle. She probably notices.
For the record, I understand that I tend not to be a discreet person. But really, she’s making this too easy for me.
I have to wonder what kind of night she has planned. I mean, I don’t want to visualize her—with her frizzy aisle 5A bottle blonde hair and aisle 7B shadow/liner combo—having any sort of crazy sexual encounter with anyone, but I can’t help but wonder how comic the unfolding of that night would be.
But back to business...
Debit or credit, I ask again after a silent second. Maybe she forgot I was here. She’s gone to picking her aisle 7B nail polish—‘Reddy To Mingle’ is the oh-so clever name of that shade of red that’s coquettish in the I’ll-suck-your-dick kind of way. It’s chipping and flaking at the cuticle. I want to tell her to drink more water; that it’ll make her hair and nails healthier; that her cuticles won’t shred and tear and shrink like that anymore. But she looks like she has other things on her mind. I don’t want to burden her with such frivolous information.
Debit or—
She cuts me off before I have a chance to ask her again. Cash is what she tells me. She’ll pay cash.
“$73.19,” I tell her. “Are you sure you want to pay with cash?”
But of course, she’s determined. She’s digging through her pockets and purse, pulling out eighty dollars in crumpled bills. And I thought no one carried around cash like that anymore.
Maybe she held up a bank with a ski mask from aisle 19B on her way over here. Or maybe it was her who had issues with the ATM twenty minutes ago. (Maybe working from ten to six in a place like this every day actually makes you crazy.)
And again, I want to laugh. I want to laugh until my abdominal muscles ache and my diaphragm spasms and seizes with the lack of oxygen. I want to laugh until I’m dizzy because of hyperventilating. Basically until I’m blue in the face. Until the cows come home. Until I get that degree. Until I get that new job I’ve been intending to look for.
But no, I can’t laugh. I have to be congeal and friendly. They told me that specifically in the staff meeting. They told me “Yes, Leah, that means you Leah. I’m tired at you laughing at people for living their lives. They don’t like it, Leah. It isn’t your place to criticize every person walking through the doors.”
But they don’t have to like my attitude the same way I don’t have to like this job. So the customers can suck it. The managers can suck it too.
But back to business, because I clearly always have my mind on business.
Paper or plastic? I ask it just to fuck with her. I obviously succeed. She gives me a look that could freeze hell over and I want to tell her to wish me her worse; I want to tell her that whatever apocalyptic horsemen she casts unto me couldn’t be more horrendous than this. But I don’t. I just ask her again.
Paper or plastic?
And part of me wonders if she has a gun or a knife shoved in the space between the knock off La Perla bra and the silicone breasts or in the fake Coach purse.
But no, I’m not that lucky.
My jugular is not spouting blood like a cheap fountain.
I am not stabbed on the job.
I am not shot twice in the chest.
I do not have a bullet searing through the gelatinous goo of my brain.
I do not incite murder in others.
But I do happen to incite her to haul her shit up into that big ass purse of hers. The condoms, the calamine lotion, the fire extinguisher. All of it.
I would tell her that she is being very eco-friendly, that she’s helping the environment—just to fuck with her a little more—but she’s huffing away, towards the exit and out the automated glass doors that lead out to the real world (funny, the real world). And she’s gone out in to real life before I have a chance to react, before the transaction is technically complete.
No change.
No receipt.
No bag.
No explanation.
And I want to laugh until I pass out in aisle 15B—with the sugar cereal to my left and the beer to my right.
I would do that but alas, I don’t have the time. There are customers to assist. There is minimum wage to earn. There’s always some shmuck with some crazy combinations like a bible, a six pack of beer, and baby powder right behind the woman who I just scared off. There’s always some misguided lowlife begging for my undivided attention.
And since that’s always there, I’m always here.
I’m always “Did you find everything okay?”
I’m always “Do you have any coupons you’d like to use?”
I’m always “Thank you for shopping at Lancaster’s, please come again soon.” But I always bite my tongue before “Or just don’t” because I actually need this fucking job.
Welcome to Lancaster’s
Condoms, a fire extinguisher, and calamine lotion.
She ducks her head.
I have to hold back a laugh.
Debit or credit, I ask.
Is he really that much of a freak, I wonder.
I chuckle. She probably notices.
For the record, I understand that I tend not to be a discreet person. But really, she’s making this too easy for me.
I have to wonder what kind of night she has planned. I mean, I don’t want to visualize her—with her frizzy aisle 5A bottle blonde hair and aisle 7B shadow/liner combo—having any sort of crazy sexual encounter with anyone, but I can’t help but wonder how comic the unfolding of that night would be.
But back to business...
Debit or credit, I ask again after a silent second. Maybe she forgot I was here. She’s gone to picking her aisle 7B nail polish—‘Reddy To Mingle’ is the oh-so clever name of that shade of red that’s coquettish in the I’ll-suck-your-dick kind of way. It’s chipping and flaking at the cuticle. I want to tell her to drink more water; that it’ll make her hair and nails healthier; that her cuticles won’t shred and tear and shrink like that anymore. But she looks like she has other things on her mind. I don’t want to burden her with such frivolous information.
Debit or—
She cuts me off before I have a chance to ask her again. Cash is what she tells me. She’ll pay cash.
“$73.19,” I tell her. “Are you sure you want to pay with cash?”
But of course, she’s determined. She’s digging through her pockets and purse, pulling out eighty dollars in crumpled bills. And I thought no one carried around cash like that anymore.
Maybe she held up a bank with a ski mask from aisle 19B on her way over here. Or maybe it was her who had issues with the ATM twenty minutes ago. (Maybe working from ten to six in a place like this every day actually makes you crazy.)
And again, I want to laugh. I want to laugh until my abdominal muscles ache and my diaphragm spasms and seizes with the lack of oxygen. I want to laugh until I’m dizzy because of hyperventilating. Basically until I’m blue in the face. Until the cows come home. Until I get that degree. Until I get that new job I’ve been intending to look for.
But no, I can’t laugh. I have to be congeal and friendly. They told me that specifically in the staff meeting. They told me “Yes, Leah, that means you Leah. I’m tired at you laughing at people for living their lives. They don’t like it, Leah. It isn’t your place to criticize every person walking through the doors.”
But they don’t have to like my attitude the same way I don’t have to like this job. So the customers can suck it. The managers can suck it too.
But back to business, because I clearly always have my mind on business.
Paper or plastic? I ask it just to fuck with her. I obviously succeed. She gives me a look that could freeze hell over and I want to tell her to wish me her worse; I want to tell her that whatever apocalyptic horsemen she casts unto me couldn’t be more horrendous than this. But I don’t. I just ask her again.
Paper or plastic?
And part of me wonders if she has a gun or a knife shoved in the space between the knock off La Perla bra and the silicone breasts or in the fake Coach purse.
But no, I’m not that lucky.
My jugular is not spouting blood like a cheap fountain.
I am not stabbed on the job.
I am not shot twice in the chest.
I do not have a bullet searing through the gelatinous goo of my brain.
I do not incite murder in others.
But I do happen to incite her to haul her shit up into that big ass purse of hers. The condoms, the calamine lotion, the fire extinguisher. All of it.
I would tell her that she is being very eco-friendly, that she’s helping the environment—just to fuck with her a little more—but she’s huffing away, towards the exit and out the automated glass doors that lead out to the real world (funny, the real world). And she’s gone out in to real life before I have a chance to react, before the transaction is technically complete.
No change.
No receipt.
No bag.
No explanation.
And I want to laugh until I pass out in aisle 15B—with the sugar cereal to my left and the beer to my right.
I would do that but alas, I don’t have the time. There are customers to assist. There is minimum wage to earn. There’s always some shmuck with some crazy combinations like a bible, a six pack of beer, and baby powder right behind the woman who I just scared off. There’s always some misguided lowlife begging for my undivided attention.
And since that’s always there, I’m always here.
I’m always “Did you find everything okay?”
I’m always “Do you have any coupons you’d like to use?”
I’m always “Thank you for shopping at Lancaster’s, please come again soon.” But I always bite my tongue before “Or just don’t” because I actually need this fucking job.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
I dunno if people still read this . . .
A short story I wrote. Please let me know what you think; I'm really insecure about it.
Monday mornings in the cafeteria are awful. I enter and it reeks of tired, and it’s more than obvious that no one has any desire to be there. Some kids are off in a corner, trying to finish the last minutes of homework before first period starts while others are just hanging around because hanging out with friends before class is a good alternative to hanging around at home. The people who are in the cafeteria on Monday mornings are almost always the kids who live across the street from school, and if they didn’t get to school a half hour early they would be, without a doubt, fifteen minutes late each and every day.
I am not usually in the cafeteria on a Monday morning. It just happened to be that this Monday morning I woke up earlier than expected, got out of bed earlier than expected, and left my house earlier than expected. I find a seat away from everyone, and oddly enough it’s a seat directly in the middle of the large room. I wait.
The people around me are not interesting. I only recognize a few faces, and even then I don’t know any of them personally. Of course, this excludes Him, but He sits with Her and They sit together, like everyone else, on the perimeter of the room, Her binder spread out between them. I can tell from where I’m sitting that it’s math homework and He’s helping Her understand whatever proof She’s trying to complete. I don’t know either of Them very well, except that He’s in my grade and She’s a grade below. They’ve been dating for a while now, and They remind the school of it constantly by kissing at all spare moments.
Like just then. She finished a problem–all on Her own!–and He kisses her solidly on the mouth. No tongue, but it’s a kiss that only a loving boyfriend could give his loving girlfriend. Not the kind that occurs against lockers during change of class that’s always rough and disgusting-looking, but a tender one that will occur when there’s a bond of more-than-average love. I look back down at the table; letting Them catch me staring would be an awkward to end all awkwards.
I’m not quite sure what to do this Monday morning. The clock hanging above the door reads fifteen more minutes until first period starts, which means about eight more minutes until my friends appear, and there They are, at it again! I don’t understand why people find Them gross; it’s really kind of sweet. It’s nice, that They have each other. The public displays of affection would make some people mad, but I think it’s kind of adorable. I can’t help but look at the couples, flirting and smiling, their eyes dancing about, and think how cute they are and how wonderful it must be to stop everything and kiss in the middle of the street and not really care who sees. How beautiful.
At this moment, You walk in. You run over to me, long before I had expected You, and You snap me out of my trance.
“OH my God! Guess who I talked to last night?” You ask, even though You know that I know and You know what my reaction will be. I say Mitchell in my best monotonous voice, and You say “Duh!” just like You always do, and you sit next to me and you wait for me to ask you for all of the dirty details, but I refrain because I’m not really in the mood.
“What’s eating you?” You ask me and I try to shake You off by calling it the Monday Morning Blues.
“Of course. WAKE UP! IT’S MONDAY MORNING! IT’S NOT THE WEEKEND ANYMORE!” You scream at me. Usually I am the one screaming at You, and after a morning of watching Him and Her, I don’t really feel motivated to be doing much of anything, but at the same time, I don’t really feel like listening to You yell at me all day, either, so I take your bait and ask what it was he said.
“Well,” You begin, but I stop listening. You say something about him calling you or you calling him and something about awkward conversation, as if any of this is new or original. I tell You that You should just go for it with Mitchell–he’s a good guy, and you have a lot in common. You tell me that I’m crazy. I shrug it off.
I sit through class and feign paying attention, and all I can think about is that ridiculous image of Him and Her in the cafeteria. Three hours and three classes later, I’m back in the cafeteria again and the image is right in front of me again, and You’re in front of me, too. Everything is always in front of me. All of the thinking gives me a headache. You want to go to lunch, but I have no money so we decide to splurge at whoever’s bake sale is in the lobby and hang around the cafeteria. I make it my mission to avoid sitting near Him and Her, but from the start I know that there will be no avoiding it. Soon enough, You run off to hang out with one of your freshmen friends and I’m left all alone again. Story of my life.
And then again someone else is talking to me and I look up and I realize that it’s Ben and that Ben is the one talking to me. Ben, you are cute, I think to myself, that and Ben, you pay attention to me, and Ben, you could be kissing me right now ‘cause I got a math problem right. Math isn’t that hard. I’ll get a thousand right and then Ben will give me a thousand kisses, right? And then I remember that Ben is talking to me and that I’m not paying attention but with my luck he probably won’t have noticed.
Ben sits next to me and leans towards me but not like he’s going to kiss me, like he’s trying to figure out what the hell is going on inside of my head. He asks if We’re still going to hang out after school like We usually do for that hour between classes and extra curricular activities. I tell him yes and then he finally asks what’s up, like everyone’s been asking, and I tell him that I just want to sleep because really that’s all I want right now, even though nothing’s really stressing me out and I got at least five hours of sleep the night before. He offers me his shoulder and I take it because maybe he’ll think I’m flirting with him and then maybe he’ll like me except I already know that he kind of likes me and he already knows that I like him but whatever, it doesn’t matter, because neither of us would ever admit it to each other’s faces.
You come back after a half hour of doing whatever with whoever wherever You were and You pull me off of Ben’s shoulder because it doesn’t matter what We have going on that We won’t admit to, he’s still Your best friend. The period is nearly over and I glance up and force my eyes open and I look away from You and Ben but if I’m not looking at You and Ben the only thing to look at it is Her and Him and they disgust me. He still helps Her with math and sometimes I wonder if She really needs it or if it’s just an excuse because if it were me it would just be an excuse, even though I would never dumb myself down for a guy, if I had a guy to dumb myself for. Then lunch is over and everyone packs up and moves to class and tries to navigate through the hallways that are suddenly a lot more crowded than usual in this small school, and I can’t remember which class I have next but it doesn’t really matter since I know that somehow I’ll end up in the right place eventually.
Two more classes and I’m done for the day so I leave the school and go to the top of the hill and I wait for You and Ben and everyone else. It always surprises me how much faster I walk when I have no where to go, and when I get to the top of the hill and look down I realize that I am the only person there and the first one out of the building, which is stunning for a Thursday afternoon. Slowly people make their way to the top, some with bags filled with book for studying and a few with nothing at all except their cell phones and cigarettes, which magically come into sight as soon as they exit the doors of the school. I don’t see Them, but I know that He and She are somewhere in the crowd, making their way home holding hands and stopping on corners for quick kisses. The thought of it depresses me.
My phone vibrates in my pants and I look at the text message, telling me that You and Ben are almost there and I wonder why You bother to text me that, since I will be seeing you all soon anyway. Standing up at the top of the hill in my much-too-heavy jacked with my much-too-heavy backpack is awkward and hot and unexciting, except for the large masses of people pushing me away from where I’m supposed to be waiting. Soon enough I see You approaching with Ben a ways behind and you walk up to me and we “kiss” by pressing our cheeks together, and You rush to tell me about Your plans for the evening so that You can hurry home and leave Ben and me alone. I tell You that it sounds exciting, and that You really should call Mitchell because I really do think that you would make a good couple. As always You glare at me and insist it would never work even though I’m sure it really would and we press our cheeks together again and You’re off to the subway before Ben has even made it all the way up the hill.
Again I’m standing their awkwardly waiting at the top and finally Ben is there with me and We decide to go back to school, since We’d just end up back there in an hour anyway and there isn’t really anywhere else to go. He gives me a hug and We link arms and skip down the hill, almost as if We were together, and even though We aren’t.
Inside the school is empty, since everyone is either in class or outside or home already. We aren’t sure where to go at first, but quickly decide to just go down to that room in the basement, where We’ll end up in the end anyway. It’s small, but for some reason when We rush ourselves inside it feels a lot smaller. We can hear the class being taught next door, probably full of juniors counting down the minutes until they’re finally free to go home. I put my backpack on the large conference table and Ben does the same and We take off our jackets in unison because it’s hot in this room. Ben makes his way to the row of computers in the back of the room and I follow him because I don’t have a better idea for what to do, so I let him sit down in front of the Mac with the camera on top and I sit on top of him as usual even though I wouldn’t be surprised if I weighed twice as much as he did because he’s so skinny and so adorable. And I’m sitting on top of him and he opens up whichever application on the computer lets us take pictures and he presses some buttons and We pose together as if We were in a picture booth. I’ve never been in a picture booth, and I wish We were right now, for real, because then maybe We’d be more alone than We are right now and then maybe he could tell me that he likes me and We could take pictures of us kissing without it being obscene in the same way that it would be if We took pictures of us kissing on a school computer.
The minutes pass and We don’t move from the chair, except to switch so that he’s sitting on me instead of vice versa. I like to smell his hair when he isn’t paying attention, because it smells good even if I can’t recognize the scent. I play with it a bit, run my hands through it and if he turned around to face me it would be so easy just to bring his head closer towards mine and my fingers would already be running through his hair and it would be all romantic and beautiful just like Him and Her. I tell Ben that my legs are tired and that he should get up for a minute and he does and I get up and walk around and I wonder out loud whether or not anyone will be coming into the room any time soon. Ben reminds me that everyone who will be coming into the room later is in class, except for Alex, and Alex wouldn’t come into the room until everyone else does, at least, he shouldn’t. Yet again I think about how easy it would be for Us to clear off the table and just make out on top of it for the next twenty minutes, and that fault is replaced rather quickly by the thought that reminds me that maybe I don’t really want to be kissing Ben and maybe this whole thing is stupid and nothing will ever happen because neither one of us would ever make the move it takes and a crush is really just something to get over, anyway.
I sit on the reclining chair, off to the side between computers and the printer, almost out of view from the window of the closed door but not quite. It’s a comfortable chair and I lie back and try to sleep a little bit and then Ben walks over towards me, flirting beyond belief and he knows it and I know it as he approaches me, about to straddle me in the chair. I welcome him onto my lap and I know and he knows that it would be the perfect opportunity to do whatever we wanted, right then and there, but instead I remind him that someone could walk in at any minute and it would be bad and he agrees with me even though I wish he wouldn’t and he turns around and sits there, and we lie together thinking about how much we maybe want each other until Alex walks in and says hello and we realize that there’s only two more minutes until everyone else crowds into the room and so we both get up and sit around the table and We wait together.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
after reading Keats' Ode on Indolence
skin and shirts first melt
and then seep through couch fibers,
that mesh of morphine
(I can't decide whether I want to use "seep" or "drip"...)
and then seep through couch fibers,
that mesh of morphine
(I can't decide whether I want to use "seep" or "drip"...)
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
The Beholder's Eye
(Well, I was not bored or at school. I was exhausted and at home, and I suddenly got this really creepy idea. I think I channeled Sylvia Plath. Anyway, I wrote this last night, and it hasn't really been edited much, so it's rough, but I kind of like it this way. And for the record, no, I do not actually feel this way.)
The beholder's eye
just got shot
struck with an arrow
feathered with ice
Crystalline elegance
pierced it
shoved a stake in its heart
Its pulsing, beating,
bleeding heart
It's learned how to see
It has a peep hole now
into all the nasty crevices
of every unique snowflake
Am I beautiful yet?
The beholder's eye
just got shot
struck with an arrow
feathered with ice
Crystalline elegance
pierced it
shoved a stake in its heart
Its pulsing, beating,
bleeding heart
It's learned how to see
It has a peep hole now
into all the nasty crevices
of every unique snowflake
Am I beautiful yet?
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Bored in the Metro (or Lesson Number Three)
It was cold outside before I got in here.
And it'll be cold when I come out.
But for some odd reason
It was hot at lunch.
Stupid inconsistent climate.
Don't quite notice the temperature in here.
Puts you off guard
for the blast of cold
and wind
that comes as you go up the escalator.
Just pretend not to notice.
Like I don't really notice anything, here.
Not the dizzyingly high ceilings
Not the tunnels that stretch off into the darkness.
Pretend not to notice.
Pretend not to care.
That's lesson number one.
Of Course,
I do notice things.
It's just pretend.
That's all we do all day.
Isn't it?
Pretend that you care
what the teacher's talking about
even though you don't give a shit
what the cosine of 47.35 degrees is.
Just sit there
Nod your head.
Pretend you care.
That's lesson number two.
Of course,
I care about things.
Everyone cares.
No one cares.
Can't make up my mind.
I do care.
I care that it's 4:30 and I need to get home.
I care that it's Thursday.
Almost Friday.
Almost the weeked.
When I get to sleep in.
That'll be nice.
Just wanna get home.
Relax.
Now I see a light at the end of the tunnel
And I really hope it's the train.
Maybe that's lesson number three.
And it'll be cold when I come out.
But for some odd reason
It was hot at lunch.
Stupid inconsistent climate.
Don't quite notice the temperature in here.
Puts you off guard
for the blast of cold
and wind
that comes as you go up the escalator.
Just pretend not to notice.
Like I don't really notice anything, here.
Not the dizzyingly high ceilings
Not the tunnels that stretch off into the darkness.
Pretend not to notice.
Pretend not to care.
That's lesson number one.
Of Course,
I do notice things.
It's just pretend.
That's all we do all day.
Isn't it?
Pretend that you care
what the teacher's talking about
even though you don't give a shit
what the cosine of 47.35 degrees is.
Just sit there
Nod your head.
Pretend you care.
That's lesson number two.
Of course,
I care about things.
Everyone cares.
No one cares.
Can't make up my mind.
I do care.
I care that it's 4:30 and I need to get home.
I care that it's Thursday.
Almost Friday.
Almost the weeked.
When I get to sleep in.
That'll be nice.
Just wanna get home.
Relax.
Now I see a light at the end of the tunnel
And I really hope it's the train.
Maybe that's lesson number three.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Videotape
(Yes, I stole Charles' muse and made a weak version of something in his vein)(PS sorry this chews up so much space)
You tell yourself that you’re not crazy, and most days you believe yourself. Your days aren’t really that interesting, or at least you don’t think they are: you wake up, toast a bagel while your coffee dripdripdrips into your mug, and then you’re off to work--an agency that files away reports about UFOs. Most of the people there really are crazy, and compared to them, you feel pretty good about yourself. The only thing that bothers you is that you’ve never been sure whether you were hired by the government or Ernie, the nutjob who runs the office. He hired you, of course, but a lot of the things you signed were all official looking, and maybe you’re really looking for the government and don’t know it yet. Or that’s the lie that you tell yourself to make your job seem more interesting. Usually you eat lunch with Albert and Jane at the Sushi Mart across the parking lot from the little mousetrap office that you work in. Actually, you think of your office as an ant motel because it looks like the ant motel traps, but Albert calls it a mousetrap and you don’t think that arguing with him is worth your time because he’s rather stupid.
Anyway, that’s the boring part of your day. After you get done answering calls from crazy people and writing down stupid reports about the things that they saw in the sky--usually airplanes, you imagine, but never tell anyone this--and pretending to care about the crazy things that you hear about with the crazy people that you work with, after all that you drive home across the desert past the roll-polly balls of weeds and dead animal stuff and work on making your videotape. It’s your pride and joy, though you like to think of it as your magnum opus, because if you’re going to be cliché, you may as well be fancy about it.
You close all your doors and lock them, but you leave your blinds open because the neighbors might wonder what you’re up to if you button up the house every day as soon as you get home from work. Then you turn on the TV in your bedroom and leave it blaring nonsense while you go down into your basement and through the little trapdoor hidden underneath a chest that you cut the bottom out of. Under that is your wine cellar, or it was a wine cellar when you used to live in the house with your mother, when you were a little girl. Now it’s your laboratory, and you make sure to pronounce all the syllables because you think that pretentious-sounding words are amusing.
After you killed your mother, you stuck her body in a barrel that you filled up with liquid nitrogen and insulated with styrofoam that you duct-taped together to keep the cold in. More importantly, you started remodeling the wine cellar and turned it into your laboratory. First you got rid of all the wine, threw out all of the Australian crap that your mother liked and replaced it with more palatable French reds. Then you tiled the walls, floor, and ceiling with little, square, white tiles that you got at the Home Depot before the owner got caught running a kiddie porno ring and had to shut the store down and sell the land to pay off all the neighborhood parents; you thought he was a nice guy, but you only ever got candy from him on Halloween and never talked to him other than that.
Now the laboratory has white fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling, the barrel with mother’s body in it is set into the floor and covered with a plate of tiles that looks just like the rest of the floor. Then there’s your metal table where you do most of your work, making your video tape. It used to be messy, and you weren’t making much progress until you realized that the cutting worked much better if you kept mother rock hard. The cutting took more time, but if you were patient you found that you could make precise, film-thin slices that would have impressed even Tyler Florence. You still think that he’s cute, but he’s been eating too much of his own food, probably.
Getting the right edging stuff for your videotape was a lot trickier than you thought it might be, especially because of how large your frames needed to be. But you’re bright, you figured it out--you bought a lot of cans of thrown-out film and cut out the pictures--mostly porn, nothing you’re interested in; you could probably sell it by the slide to the neighborhood boys and make a fortune, or you would if it weren’t for the internet--and then mounted your frames in between the edges after you backed each with a thin sheet of plastic and glue to keep everything in place.
It’s hard to tell how much time you’ve spent working in your laboratory on your magnum opus, but it must have been a long time. Every day you spend hours with a ceramic knife, cutting mother into the thinnest of sheets to make into your videotape. You started with mother’s left arm, a few years ago, and finished the whole thing last May, now you’re working on her left leg, to mix things up and keep yourself from getting bored. Her whole body is as solid as a block of granite, so you had to get a power saw to chop her leg off, and now you keep pouring liquid nitrogen on it as you work to keep everything solid and make it easier to cut thinly and cleanly. It’s a good thing that mother lost so much weight when she had cancer, or her thighs would be too thick to fit in your frames; they’re already too big for a normal videotape, but you’ve figured you can break the rules a little. Most videotapes aren’t deep tissue explorations of murdered mothers kept on ice in a retrofitted wine cellar, either.
Your first videotape, the one of mother’s left arm, turned out nicely, you think; you rigged up an old movie projector and watched it, and the picture quality was a bit fuzzy, and you could tell where you didn’t cut through her wrist bones very cleanly, but you got the idea across, at least. It starts at the tips of her fingers, and then the cross sections whiz by and you gradually progress all the way up her arms, watching where her bones and veins and skin shift and dance around as the film rolls. You think that she’s the most animated dead person you’ve ever met, as a joke to yourself. You thought it was clever once, at least.
This morning you woke up and wondered whether you saw the same colors as everyone else. Perhaps what you thought was yellow looked red to Albert or purple to Jane, but you all called it “yellow” for convenience. Perhaps your boss, Ernie, sees green fire. He’s probably crazy enough. You wonder what color your mother thought your hair was; you call it “auburn”, but maybe that doesn’t mean anything beyond pure semantics. Thinking of your mother makes you angry, but only for a little while. You remind yourself of the video tape that you’re making, and you start to feel better. She may have ruined your childhood, but you can’t let that worry you; after you stirred up her brains with a power drill, you don’t worry too much about what mother used to do to you.
Instead of coffee, you drink orange juice today, and feel better than normal. Like you got an extra few hours of sleep, or passed the night without any odd dreams of aliens and videotapes to keep you from truly recouping energy you lost on your magnum opus. So you’re feeling rejuvenated, and you go to work with the idea planted in your cerebellum that maybe you’ll do something interesting, perhaps some whack in Nevada will call you and say that they saw an alien disembowel their dog. And you’ll ask them whether they actually saw the dog being disemboweled, and no, no they didn’t actually see it, but what else could have done that? A chupacabra? No, that would be stupid--everyone knew those didn’t exist. So you’d ask if they had kids, or if there were any kids nearby in the neighborhood, and of course there would be, and you would chuckle and inform them that they might want to have a stern conversation with little Jimmy about how to treat animals.
That happened once, and Ernie had almost fired you, but had to admit that it was pretty funny and you got to keep working the in office. Jane never liked you much after that; she was convinced that it had been an alien, but Ernie hadn’t let her file a report about it. He trusted your judgment, and Jane resented you for that. Nothing interesting happened today, at least not with the crazy people who called the office; all of those calls were rather pedestrian--someone saw a weird light in the sky and you explained that it was probably an airplane, or maybe a shooting star. A boy had heard something tapping at his window for the last week and his parents wouldn’t believe that he was seeing girl or maybe even another boy, but you were pretty sure that’s what was going on.
There was a new guy working in the office; he was a replacement for Bill, who had died at seventy-eight a month ago. He was cute and his name was Mark and you talked to him a little and kept all your weight on your right leg because you were nervous at forgot that it made your knee hurt to put all your weight on one leg for a long time. You made him laugh a little and he asked if he could eat with you and Jane and Albert tomorrow and of course you told him that he could.
So that night you tried to work on your videotape, but you couldn’t focus because you kept thinking about Mark, and then your mother, and you had such a hard time keeping the two of them separate that you mixed up all of your thoughts and got confused and angry and sad all at the same time. You ended up remembering too much about mother and that just made you more angry. It felt like she was standing over your shoulder, reminding you that you were ugly and stupid and worthless and if you kept hanging out with Ernie you’d end up being a stupid, pregnant, good-for-nothing waste and she’d be damned if she let her daughter turn out like that. She had been standing over your shoulder just like that when you had to call Ernie and tell him that you couldn’t hang out with him any more, and it almost hurt worse that he didn’t really care, and that he had better, prettier girls to be around, and he thought you were a stupid bitch. Mother heard all of that and agreed with you, so you tried to punch her and she had caught your wrist like her hand was a bear-trap, and then she slapped you and she might as well have taken a bunch of needles and ripped open your cheek.
And that made you think that maybe Mark would be like Ernie, and maybe you shouldn’t even try to be nice around him. But that would be doing just what mother said--that you were useless, a coward. No, you’d go to lunch with him tomorrow and try to forget that you had mixed up what you thought about him with what you thought about your mother. You spent a long time trying to sort that out, but something about him reminded you of mother, or what mother used to be like, before she became a bitch. It was strange, and you couldn’t quite figure it out, so you went to sleep.
The next morning you spent an extra ten minute in front a mirror in your bathroom, admiring your figure and trying to judge what clothes made you look the best. Your hips were nice, you thought, but your boobs were a little small, though it wasn’t like you were flat. You had a nice face, which was the most important, you decided, and so you added a little makeup to make your eyes look nicer. You wore a blouse instead of a sweatshirt, but you decided to stick with the jeans that you usually wore, in case somebody wondered why you were all dressed up.
Lunch with Mark was nice, and you talked to him the whole time and made Jane and Albert feel a little out of place, though they did the same thing to you a year ago when they went out for a few weeks. And when lunch was done you felt lighter than you had since before mother had started to yell at you all the time, and you walked next to mark and kept talking to him and admired the way that the sun crawled up his hair and out over his eyes.
“Have you ever wondered whether we all see the same things,” you asked him as you walked, and he looked at you a little nonplused, so you elaborated for him, “You know, like maybe I see a car I I say ‘That car is blue’, but you see the same car and it looks to you what the color ‘green’ looks like to me, but you’ve been taught that color was called ‘blue’, even thought I would call it ‘green’...” You bit your lip because you knew that you were rambling and not making any sense and now he probably thought you were weird and you’d gone and ruined everything.
But Mark just laughed and nodded and said that Yes, he’d thought about the same thing a lot, especially when he was younger, but he hadn’t really had a hole lot of time to think about things like that lately, but it certainly was interesting.
You exploded into a smile and skipped a few paces as you walked back to work and thought for a minute that you might be in love. But then you thought of your mother and got angry again and wondered briefly what it would be like to stick a drill into Mark’s skull. You felt bad, thinking like that; it wasn’t nice, but you were still curious, in an angry sort of way.
A few days later you asked Mark to come and watch a movie at your house and he said Oh, that would be fun, when should I come over? And you floundered for a bit because you hadn’t expected him to accept the offer, but you got your words back under you and managed to say that seven o’clock ought to be a good time, and that you would make pizza if he wanted, or he could eat before he came over, it didn’t really matter.
So you went home from work and were so nervous that you could hardly hold the brush to paint your nails and had to give up because you were just going to get polish all over your fingers and then they would look bloody and Mark wouldn’t like that. And you kept looking at the knives and thinking about them and what you were doing down in your laboratory, working on your videotape, and you wondered whether you would ever be able to show your videotape to Mark, but of course you wouldn’t, not even if you got married, because people go to jail for things like that. So you tried to think about the knives instead, but then you started taking them out and holding them, just feeling their weight in your hand and you got scared that you might use them, so you put them away. It was already past five and you were terrified that you would be a nervous wreck, and all the time your nerves were building up and up and up on one another in a feedback cycle that you had to break before you had a breakdown, so you went down to your laboratory.
You were almost done slicing up mother’s leg and had already started to mount some of the frames because the only bits left were the knee and they were the hardest to cut through and you weren’t sure you were strong enough to get the knife through all of the bone. But you worked on it and kept an eye on your watch because in half an hour you would need to shower and get ready so that you wouldn’t smell like mother and nitrogen and knives with rotting blood on them. Cutting away, you almost got a good, thin slice off, but then your mind wandered and you thought about sticking your tongue in Mark’s mouth and holding him so tightly to you, and then your knife slid off of mother’s kneecap and took a chunk out of your thumb.
In a whirl of blood and curses you wrapped your thumb up in a rag you used to clean up whenever mother leaked, and you put her and the frames away in the barrel of nitrogen and headed upstairs to patch up your thumb and shower, and before you hardly knew it, Mark was knocking at the door because it was dark and time for him to be meeting you.
Though your nerves weren’t really any better, you had put a pink BandAid on your finger, and that made you feel a bit better, a bit silly. But you had the courage to open the door and smile and welcome him in, and for a moment you forgot all about the pizza and what movie you were supposed to be watching because he was smiling.
“Oh hi, make yourself comfortable,” you said like a robot, but Mark didn’t seem to notice and you drew in a shaky breath and headed back to the kitchen to cut the pizza and put it in the oven. Mark was talking to you, about nothing important, from the living room while you made the pizza, and you were so scared that you might screw something up, with the pizza or the conversation. You were never that good at multitasking.
Somehow you managed to get the pizza into the oven, but as you were going to put the knife away, something funny happened: you couldn’t let go of it, no matter how hard you tried. The knife just stuck in your hand like it was happy to be there and your mind raced like a rabbit chased by a dog, running round and round a fenced enclosure until its heart went pop and it fell over dead. You had seen a rabbit do that once, and you wondered whether your heart would pop. But it was Mark that was making you so nervous, and maybe if you just popped his heart with the knife, everything would be better. Mother was certainly much nicer frozen solid that she ever had been when she would never let you out of the house, never let you talk to boys, never do anything but learn to cook and sew--and neither of them very well. You stood there for a long time with the knife in your hand while your mouth kept talking to Mark without your brain paying attention to what you were saying.
You certainly liked Mark a lot, but you had liked your mother once too, and that was the problem. You were never sure why she had become such a bitch, but she had, and it hurt, and then you hadn’t had any choice but to stick the drill in her head while she was sleeping, because she hadn’t been feeding you much any more, and she never let you out of the house, not in the last month at least. Mark could turn out just the same. He scared you as much as she did, but not in the same way. And that’s how you managed to put the knife down. He scared you because he liked you, and you liked him; mother had only started to scare you after she stopped liking you. So you put the knife down and hopped over the couch and sat next to Mark and ruffled his hair a little as the movie started, and you had a good time while he was over and you were a little sad to see him go, but at least you weren’t terrified any more.
And when he finally was leaving, he said, “I think you were right, about the colors. But I don’t think it’s a bad thing.”
And of course you agreed, No, no, it wasn’t a bad thing at all to be a little mixed up about things like that.”
“Not mixed up,” he said, “just a different perspective.” And he smiled and you hugged him suddenly when he was half turned to leave and you both laughed and said goodnight and you felt the best you had as long as you could remember.
You were so excited that you couldn’t sleep, so you sat in your laboratory, piecing together your videotape and humming to yourself. Mother didn’t seem to mind the music.
~Sam McLaughlin
You tell yourself that you’re not crazy, and most days you believe yourself. Your days aren’t really that interesting, or at least you don’t think they are: you wake up, toast a bagel while your coffee dripdripdrips into your mug, and then you’re off to work--an agency that files away reports about UFOs. Most of the people there really are crazy, and compared to them, you feel pretty good about yourself. The only thing that bothers you is that you’ve never been sure whether you were hired by the government or Ernie, the nutjob who runs the office. He hired you, of course, but a lot of the things you signed were all official looking, and maybe you’re really looking for the government and don’t know it yet. Or that’s the lie that you tell yourself to make your job seem more interesting. Usually you eat lunch with Albert and Jane at the Sushi Mart across the parking lot from the little mousetrap office that you work in. Actually, you think of your office as an ant motel because it looks like the ant motel traps, but Albert calls it a mousetrap and you don’t think that arguing with him is worth your time because he’s rather stupid.
Anyway, that’s the boring part of your day. After you get done answering calls from crazy people and writing down stupid reports about the things that they saw in the sky--usually airplanes, you imagine, but never tell anyone this--and pretending to care about the crazy things that you hear about with the crazy people that you work with, after all that you drive home across the desert past the roll-polly balls of weeds and dead animal stuff and work on making your videotape. It’s your pride and joy, though you like to think of it as your magnum opus, because if you’re going to be cliché, you may as well be fancy about it.
You close all your doors and lock them, but you leave your blinds open because the neighbors might wonder what you’re up to if you button up the house every day as soon as you get home from work. Then you turn on the TV in your bedroom and leave it blaring nonsense while you go down into your basement and through the little trapdoor hidden underneath a chest that you cut the bottom out of. Under that is your wine cellar, or it was a wine cellar when you used to live in the house with your mother, when you were a little girl. Now it’s your laboratory, and you make sure to pronounce all the syllables because you think that pretentious-sounding words are amusing.
After you killed your mother, you stuck her body in a barrel that you filled up with liquid nitrogen and insulated with styrofoam that you duct-taped together to keep the cold in. More importantly, you started remodeling the wine cellar and turned it into your laboratory. First you got rid of all the wine, threw out all of the Australian crap that your mother liked and replaced it with more palatable French reds. Then you tiled the walls, floor, and ceiling with little, square, white tiles that you got at the Home Depot before the owner got caught running a kiddie porno ring and had to shut the store down and sell the land to pay off all the neighborhood parents; you thought he was a nice guy, but you only ever got candy from him on Halloween and never talked to him other than that.
Now the laboratory has white fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling, the barrel with mother’s body in it is set into the floor and covered with a plate of tiles that looks just like the rest of the floor. Then there’s your metal table where you do most of your work, making your video tape. It used to be messy, and you weren’t making much progress until you realized that the cutting worked much better if you kept mother rock hard. The cutting took more time, but if you were patient you found that you could make precise, film-thin slices that would have impressed even Tyler Florence. You still think that he’s cute, but he’s been eating too much of his own food, probably.
Getting the right edging stuff for your videotape was a lot trickier than you thought it might be, especially because of how large your frames needed to be. But you’re bright, you figured it out--you bought a lot of cans of thrown-out film and cut out the pictures--mostly porn, nothing you’re interested in; you could probably sell it by the slide to the neighborhood boys and make a fortune, or you would if it weren’t for the internet--and then mounted your frames in between the edges after you backed each with a thin sheet of plastic and glue to keep everything in place.
It’s hard to tell how much time you’ve spent working in your laboratory on your magnum opus, but it must have been a long time. Every day you spend hours with a ceramic knife, cutting mother into the thinnest of sheets to make into your videotape. You started with mother’s left arm, a few years ago, and finished the whole thing last May, now you’re working on her left leg, to mix things up and keep yourself from getting bored. Her whole body is as solid as a block of granite, so you had to get a power saw to chop her leg off, and now you keep pouring liquid nitrogen on it as you work to keep everything solid and make it easier to cut thinly and cleanly. It’s a good thing that mother lost so much weight when she had cancer, or her thighs would be too thick to fit in your frames; they’re already too big for a normal videotape, but you’ve figured you can break the rules a little. Most videotapes aren’t deep tissue explorations of murdered mothers kept on ice in a retrofitted wine cellar, either.
Your first videotape, the one of mother’s left arm, turned out nicely, you think; you rigged up an old movie projector and watched it, and the picture quality was a bit fuzzy, and you could tell where you didn’t cut through her wrist bones very cleanly, but you got the idea across, at least. It starts at the tips of her fingers, and then the cross sections whiz by and you gradually progress all the way up her arms, watching where her bones and veins and skin shift and dance around as the film rolls. You think that she’s the most animated dead person you’ve ever met, as a joke to yourself. You thought it was clever once, at least.
This morning you woke up and wondered whether you saw the same colors as everyone else. Perhaps what you thought was yellow looked red to Albert or purple to Jane, but you all called it “yellow” for convenience. Perhaps your boss, Ernie, sees green fire. He’s probably crazy enough. You wonder what color your mother thought your hair was; you call it “auburn”, but maybe that doesn’t mean anything beyond pure semantics. Thinking of your mother makes you angry, but only for a little while. You remind yourself of the video tape that you’re making, and you start to feel better. She may have ruined your childhood, but you can’t let that worry you; after you stirred up her brains with a power drill, you don’t worry too much about what mother used to do to you.
Instead of coffee, you drink orange juice today, and feel better than normal. Like you got an extra few hours of sleep, or passed the night without any odd dreams of aliens and videotapes to keep you from truly recouping energy you lost on your magnum opus. So you’re feeling rejuvenated, and you go to work with the idea planted in your cerebellum that maybe you’ll do something interesting, perhaps some whack in Nevada will call you and say that they saw an alien disembowel their dog. And you’ll ask them whether they actually saw the dog being disemboweled, and no, no they didn’t actually see it, but what else could have done that? A chupacabra? No, that would be stupid--everyone knew those didn’t exist. So you’d ask if they had kids, or if there were any kids nearby in the neighborhood, and of course there would be, and you would chuckle and inform them that they might want to have a stern conversation with little Jimmy about how to treat animals.
That happened once, and Ernie had almost fired you, but had to admit that it was pretty funny and you got to keep working the in office. Jane never liked you much after that; she was convinced that it had been an alien, but Ernie hadn’t let her file a report about it. He trusted your judgment, and Jane resented you for that. Nothing interesting happened today, at least not with the crazy people who called the office; all of those calls were rather pedestrian--someone saw a weird light in the sky and you explained that it was probably an airplane, or maybe a shooting star. A boy had heard something tapping at his window for the last week and his parents wouldn’t believe that he was seeing girl or maybe even another boy, but you were pretty sure that’s what was going on.
There was a new guy working in the office; he was a replacement for Bill, who had died at seventy-eight a month ago. He was cute and his name was Mark and you talked to him a little and kept all your weight on your right leg because you were nervous at forgot that it made your knee hurt to put all your weight on one leg for a long time. You made him laugh a little and he asked if he could eat with you and Jane and Albert tomorrow and of course you told him that he could.
So that night you tried to work on your videotape, but you couldn’t focus because you kept thinking about Mark, and then your mother, and you had such a hard time keeping the two of them separate that you mixed up all of your thoughts and got confused and angry and sad all at the same time. You ended up remembering too much about mother and that just made you more angry. It felt like she was standing over your shoulder, reminding you that you were ugly and stupid and worthless and if you kept hanging out with Ernie you’d end up being a stupid, pregnant, good-for-nothing waste and she’d be damned if she let her daughter turn out like that. She had been standing over your shoulder just like that when you had to call Ernie and tell him that you couldn’t hang out with him any more, and it almost hurt worse that he didn’t really care, and that he had better, prettier girls to be around, and he thought you were a stupid bitch. Mother heard all of that and agreed with you, so you tried to punch her and she had caught your wrist like her hand was a bear-trap, and then she slapped you and she might as well have taken a bunch of needles and ripped open your cheek.
And that made you think that maybe Mark would be like Ernie, and maybe you shouldn’t even try to be nice around him. But that would be doing just what mother said--that you were useless, a coward. No, you’d go to lunch with him tomorrow and try to forget that you had mixed up what you thought about him with what you thought about your mother. You spent a long time trying to sort that out, but something about him reminded you of mother, or what mother used to be like, before she became a bitch. It was strange, and you couldn’t quite figure it out, so you went to sleep.
The next morning you spent an extra ten minute in front a mirror in your bathroom, admiring your figure and trying to judge what clothes made you look the best. Your hips were nice, you thought, but your boobs were a little small, though it wasn’t like you were flat. You had a nice face, which was the most important, you decided, and so you added a little makeup to make your eyes look nicer. You wore a blouse instead of a sweatshirt, but you decided to stick with the jeans that you usually wore, in case somebody wondered why you were all dressed up.
Lunch with Mark was nice, and you talked to him the whole time and made Jane and Albert feel a little out of place, though they did the same thing to you a year ago when they went out for a few weeks. And when lunch was done you felt lighter than you had since before mother had started to yell at you all the time, and you walked next to mark and kept talking to him and admired the way that the sun crawled up his hair and out over his eyes.
“Have you ever wondered whether we all see the same things,” you asked him as you walked, and he looked at you a little nonplused, so you elaborated for him, “You know, like maybe I see a car I I say ‘That car is blue’, but you see the same car and it looks to you what the color ‘green’ looks like to me, but you’ve been taught that color was called ‘blue’, even thought I would call it ‘green’...” You bit your lip because you knew that you were rambling and not making any sense and now he probably thought you were weird and you’d gone and ruined everything.
But Mark just laughed and nodded and said that Yes, he’d thought about the same thing a lot, especially when he was younger, but he hadn’t really had a hole lot of time to think about things like that lately, but it certainly was interesting.
You exploded into a smile and skipped a few paces as you walked back to work and thought for a minute that you might be in love. But then you thought of your mother and got angry again and wondered briefly what it would be like to stick a drill into Mark’s skull. You felt bad, thinking like that; it wasn’t nice, but you were still curious, in an angry sort of way.
A few days later you asked Mark to come and watch a movie at your house and he said Oh, that would be fun, when should I come over? And you floundered for a bit because you hadn’t expected him to accept the offer, but you got your words back under you and managed to say that seven o’clock ought to be a good time, and that you would make pizza if he wanted, or he could eat before he came over, it didn’t really matter.
So you went home from work and were so nervous that you could hardly hold the brush to paint your nails and had to give up because you were just going to get polish all over your fingers and then they would look bloody and Mark wouldn’t like that. And you kept looking at the knives and thinking about them and what you were doing down in your laboratory, working on your videotape, and you wondered whether you would ever be able to show your videotape to Mark, but of course you wouldn’t, not even if you got married, because people go to jail for things like that. So you tried to think about the knives instead, but then you started taking them out and holding them, just feeling their weight in your hand and you got scared that you might use them, so you put them away. It was already past five and you were terrified that you would be a nervous wreck, and all the time your nerves were building up and up and up on one another in a feedback cycle that you had to break before you had a breakdown, so you went down to your laboratory.
You were almost done slicing up mother’s leg and had already started to mount some of the frames because the only bits left were the knee and they were the hardest to cut through and you weren’t sure you were strong enough to get the knife through all of the bone. But you worked on it and kept an eye on your watch because in half an hour you would need to shower and get ready so that you wouldn’t smell like mother and nitrogen and knives with rotting blood on them. Cutting away, you almost got a good, thin slice off, but then your mind wandered and you thought about sticking your tongue in Mark’s mouth and holding him so tightly to you, and then your knife slid off of mother’s kneecap and took a chunk out of your thumb.
In a whirl of blood and curses you wrapped your thumb up in a rag you used to clean up whenever mother leaked, and you put her and the frames away in the barrel of nitrogen and headed upstairs to patch up your thumb and shower, and before you hardly knew it, Mark was knocking at the door because it was dark and time for him to be meeting you.
Though your nerves weren’t really any better, you had put a pink BandAid on your finger, and that made you feel a bit better, a bit silly. But you had the courage to open the door and smile and welcome him in, and for a moment you forgot all about the pizza and what movie you were supposed to be watching because he was smiling.
“Oh hi, make yourself comfortable,” you said like a robot, but Mark didn’t seem to notice and you drew in a shaky breath and headed back to the kitchen to cut the pizza and put it in the oven. Mark was talking to you, about nothing important, from the living room while you made the pizza, and you were so scared that you might screw something up, with the pizza or the conversation. You were never that good at multitasking.
Somehow you managed to get the pizza into the oven, but as you were going to put the knife away, something funny happened: you couldn’t let go of it, no matter how hard you tried. The knife just stuck in your hand like it was happy to be there and your mind raced like a rabbit chased by a dog, running round and round a fenced enclosure until its heart went pop and it fell over dead. You had seen a rabbit do that once, and you wondered whether your heart would pop. But it was Mark that was making you so nervous, and maybe if you just popped his heart with the knife, everything would be better. Mother was certainly much nicer frozen solid that she ever had been when she would never let you out of the house, never let you talk to boys, never do anything but learn to cook and sew--and neither of them very well. You stood there for a long time with the knife in your hand while your mouth kept talking to Mark without your brain paying attention to what you were saying.
You certainly liked Mark a lot, but you had liked your mother once too, and that was the problem. You were never sure why she had become such a bitch, but she had, and it hurt, and then you hadn’t had any choice but to stick the drill in her head while she was sleeping, because she hadn’t been feeding you much any more, and she never let you out of the house, not in the last month at least. Mark could turn out just the same. He scared you as much as she did, but not in the same way. And that’s how you managed to put the knife down. He scared you because he liked you, and you liked him; mother had only started to scare you after she stopped liking you. So you put the knife down and hopped over the couch and sat next to Mark and ruffled his hair a little as the movie started, and you had a good time while he was over and you were a little sad to see him go, but at least you weren’t terrified any more.
And when he finally was leaving, he said, “I think you were right, about the colors. But I don’t think it’s a bad thing.”
And of course you agreed, No, no, it wasn’t a bad thing at all to be a little mixed up about things like that.”
“Not mixed up,” he said, “just a different perspective.” And he smiled and you hugged him suddenly when he was half turned to leave and you both laughed and said goodnight and you felt the best you had as long as you could remember.
You were so excited that you couldn’t sleep, so you sat in your laboratory, piecing together your videotape and humming to yourself. Mother didn’t seem to mind the music.
~Sam McLaughlin
Friday, November 7, 2008
On Icarus's Flight
I was bored at school one day (are we sensing a theme here?)
I don't even like this that much. I just miss workshopping.
As Summer’s humidity fades to Winter’s harsh rain,
your eyes gain that melancholic lust,
and your cheeks stain red.
Synthetic energy feeds your lethargy,
night turning to morning and morning to night,
You are the living dead,
drowning in black shirts and skinny jeans,
God, if I could have your woman’s waist,
those stick thighs.
I forget their price;
I cannot pay.
As Bone pervades your soul,
lines will mark this face.
Truth disappears behind contused lies;
you will be Broken
the rest of your life.
And however hard I may try
I cannot glue a broken record,
have it sing like it did before.
The blackness is what you have in common;
your eyes no longer look like mine,
you are not my mistaken brother,
I wish it was your ankle that was sprained,
not your organs.
Your Icarus demise was all I could bear,
romance the pain, woo disaster,
idolize
Disease.
When a porcelain bowl falls, it cracks,
falls too many time and it breaks.
For every word you utter this
bowl shatters.
To forgive myself, I must forgive you
for your indiscretions, your loneliness,
You do not want to be lonely with me.
Red wine cannot be scrubbed from a white tablecloth,
nor can the grape juice of our shared childhood.
This time I am stronger;
next time you fall,
I will not plunge with you.
I don't even like this that much. I just miss workshopping.
As Summer’s humidity fades to Winter’s harsh rain,
your eyes gain that melancholic lust,
and your cheeks stain red.
Synthetic energy feeds your lethargy,
night turning to morning and morning to night,
You are the living dead,
drowning in black shirts and skinny jeans,
God, if I could have your woman’s waist,
those stick thighs.
I forget their price;
I cannot pay.
As Bone pervades your soul,
lines will mark this face.
Truth disappears behind contused lies;
you will be Broken
the rest of your life.
And however hard I may try
I cannot glue a broken record,
have it sing like it did before.
The blackness is what you have in common;
your eyes no longer look like mine,
you are not my mistaken brother,
I wish it was your ankle that was sprained,
not your organs.
Your Icarus demise was all I could bear,
romance the pain, woo disaster,
idolize
Disease.
When a porcelain bowl falls, it cracks,
falls too many time and it breaks.
For every word you utter this
bowl shatters.
To forgive myself, I must forgive you
for your indiscretions, your loneliness,
You do not want to be lonely with me.
Red wine cannot be scrubbed from a white tablecloth,
nor can the grape juice of our shared childhood.
This time I am stronger;
next time you fall,
I will not plunge with you.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
So I was bored in English class...
Like Workshop
We're fish on a wire,
scaly minds laid open to the sun
poked and prodded by fingers and
punctured by gutting knives.
Let's explore these folds of scales and gills and bones,
strip away the ribs and the rest of the viscera,
leaving muscle-made-flesh:
a fillet, worthy of exposure to the world--
edible, if nothing else.
We're fish on a wire,
scaly minds laid open to the sun
poked and prodded by fingers and
punctured by gutting knives.
Let's explore these folds of scales and gills and bones,
strip away the ribs and the rest of the viscera,
leaving muscle-made-flesh:
a fillet, worthy of exposure to the world--
edible, if nothing else.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Some Haikus, too
It seems that you all
have written many haikus
I feel I must join
I worry sometimes
I’ll marry someone pretty
Who’s really from space
I had too much sex
And all the pills were too small
So play some Bach, dear
My Haiku Dissents
From common prose and low thoughts
But transcends nothing
I spent a weekend
In Tijuana, with Mike
Only I came back
Once upon a time
There was a prudish princess
who died a virgin
A wolf ate my hand
But the joke’s really on him
I (was) ambidextrous
Am I the only one
Who worries constantly that
His zipper’s come down?
Haiku?
My runny nose and
A pumpkin smashed on the street;
Halloween next week.
That's really all I've got right now. It's been one of those non-writing weeks.
A pumpkin smashed on the street;
Halloween next week.
That's really all I've got right now. It's been one of those non-writing weeks.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Yay Terra (!)
I'll resist the urge to flood this with the gazillions of terrible haikus that I write when I'm monstrously bored in AP Bio...
(inspired by Charles' affection for his own moleskine)
A little knot of leather
black and white and grand all over.
Molly dearest is a darling dear
of paper and cords and the fine skin of moles.
With tender threads that bind and twine
and labial parchment folds,
she embraces words and thoughts and whims,
an orderly orgy of the intellect
and soul.
And now some (horrible) haikus:
Dams and locks shatter
a lonely table floats by
Silt ensnares a town
The Paris Commune
[Retrograde Revolution
(Reactionary Life)]
Nice decomposers
munching on your grandma's face;
to make an omelet...
(I'm sorry about that, really...)
On Rereading Things Written Some 2-3 Years Ago
First: Bemused
Pretend you stroll home and find
a platoon of midget goons in wizard hats
partying on your lawn and one
hands you a rubber duck.
Second: Embarrassed
Like showing up to school in hookers boots
but worse.
Third: Grave(digger)
Up to my armpits in slop
and earth and dirt and
I can't tell where my work
stops and the shit starts,
but I'll have it all buried soon.
(And lastly, a little snippet that is growing into something bigger)
We are Orion,
nailed to the sky,
revolving 'round the telephone poles
punched through our eyes.
Plated in clouds and agony,
we writhe as we remember tomorrow:
(inspired by Charles' affection for his own moleskine)
A little knot of leather
black and white and grand all over.
Molly dearest is a darling dear
of paper and cords and the fine skin of moles.
With tender threads that bind and twine
and labial parchment folds,
she embraces words and thoughts and whims,
an orderly orgy of the intellect
and soul.
And now some (horrible) haikus:
Dams and locks shatter
a lonely table floats by
Silt ensnares a town
The Paris Commune
[Retrograde Revolution
(Reactionary Life)]
Nice decomposers
munching on your grandma's face;
to make an omelet...
(I'm sorry about that, really...)
On Rereading Things Written Some 2-3 Years Ago
First: Bemused
Pretend you stroll home and find
a platoon of midget goons in wizard hats
partying on your lawn and one
hands you a rubber duck.
Second: Embarrassed
Like showing up to school in hookers boots
but worse.
Third: Grave(digger)
Up to my armpits in slop
and earth and dirt and
I can't tell where my work
stops and the shit starts,
but I'll have it all buried soon.
(And lastly, a little snippet that is growing into something bigger)
We are Orion,
nailed to the sky,
revolving 'round the telephone poles
punched through our eyes.
Plated in clouds and agony,
we writhe as we remember tomorrow:
Welcome!
We've been due to make something like this for a while now... Hopefully, now that we're all well settled into school and [seniors] getting those applications out of the way, there'll be more time for writing and keeping in touch.
I can add anyone with a gmail account to be able to post on here, so just let me know if you want to be added.
-Jane
P.S. Kaitlin, I resisted the urge to use exclamation points so many times in this brief post, just for you.
I can add anyone with a gmail account to be able to post on here, so just let me know if you want to be added.
-Jane
P.S. Kaitlin, I resisted the urge to use exclamation points so many times in this brief post, just for you.
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