Flypaper

It was the end of a long day and an even longer series of regrettable life decisions. But after it was done, all the terror gone and nothing but purpose ahead, there was a sense of renewal, of things actually going right for me for a change.

I was sick of coming home to an apartment she treated like a landfill. The toilet had unscrubbable stains of feces sprayed on the upper porcelain rim from too much French fries and vodka, coffee and cigarettes – vasoconstriction causing the smooth muscle to spasm the partially digested chyme rushed through the lower intestine. Cunnilingus made me nauseas at the thought. Sex was an activity we didn’t bother with anymore at that point, along with sweeping the floor or washing the dishes. I think about it now and it had started so many months before, almost all the way back to the first day we met. But it wasn’t that far that I can say when I noticed what a terrible person she truly was on the inside.

It should have been obvious to me. Her grooming habits left something to be desired. I can’t really talk though. My hygiene of late hasn’t been very prim. I’d like to blame that bit on picking up those habits of hers that I couldn’t stand but put up with so long as she put out. Things like how she never trimmed her toenails, only painted them, the paint was always flaking. How she had a fear of rats but never did the dishes, just left out plates of half-eaten sandwiches or three-quarters of a pot of pasta on the stove for days. Or how I had to avoid knocking over all the plastic cups with paintbrushes left on tabletops, bookcase shelves, the back of the toilet, the top of the radiator, next to the alarm clock. It was living with a five-year-old who’d discovered finger paints. Everything had a smudge of color in acrylic on it.

Maybe it wasn’t even her. Maybe it was the dog that belonged to someone in the building being let out to shit in the hall. It left me to wonder each time I opened the door if I was stepping out of one world of shit into another. Maybe it was the broken lock on the front of the building that I needing to bang loud enough on the door to wake the super. Maybe it wasn’t even the apartment but the job. Each early morning that I came home early from a graveyard shift, no one would be awake. It would be too late to catch anyone heading in to go to bed or coming home from a bar. It might have even been the pipes bursting in the middle of the night when I was in desperate need of a shower. The fire department hammering the lock off of the cellar doors – the echo like a gavel handing down the sentence of insomnia – in order to turn off the water at the main.

Or maybe just the coppery note of blood spurting from the femoral artery of a gunshot wound filling my nose.

The super wasn’t in his apartment. He was at a funeral. I had just gotten in from the C shift. Light came up early that time of the year, and the noise from the firemen woke her up.

            “What have you done about the flies, Love?” Desdemona asked in that lilted British accent. It didn’t seem to matter if it was a question or a statement, it always sounded like a rhetorical one, somehow passing judgment on the listener to which it was directed. “I’ve been bitten every bloody time I sit still for more than five seconds.”

            She sat at the kitchen table we found in a side alley sipping coffee she’d left out for at least a day. She lit a cigarette.

            “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. I put up the flypaper strips over the windows, the sink, the stove, the trash…”

She rolled her eyes as she ashed the spent embers into one of the paintbrush cups sitting on the table. Her skin glistened in the late August heat. The city was hazy outside, each exhale of burning dried tobacco filled the apartment’s stagnant air with an acrid scent. I took one from the pack she had set on the table. She looked at me annoyed.

“I’m almost out, do you have to smoke mine?” she asked. “Don’t you have any of your own?”

I put it back like a scolded child and went to the bedroom to try and sleep, knowing full well that if the heat didn’t keep me awake, the buzzing of the flies or the drumming bass from the Latin music at full volume in an adjacent apartment would. Maybe it was pity sex, or her libido was revved up from the thought of firemen, but she came in soon after I lay down to sleep. After she fucked me, she went back to the kitchen and smoked another cigarette.

            That’s how it went for the first month. Stifling heat day and night causing us to soak the sheets in sweat. We shared a bed most nights, but sometimes it was too much and I had to go up to the roof with a blanket and bug spray. Sometimes it rained. We couldn’t afford the cost of the electricity that air conditioning would have eaten up. But she insisted on having a fan in the window in the tiny room we shared to keep her cool. Laying there, she blocked the flow of the breeze from my dampened skin. Her body heat filled the air next to me. A twin size bed was all that would fit in the bedroom.

“Flies don’t eat live flesh. They don’t bite. Horseflies, yes. But houseflies? No. They only go after the rotting flesh,” my friend Nando told me after relating the story to him. We sat outside a café by the hospital where I worked. A cute place with a cuter cashier.

“You know,” he said. “You should already know this being a nurse and all, the whole thing about maggots…”

            “What about maggots?” I asked.

            “I don’t know if they still do it, but they used to.”

“Used to what? Jesus, just get to the point. You always blather on without getting to the damn point.”

            Nando had a tendency to do this. Ever since we met in college, he liked to spout facts useful only to medics and quiz show contestants.

“Sorry…” he continued. “The maggots, back in the middle ages, or Civil War, or whenever, they used to use them on – Civil War, definitely…”

“Jesus, you’re like Dustin fucking Hoffman,” I said. I was irritable to say the least. The lack of sleep and ineffectuality of coffee had me on edge a lot. It could have also been the fact that I was jealous of Nando for already being in his residency while I had to drop out and taking a nursing job to pay for Desdamona’s aspirations.

“Sorry, sorry. It was Civil War, soldiers whose limbs were going gangrene, the doctors would put maggots on the wounds to eat away the dead flesh and keep the infection from spreading.”

            “They could have just washed their hands in the first place,” I thought. I kept my comment to myself. I looked through the window from the patio where we sat. I saw the cashier singing to herself, the café was empty. She caught me watching, stopped singing and smiled, embarrassed. I smiled back to let her know it was alright, giving her a wink, then realized how creepy that would seem and turned back to my conversation with Nando. He kept talking but I only thought about how carefree the cashier was singing to herself, stopping only when she knew someone was watching.

The hospital had handed down new shift assignments the second month. I had expected to start medical school after the summer ended, but the loan package fell through, so the income from the work I did was all that kept us in that apartment. The shifts I was assigned were graveyard shifts, keeping me up all night with not much time to sleep during the day, if I even could. Latino music echoed off the exposed brick along with all the horns and cat calls that went on during the daylight hours. The bedroom window faced the south and arched around the room throughout the day keeping it hotter than the rest of the apartment. I would have slept in the kitchen, shaded by the other buildings, but every time I tried Desdemona sighed, disapproving of my need to dream.

So it was, in those hot months, that I stole packs of cigarettes from her to smoke outside while filling myself up with enough caffeine to keep me operating. She slept most days, spending all night on my computer or in front of the television. Occasionally she would pick up a paintbrush and put it to canvas.

....To Be Continued?

At the Edge of Forever (Emergence excerpt)

At the edge of forever, he sits apart from his one true love. She sits across the void at the beginning of time. I could have begun by saying once upon a time, but how do you tell a story about people who no longer exist inside of time? No, these two lovers, separated by the matrices of time and space – separate planes to them – discovered a terrible truth about themselves, their love, and the world they promised one another.

His name was Yulee. He was simple boy from a simpler time. His heart was pure and his ambitions humble. He saw the world in black and white and knew nothing of the color of love. That was, until, he met a girl. Her name was Penny. She was a simple girl from that same simple time. She also saw the world in black and white and knew nothing of love until she met him.

It was a day much like the days that preceded it, much as the days that followed were expected to be. The sun snuck from cloud to cloud over the grassy fields of a park. Yulee was collecting stones from a nearby creek. He was fascinated by the roundness of the pebbles he picked up, unaware of the journey they made tumbling towards the ocean as the waters flowed. Penny was picking leaves from trees, fascinated by their varied forms. Some had pointed edges, others round, still others were serrated – appearing round from a distance, but she noticed the points when she wandered closer.

Along the edge of the creek, by a deep furrow the rushing water had carved by the bank, Penny felt an uncontrollable passion in the want to possess a specimen of a tree whose leaves deceived her at a distance. The branches held them just out of reach. Like a child taunting another, the lowest branch stood above the water of the creek. Penny climbed along the trunk, up to the low limb jutting out. She slid her way along the branch above the creek. Her reach was too short as she leaned further and further to pull off a leaf. The dewy moss that found its home in the craggy nooks of the tree bark made her loose her grip and she slid around to the bottom of the branch. She dangled below the limb as her own hoped to hold. She was loosing her grasp with each second and began yelling for help – she did not know how too swim! Too far from the edge of the bank if she fell to make her way back to land, she screamed and screamed.

Yulee had his pockets full of tiny round pebbles. He waded through the shallow parts of the ravine, drawn to the different colors. There were light gray stones, some deeper gray than others, and white ones and black ones. He dipped into the stream and pulled out one that he hadn’t noticed before. It didn’t look like any of the other pebbles he had collected. This one had color. A deep red hue, in perfect roundness, with a vein of blue running the whole way through its center. He held it in his hand and examined it with a severe intensity. It almost made his mind hurt. The sounds of the world faded into the whirling thoughts storming inside his head. He was aware of something, he did not know what. Words failed to describe the wonder in that object he started to feel. And like a sudden gust of wind opening the shutters of a house by the prelude to a storm, a shrill screech broke his concentration and the world reappeared around him.

Penny’s desperate cries for help echoed off the trunks of the trees and hollowed out edges of the creek. Yulee put the red pebble in his pocket and moved towards where he heard the commotion. Around a bend, he came upon Penny, dangling from the limb, her feet dipping into the deep pool below her as her kicking flexed the branch. Yulee trudged along the bank, his feet growing heavy with mud, until he reached the tree. He stood at the base of the tree and looked at her with an awkward smirk. It was the same face he had whilst examining the red pebble.

Penny noticed him as the limb continued to bob with her legs bicycling in the air, a vain attempt to gain traction on something. She yelled at him “Stop smiling and help me!” He snapped out of his daze and told her to stop kicking and stay still. He climbed the trunk with his mud covered feet and weight laden pockets, and scooted along the branch to where she was. He pulled her up, back on the branch where she started. She hugged the dewy, moss covered bark, unable to let go.

He asked why she was up there, and she told him about the leaf. His arms were longer than hers. He decided to make up for the gawking by grabbing the leaf for her. He scooted along the branch some more until he was in reach of the leaf. The bough bent uneasy beneath him. Penny felt the pull of gravity on her body as the limb dipped towards him. She looked up to see his hand holding a green leaf with serrated edges.

“Here you go,” he said, and she took the gift with a sheepish grin.

Just as she was about to thank him, a thunderous crack tore the tree limb between them. It launched her back to the edge of the bank. She landed plum on her bottom, still holding the leaf. She saw his half of the branch floating in the pool, his arms thrashing above his sunken head. The mud and the stones lacking the buoyancy he needed to break back above the surface for air. Penny panicked. She did not know how to swim, was never taught. And now this stranger, who had risked his life for helping her, and getting her that coveted leaf, was not waving but drowning!

She left the leaf on the knoll by the base of the tree where she landed and jumped to where the broken branch floated. She held tight to it, pushing off the edge of the bank to where Yulee started to stop flailing. She saw bubbles as his arms dipped into the murky water, all the silt kicked up in his thrashing. She put the bulk of the branch at her navel, pinching the stick between her thighs and her chest, took a deep breath, and tipped towards where she last saw his limbs. It seemed like forever by the time she found the hem of his shirt, she pulled and pulled, climbed his clothes upside down, lifting his torso over her shoulder and onto the branch. The two rolled over together, back into the open air. She found a root stalk that she could pull on to bring them back to the bank.

Penny tossed Yulee onto the shore and crawled up next to him. She looked him over, saw he wasn’t breathing. She put her hands together on the center of his chest and pushed in pulses. When that didn’t work, she moved to his mouth and placed her lips on his to give him breaths he could not take. She moved back to pushing in pulses, then back to breathing for him. It seemed like forever. Yulee opened his eyes to see her face so close to his. He retched a moment, then coughed clear the lungs full of water. They lay beside one another exasperated. Their clothes soaked and soiled from rolling around on the sediment of the creek.

After a while, they rolled towards one another and introduced themselves. The talked for a spell about who they were and how much they had in common. Then there was an awkward silence between them, as if they had spoken every word in every order that words could be put in, and tried to avoid the eyes of the other. But each caught the other stealing glances and the spark of romance made their hearts flutter. It was there, on the edge of the bank that they fell in love – a true love. So true it need not be explained, cannot be explained, as there are truths in proofs of life and logic that must be accepted upon faith. Otherwise, everything falls apart.

Yulee searched his pockets for the special rock he had found before he met Penny. He worried he had lost it in the water, but found it easy enough among the plain round rocks of grays and whites, colors so uninspiring where once they were fascinating. He showed Penny, dropped the pebble into her open hand. She admired its perfect roundness, the sapphire blue line that split its two spheres. The night was coming upon where they sat. They noticed that the blue vein still maintained its radiance even in the faltering sunlight. Penny noticed it first and held up the sphere with her hand to show Yulee. He held the other hemisphere as she did hers – thumbs pointed down, their other digits cresting in a mirror image. The held the stone with their hands making the symbol of a heart. They looked to each other as their fingers touched tips and kissed each others lips in the iridescent shimmer.

As they kissed, the stone split in two along the line of blue at its center. Each half sunk into the skin of both their hands without them noticing while they interlaced their fingers in passionate embrace. They became unstuck in time, unlimited by the structure of the universe, removed from the substantive matrix the way one leaves a pool.

At first, they were confused. They appeared to exist within a blue sphere, the walls of which distorted an exterior of the park. But the images they saw were of many places at many times, too complex to describe with words in any accurate way. They walked away from the center to edge of the sphere and fell through. They were still in the park, but years in the past. It took a long time to master the ability, to even realize the trigger. That first trip was testing. They were on the edge of violence before they rationalized that they knew that this was some sort of gift, something bestowed upon true love – an eternity to be together at any point in the continuum.

They were set adrift through time. Their wanderings, haphazard at first, spanned the entirety of existence. They mastered the traveling like sailors master the seas. They lost each other in the first days, falling into different times in the same space, or in different places during the same Time. They learned it had to do with the pebble that Yulee had found. Whenever they held hands and kissed, they opened the door. In those times they were separated, they could make the trek back to each other. They could even travel on their own. An effort in and of itself, it involved true feelings of longing for their missing half, letting the tears of solitude mix with a kiss to the palm.

They lived lifetimes outside of time. They didn’t seem to age, no matter how many years they spent apart wonder where the other could be – that was before they discovered their independent abilities. After those fretful early years, as they were still aware of time’s passage in that relative way, they settled in a space they found no one would ever discover. A place on earth inaccessible and undesirable for exploration. They made trips into those points of time and space during civilization that they had found romantic or worth revisiting – like when they found the best years for wine. They began to read volumes at time, having so much of it to themselves. They read of their own exploits recorded for the ages.

You see, Yulee and Penny were the lovers in ever story ever written – all the good ones anyway. They were Adam and Eve, born of clay and bone, their original sin was to be human. They were Dante and Beatrice, Ulysses and Penelope, lost from each other for a time, toiling through the depths of darkness to find each other, having night extended into forever together. They had crossed through time, told their stories to the poets of the ages during those early excursion where they managed to be separated. They liked that everyone else who believed in romance had been informed by their relentless searches for one another. Their love recorded in the whole of the literary canon of their origin time. They built a library for themselves in that special space with those books, laughing at the inaccuracies, the petty jealousies of the writer, the meanings lost in translation.

They had a child at one point. It was a boy. They named him Tillie. They had him in the early times when they often lost one another in history, leaving clues for one another in time – monuments of stone made over the course of millennia mapping out the stars. Tillie seemed to age while they did not. This fact frightened Tillie as he grew older. They saw the constant consternation in his eyes and could not bear the weight of outliving their own child, watching him die, so they decided to disappear back into the slipstream of time.

It was after they left Tillie they managed to see both ends of time’s line.

They ventured together to the time and place where all things were one. They were unaffected by the physical properties that existed, as they were extracted from that which they were once a part of. Now, apart from it, they could step out into any part of the matrices of space-time and observe it as a god might. Penny found it magnificent. A single point of limitless possibilities and potential, the entirety of history packaged into a point invisible to the eye at the inception point. She wanted to spend a time in that instant so much she spent eons learning how to maintain a moment.

Yulee was the opposite. He enjoyed the end times. The gaping void consuming the universe, the skin of space-time spread so thin nothing could coalesce into matter, create gravity. He didn’t need to learn the art of maintaining a moment as Penny did. Forever went on forever like that. Even if they pushed to the farthest limit of the timeline, they’d only reach the edge of the universe on its constant march towards the infinite. It kept expanding, pulling the fabric of space-time tauter and tauter. He wanted to wait for the snap. The Big Collapse!

After these excursions, they returned to that space they had found away from the rest of the world. They often slept lengths of seasons. No one was around to disturb them. This part of history was a place humans no longer occupied. They never looked into why, they accepted the absence of others. There were no structures that survived the ebb and tide. No monuments save the nubbie burms of the ones they had built so long ago. No one and nothing to bother them. They figured it was a meteor, like the one they saw take the dinosaurs. No great beasts to overrun the world at this point though.

It was during one of those long winter naps they heard a knock on the door of the cabin they had built in the middle of nowhen. They weren’t sure if they had returned to the epoch of homo absentia or a little early. Penny stood behind Yulee, peering over his shoulder as he opened the door. A cold wind brushed past her skin giving her shivers. Her eyes focused in the dark on the hooded figure standing in the doorway in front of Yulee. It pulled its hood down to reveal the weary, weathered face of an ancient man, emaciated and arthritic. They bid him welcome and made a pleasant space for him. His voice was horse and his limbs looked brittle. They built a fire and poured him some hot tea.

It took a while – almost long enough to want to jump forward to it – but the man’s voice finally came back and he began to speak.

The man described a time they had almost forgotten. He told a tale of a frightened child and remorseful parents. He talked of abandonment and sojourn. He spoke of endless death. It took them more time to admit it to themselves than it did for them to realize that the ancient stranger sitting across from them was no one other than their child, Tillie. They became teary eyed and kneeled by the boy, now an old, old man. They cried into his tattered clothes. Tillie was unmoved. He was devoid of emotion, having been alone for so long, he lost the instinct to emote. His heart was not stone, but it did not know how to warm the bones that had spent in the cold. He continued to tell them his story.

“They discovered who you were – what you were – and realized no others could possess your powers,” he explained in a prosaic cadence. “It’s not the stones, it’s the love. You two are the only ones to ever find true love. Selfless love. It pulls you outside of time. The only reason I have lived this long is because of my love for you both. I was once afraid, unsure as to why the two of you never aged. I went to the Academy, studied the histories, discovered that every story of love was your story of love.”

He went on to describe what happened over the course of eternity. He wandered the earth looking for his parents. Saw the world that once believed in institutions of marriage suffer absolute divorce rates. Saw a lack of affinity between human beings. Saw that apathy give way to violence and mass slaughter. He survived the Forever War. Watched the last person born into a natural life spend his life burying all those that lived before and gave up on the possibility of love. Always only just so close in being able to reunite. His love was true, but it wavered for a time, and that is why he had grown old. He could not be as selfless with his affections as they were to each other. Others discovered the truth – that there was no true love, no acts of selfless caring, there was only the two of them bouncing around through history, untraceable and untouchable by the corruption that the rest of the world faced.

Penny was upset. She had an anger boiling from within. There was a sense of justice absent from the universe that she could not tolerate. She felt as if they had taken balance and fairness with them – their selfless love for one another was a selfish love of each other. Tillie looked at his parents, his eyes shaking out a tear from each corner. He was so happy to see them again, to see their faces unchanged even after so long apart. Penny leaned over and gave him a hug and kiss as a mother does to her child, running her fingers over his face. She leaned away and looked into the eyes and saw that life had left him. She wailed for decades. Yulee held her hand just as long.

After her grief subsided, she turned to Yulee and told him that they could no longer be with one another, no longer share the forever they had found. If others could not share in the joys of love as they had, they had no right to enjoy it themselves. He did not agree with her, but accepted it was her belief and made the sacrifice, resigning himself to spend the rest of eternity at the edge of forever, never to see her, never to touch her, never to love her again.

And in the end is where he stays, looking across the gaping void towards the center of the universe where he knows his only true love watches that single point of limitless possibilities and potential. The beginning of everything.

Roc City Blue excerpt (Shadow of the Valley)

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Roc City Blue excerpt (Shadow of the Valley)

Ernest Living

Ernie Prescott drove the same stretch of interstate every day he was scheduled for work. It ran from where he had an apartment in the northwestern suburbs of Roc City down along the southern rim of the city, out to an office park in a town outside the city limits at the edge of the county in its southeastern corner. He disliked cutting through the junction that ran through downtown, preferring instead to drive a roundabout way that avoided the urban center. It may have been longer, but it allowed him the tranquility of listening to his compact disc of nature sounds. He enjoyed the ambient static noise of the waterfall track the most. It aroused in him images not of majestic natural spaces, pristine and untainted by the hand of man, but rather, he was imbued with thoughts of ceramic tiles. The sterility of a day spa or an in ground pool embedded into a patio landscape, absent of greenery.

His vehicle was a late model SUV, high enough to see over the concrete embankments that hid the views of the city from those in more stout automobiles. He passed over the golf course by the river. Its lush greenness was being manicured by the maintenance crew up so early. The pale blue dawn casting a shadow of the bridge over the back nine. But his eyes paid less attention to those vistas than to the parallel lines of the highway lane dividers painted on the concrete. They disappeared into the distance ahead of him, a distance he headed toward at a steady speed set on his cruise control. A distance that seemed unending no matter how long he traveled.

He drifted into the center lane to avoid merging traffic up ahead. His absentminded move cut off an old Chevy sedan. That driver laid on the horn, breaking him from his meditative state. He threw his head around wildly looking for where the other car was. It pulled into the left lane, the driver flipping him the bird as she passed. He could tell the driver’s gender from the black nail polish and rings adorning her fingers. Pewter skulls and onyx gems. The Chevy pulled ahead into the distance. He returned to his tranquil daydream of sterility. He could almost smell the chlorine.

Ernie pulled into an empty parking lot. The pole lights were still on, faint if not obscure in the growing sunlight. He walked into the two story building of the office park to where his cubicle sat in windowless silence. He turned on his computer, logged into the network, and began the day’s tasks of data entry and analysis. He worked for a company that ran reports for a market trending firm. The trends had to do with adolescent apparel and accessories. The firm supplied the reports to companies across the world, but mostly in the United States, by correlating consumptive data. It sent out scouts into youth culture to promote products and brands created by another division, and then gave the merchandise to the most influential of any given clique so the product would then be envied. The firm collected the date, sent it out to Ernie’s company to be correlated, and then sent back to verify its effectiveness. All of this information existed somewhere in his training manual, but Ernie never absorbed it. He went along with the tasks he was trained to perform without asking questions. He didn’t see the need.

His life was uncomplicated. His cubicle suffered from impeccable organization. He was unfettered in his daily routine in running the reports. There was seldom any interaction with other people in the office, if not altogether absent, as any report he ran could be sent over email to his direct supervisor – a man, or woman, he couldn’t remember, of whom he only met at orientation. The cubicle was in a call center that was staffed by overnight people, people he never saw as he would be finished with his work day before any of their shifts started. It was abutted to a wall, with two free standing walls pinned between adjacent desks, reminiscent of blinders for horses. While others had tacked cute images of Pac-Man resemblance charts and important call back numbers, Ernie’s desk was Spartan. He never needed to print paper, or call anyone, so little to nothing adorned his desk. In his drawers he kept antibacterial hand sanitizer, a box of tissues, and the lunches he packed at home into plastic containers. The containers held plastic bags. Inside the plastic bags there was typically a bologna sandwich he had slapped together that morning. It was a ritualistic performance each time he made one. A slice of white bread on the bottom slathered with yellow mustard, then a layer of bologna, then a slice of American cheese, then a slathering of mayonnaise, and finally, after placing the top layer of bread on the structure, it was cut at a diagonal.

Much of the things Ernie did followed a peculiar order of steps. In fact, the same way he made his sandwich was analogous to the rituals he performed in cleaning himself after defecating. Because of his fiber lacking diet, his bowel movements occurred only every few days, and the excrement was less compact than someone with a healthier lifestyle. The smooth muscle tissue of his intestines pushed out the refuse of food matter through his anal sphincter. Inevitably, there was residual effluvial matter which did not succumb to the force of gravity and muscle contractions. He had formulated a way to be as sanitary as possible in removing that matter from surroundings of his anal orifice. The origins of the technique were from a joke he heard once about how a man wiped himself after finding that there was only one piece of toilet tissue left on the roll. The joke went that the man folded the tissue into a square, tore a corner, opened the piece up and scooped the fecal matter with the tip of his finger. He then disposed of the tissue that protected his hand from collecting any feces, and cleaned under the fingernail with the bit he tore off. Ernie’s technique was nowhere near as grotesque. Instead of a square, he folded a single piece of perforated toilet tissue into a triangle. Using the tip, he scraped away any unwanted particles that didn’t make it into the toilet bowl due to their adhesive properties.

On the Monday he had driven in, he had taken a morning constitutional before getting in the car. He also did this before making himself his daily bologna sandwich for lunch. While conducting the cleaning ritual in the bathroom, he had managed to lodge a small amount of fecal matter underneath a fingernail. It was unnoticeable and evaded the antibacterial purification of hand soap while washing his hands after the act. In making the sandwich, a glop of mayonnaise collected on that finger. Without a napkin or towel at the ready, Ernie Prescott placed the tip of his finger in his mouth, sucking the condiment off. The vacuum that action created dislodged the feces trapped beneath his fingernail and began its unholy journey through his digestive system. The procreation of bacterial colonies not native to the upper digestive system set his homeostatic balance out of kilter. He was not affected for the rest of that Monday, but the visceral reaction came in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

The work day ended, he drove back home amidst the midday traffic, drifting blissful in daydream as he drove home of the imagined spa, ignorant of the machinations of bacteria multiplying in his belly. His apartment was as nondescript as the office building where he worked. A small one bedroom, it held all the trappings of a typical bachelor – a television, a VCR, a new device called a DVD player – most every electronic device needed to sate tedium or slough off boredom. He entered the apartment and washed the container from his lunch. When he finished with that, he put in a movie he had rented from the video store down the street. The movie was of a man who suffered from insomnia and formed a split personality after a subconscious realization that his consumer lifestyle was unfulfilling. Ernie couldn’t relate. He was content with the material things he collected. He fell asleep halfway through the film, woke up at the end of the movie. Buildings were collapsing as the main character watched over the orchestrated destruction. He stopped the tape, turned off the television, and headed to his own bed for the rest of the night.

Ernie had a dream that night of a memory. It was one from his childhood when his parents took him out for Chinese food for the first time. The restaurant was new as was the suburban strip mall plaza within which it occupied. Chinese lanterns hung above each table. Strange characters of a language he did not understand adorned the thin paper veil at the table where he sat with his mother and father. He was there for his birthday. He had ordered something off the menu that he didn’t know what it was. It contained seafood, something of which his body was unable to tolerate. Neither he or his parents knew this when their server – a pretty girl that made his cheeks turn red whenever she came by to refill waters – came over with a slice of cake with a candle. His stomach was already turning itself over and over, as if tying knot after knot on an unending string of dendrites.

He was sure he was reliving that moment over and over. The edge of oblivion would be an inability to keep half digested seafood from covering a cute Asian girl. The sight of panic in the eyes of his parents as they realized the inevitable moment of bodily fluid percolating up his esophagus onto the unsuspecting waitress…

He awoke sweating and nauseous. The nerves in his intestines were twisted barbs. He barely made it to the toilet in his apartment’s bathroom to expunge the contents of his innards from both ends. He spent an hour confined to the small space, the expulsion of bodily fluids finding an amplified resonance in the wave type frequency of convulsions. When the urge to vomit and defecate subsided, he managed to retrieve anti-diarrhea medication from the medicine cabinet. By this time, he was already late for work. He logged onto his computer at home and sent his supervisor what he thought was an eloquent email stating that he would be unable to make it to work. A simple reply of OK was received soon thereafter. Feeling his stomach settling, Ernie went back to bed to sleep off what he could of the remaining agony that churned behind his navel.

It wasn’t a long sleep. He awoke to an absence of pain, the days light filtering in through Venetian blinds. He went to the kitchen and decided it would be worth the attempt to put down some cereal. He ate at his kitchen nook – a folding table and a pair of chairs abutting a wall. He finished the meal, put the bowl in the sink, forgetting to fill it with water as he usually did so that the dehydrating proteins would not adhere to the glass. Time passed and the bowl would cake with that inevitable milk ring.

He went into his living/dining room and turned on the television. The cathode ray tube let out a bass note as static snapped and an image came to life. The electrons being forced in different directions to hit the phosphorus mesh behind the glass let off x-rays in the tangential direction of their electromagnetically manipulated paths. At first, he thought he had left the tape running in the machine, that maybe it started playing after he hit the rewind button the night before. But the math didn’t work out, unless it had rewound and played over and over. Even with that theory the tape would need to be in the machine, which it was not. It sat atop the VCR in the plastic rental box. No, these images were something else. Something familiar but out of place. The camera panned out to show the skyline of a large city. He recognized it from the training manual. It was the same buildings that housed the market trending firm. One of them was on fire, billowing dark ash into a cerulean blue sky. He couldn’t hear anything. He just saw the images on the screen. He had left the audio on Aux for the movie being played through his surround sound transceiver. He grabbed a remote and flicked over the audio to the television. It was still too low to discern anything. Words were scrolling on the bottom of the screen. Something about an attack.

He was about to sit down, but his body was frozen as his eyes remained affixed on the images being projected on the television. He stood suspended above the sofa, bent slightly at the hips, but not far enough for gravity to take over. His ears were registering nothing but the lub-dub thud of his heart. Acids in his stomach dissolved the proteins and carbohydrates of the cereal. It was a heavy stone in his torso. As he watched the cameras cut between vantage points, collecting more and more perspectives of the buildings, a plane coming from the edge of the screen cut into view, then disappear. It made a silhouette of itself into the side of the building not on fire. Glass erupted outwards, loose papers precipitated from the heights onto the tallest buildings in the skyline and crowds below. His insides wrung out the breakfast he had just finished moments before.

Ernie stood staring at the screen covered in bits of bile, his mouth agape. A trail of spittle dangled from his lower lip onto the floor. His body gave way to gravity. He watched from his living/dining room sofa as the two buildings did the same….

Excerpt - Cherry Snow

He didn’t realize in that first year just how much of a toll the move from Bison to Roc City had taken on Jude. They had both grown up there, on opposite sides of Bison, but he had little family or life left there when he managed to get his first job out of college that paid more than just enough to make rent each month. It was an actual job, a job with a suit. She had to help him tie his tie for the interview, he was so nervous. They celebrated that night when he was offered the position – Assistant Operations Manager of Strategic Resources – it rolled of the tongue with an air of importance. They went out to dinner at a fancy restaurant after Jude got one of her sisters to watch the kids. That was the last time for a long time he saw her as happy as that, if he managed enough time to see her at all. The hours were cruel, and the commute even worse. Too many hours behind the wheel dead tired, having to pull off to the side of the road so he didn’t slip into sleep and veer into oncoming traffic or slide off into a ditch. He stayed at a hotel in Roc City a few times in the first few months. They had to wait until he was able to get some vacation time in order to house hunt. It took them a few weeks to finally find a place – an American Four Square on the southwest side of the city.

The house was so much larger than their apartment back in Bison. Four bedrooms, a front porch, a two car garage. The kids found endless amusement with the laundry shoot and attic room that was just paperboard and no insulation, something he’d end up tearing down when the kids outgrew the need for a private place they were willing to share. On a weekend a few months after they had moved in, Peter built a sandbox for the kids to play in by the fence at the back of the yard. The children loved to play there, and Jude liked that she could see them through the kitchen window if she had to prepare dinner while they were outside playing. And they would play for hours in the cicada buzz of summer evenings, well into the dusk. He and Jude would sit on the back steps and watch them run around, pulling dandelions from the edge of an unkempt garden thick with ivy and patches of grass where they hadn’t the time to plant anything.

An older black couple lived in the house whose driveway ran parallel with the fence. They had raised their kids already, were enjoying a quiet retirement, the wife tending to a well manicured garden, the husband often washing his ’57 Bel Air – a car he had saved all his life to own and enjoy, Peter found out one random summer weekend while they shared a few beers along the fence. Peter was out grilling some hamburgers for the family dinner. He was enjoying a can of Piels and offered one to his backyard neighbor waxing the hood of the Chevy and working up a sweat. They got to talking and found out they had a lot in common, especial an interest in golf. A sport Peter was desperate to improve upon to impress the brass at work, the company often taking clients out to The Oaks Country Club in an effort to woo them into a contract.

The man’s name was Clarence, his wife’s was Bella. They had lived in that neighborhood for over forty years. They bounced around a few houses around Roc City but they always felt like that neighborhood was home. Their family was a quick walk or car ride away. They would have Sunday brunch with extended relatives on a regular basis. He used to work at the factory on the north east side making film, but the company exported the jobs. He managed to work long enough to collect a pension, but for the last ten or so years before he retired, he had to work three low paying jobs to maintain the income level he had before they laid him off. Clarence was a nice man, but Bella was a bit crass.

After so many years working as a cleaner, she was very particular about how things were kept, how clean a room should be, how well kempt a garden should look. Bella would often be around weeding her garden when the kids were playing in the sandbox. One day the kids were as excited and exuberant as ever, running around and throwing a ball around. It managed to get away from them and over the fence into Bella’s garden, damaging a rosebush she prided herself on. Jude was in the kitchen making dinner and didn’t see the woman scolding the children. It was Desiree who came in screaming crying to her mother. Jude heard the whine and sniffles growing as Diz ran the length of the yard through the slap of the back porch screen door into the kitchen to cling on Jude’s leg and bury her face in Jude’s apron. She peeled Desiree away from the sopping wet spot on her jeans and asked what had happened. Peter had just gotten home and had placed his briefcase on the kitchen table when Jude handed the little girl off to him for consoling and stormed out to confront Bella. He watched through the window as the two woman argued over the fence. The twins were wrestling each other over the ownership of the ball.

He didn’t hear the entirety of the conversation. He had to move closer to the screen door of the back porch to catch anything cohesive. What kind of mother lets their kids run wild, I would never let my children terrorize the neighborhood like that, destroying gardens, he heard Bella say. She pointed out the damaged bush to Jude. Look, you crabby old witch, he heard Jude reply. She was on her own there trying to keep an eye on their children and make dinner for him, a husband working twelve hour days. A man she rarely gets to see or able to enjoy his company because of his schedule and the tending to the children. She didn’t know anyone in this city, that all of her family was back in Bison, too far to offer to watch the kids while she cooked dinner every night. And God forbid that someone who has raised children and knows the difficulty might offer her a helping hand in keeping them in line instead of traumatizing them for being children to begin with.

Bella stood there, taken aback. Jude turned around to the twins still fighting each other over the possession of the ball. She called their names and they froze, dropping the ball between them. She told them it was time for dinner and they had to wash up. They ran to the kitchen where Peter was cradling Desiree. His daughter’s arms were around his neck as she sat on his forearm. The twins bolted in, the screen door slapping closed behind them. The little metal latch hook tapped a few times before it stopped. Each of the boys hugged one of his legs on their way to the downstairs half bath to clean the dirt they had collected on their arms wrestling over the ball. Jude was making her way back across the lawn. He could see the tears in her eyes.

That night they talked about how she felt. How she felt alienated, that the neighbors looked at her with furtive derision in sideways glances. She told him how unhappy she was and it would be a long time before she felt better about their new life in Roc City.

He explained this to the circle of people around him. He didn’t tell the group much else. Just that he found it hard living in that big house with only a cat and the occasional visit from his son Rusty, who had been to a few of the sessions with him. Russ was the only child he had that still lived in Roc City. The two would go each month to Mount Hope Cemetery and lay a flower on Jude’s headstone. A man sitting next to him rubbed his shoulder to console him. He was tearing up. He knew now, sitting amongst all these strangers, how alone she must have felt. How terrible it was to find the one you loved absent from your life when you needed them the most.

Roc City Blues excerpt - Cherry Snow

Growing up, he never thought of death or loss. There were no expectations of him, thus he had no expectations of life beyond its constant continuation. Death was something abstract, a historic event that only occurred in a previous time, before he had existed, or a prophecy – fictitious, written in a forgotten language, translated and retranslated into and from various languages over the centuries, an anxiety unfounded and easy to ignore through the distractions of day to day living.

It wasn’t until his maternal grandmother’s funeral that such a monster in the closet as death was to him became a reality. Russell and he had been asked to be pall bearers for her funeral by their Aunt Bella. She had moved in with Grandma Rose after the matriarch had started to suffer from Alzheimer’s in the few years before she died. Each subsequent visit for Dustin and family to B-lo for reunions took on a surreal form. An absence of recognition in the eyes of the old woman who used to smile at the sight of him and his siblings clouded that window to the soul. Tinges of sadness around a smile while children hugged her goodbye after those reunions concluded molted into quizzical lines of confusion about why such strangers were letting their offspring share such affections with her.

He thought about Grandma Rose’s memory loss. How vile a thing must it be to be unsure of the life you’ve lived, of whose life you might have been a part of. But his affection for her was a distant one. Something of a bond not quite formed. It must have been a reciprocal feeling between the two. His family had moved to Roc City from B-Lo well before he could recall any contiguous memories of his own life. He performed affectations for those relatives visited, as the frequency of such visits and their diminutive length left little allowance for deep formulations of familial bonds.

So it was as such when his Grandma Rose had slipped in the shower and broke a hip that Dustin felt only as bad for her as for anyone who might have been the subject of bad news delivered by a friend of a friend having met once or seen around his environs on occasion. A simple sadness, shallow and fleeting, more from the idea than the reality. Having been so old, his grandma had developed pneumonia in the hospital and slipped into a coma. He only noticed those days with any difference to the others in his life in the face and voice of his own mother. She would be on the phone with her sister on a regular basis, discussing the condition of their mother. She was getting worse with each day that passed. His mother began making frequent trips to B-Lo, spending the night there.

Dustin thought of how limited his father’s cooking skills were – macaroni and cheese with the occasional pan fried hotdog slices thrown in for flavor served each night during her absence. He thought of this more than he ever thought of how close to the edge of forever his grandma was.

In the final week, his mother asked if he and his brother wanted to say goodbye. Dustin did not really have an opinion, but seeing Russell’s eagerness, it infused in him the same desire. In her hospital room, Grandma Rose was hooked to a respirator, unconscious and oblivious to all that was happening. Her skin hung off her bones, having been forgetful of meals before the slip and now only being able to ingest food through intravenous tubes connected by needles in her forearms and the backs of her hands. She was covered in bruises from deteriorating circulation. Dustin watched her chest raise and lower with mechanical rhythm, unnatural and haunting. There was a rattle to each breath, as if something might escape, attempts to say some final words of utter import, something profound, but they were pressed beneath so much sleep and anesthetic they could not find their way out. Russell stood at the side of her bed, holding her hand. He said a small speech to her through a veil of tears and phlegmy sobs. Dustin stood closer to the door watching the happenings of the room. The nurses coming in to check her chart, change her IV bags. His mother turned to him, bleary eyed, and gestured for his company at her side. He obliged. Slits of sunlight fell on the old woman’s ailing body through the blinds. They stood their in silence for a long while, his mother combing her fingers through his hair.

Grandma Rose died a few weeks later. There was a wake, a funeral, and a celebration. At the funeral, Dustin, his brother, and a few uncles and cousins wore suits and were pall bearers. Dustin’s and Russell's were ill fitting, their growing bodies in between the stage of child and man. They didn’t quite fill the shoulders as well as their older relatives. Their hair was flat with too much gel, parted and straight save for the ends where the gel lost strength and it curled. They carried the casket from the parlor to the church where a mass was held. Eulogies were said. He looked around and saw all the women crying. A few men dabbed their eyes with the tips of their ties. He felt nothing any different than he had for all those years growing up. And then he looked at his mother. She was holding his father’s hand tight. He could tell how hard by the whiteness of his father’s knuckles, the redness of the fleshy part of his hand, the heel of the palm by the thumb. Her other hand clutched a bouquet of tissues, snot soaked and damp from tears pouring from the corners of her eyes. He watched her face wrench itself into the most pitiful expression he would ever see her wear as someone at the pulpit read something about Grandma Rose as a mother, about her memory loss, and about how much she was loved.

It was that expression that moved something deep within him. A door, a massive boulder at the edge of a reservoir of emotion and tears, a psychic pain he had known no equivalent to had pierced him to the core of his being, having seen the look on his mother’s face. He did not, could not understand it beyond the fact that he never liked to see his mother in pain.

Looking upon his own mother’s lifeless body in the funeral parlor at the wake, her face painted with mortician’s makeup, unnatural and unsettling, listening to Russell read his eulogy, he knew what she felt that day. A true moment of empathy, something rare for him, unable to understand people, he thought about how she would never see what might become of him, no longer there to congratulate or scorn, the same way all the memories of Grandma Rose’s life flaked away from her decaying mind. What are we to those we love but the collection of memories they have of us? How soon we find we disappear from their perspective of the world when their memories disappear from ours.

A Man Apart (part i)

The man leaned against the bar with his elbows as he sat on the stool. The bartender didn’t remember pouring him a drink, but saw he was sipping spirits out of a scotch glass and figured he must have poured it for him. The bar was empty save for a few townies having an early end to their daily shift. The bartender moseyed over to the man, wiping the rings of condensation off the bar where he had served the townies bottled beer from the chill box while he moved. He stopped at the man, noticing the scotch glass was almost empty.

“This is good scotch. You know, I hadn’t touched the stuff for over a year until last night. Had a terrible fight with the wife, went for a drive. Downed a whole bottle,” the man volunteered without prompting.

“Are you sure you should be here?” the bartender asked. He didn’t want to be a pusher, though his livelihood depended on patrons bordering on alcoholism and reinforcing their choice with a tinge of denial.

“I could finish that bottle on that shelf off in less than five minutes and not have the slightest buzz.”

“I think you’re a little old to think you’re superman. I mean, you’re no frat kid, you should know if you drink all that as quick as you say, you’ll probably need an ambulance.”

“I needed help a long time before this.”

“How’s that?”

“I’ve never been one to think beyond the scope of my own desire. For some reason, someone saw something in me I couldn’t, or thought they saw something. I never could figure it out. I guess that’s why last night happened.”

There was a stiff silence between the two. The clanking of billiards and dull din of quiet conversation could not push the bartender to ask. He stood there drying a glass, noticing after a second that the man’s was filled three fingers. The man took another sip.

“You know, there’s a theory about the universe,” the man started. “It goes that before man invented the telescope, the planets and stars that we couldn’t see with our naked eye didn’t exist as things – as solid, real things. They were possibilities. Like a reflection on a pond that someone had dropped a stone into, they looked like the reflection on the ripples, that they could be this far in one direction or that, or what have you. I wonder if that theory applies to people. Do we all of a sudden find ourselves at a loss of possible outcomes once we look upon a mirror and recognize that we’re limited in our abilities? The child knowing himself only to know really that he cannot be more than the path chosen? Or is it when someone else looks upon you, seeing something they expected, and then you lose the possibility of being anything else? And when they finally find you, you’re exactly where you were thought to be, all those tendencies so inherent in your being leading to the only outcome that made sense when someone paid attention…”

“ Sorta like how you know Buffalo isn’t gonna make it to the playoffs by midseason,” the bartender offered.

He had heard drunken philosophies before, though this was a bit more poetic. He turned around to put away the glass he had been drying, noticing that he had started to wear a hole in the towel. When he turned back around to say something to the man, something profound and relevant as well as consoling, he found that the man had disappeared, the glass was gone, and no tip was on the bar. He left the back of the bar to see where the man went, though the time it took him to turn around wouldn’t have allowed for the travel of distance it took to go from where the man had been sitting to the exit or the bathroom which were on the side farthest from them. The bartender questioned the townies, but they said they had not seen a man either pass their way, nor had one been sitting at the bar since they had arrived. The bartender went back to tend bar as new patrons came in, shaking off the cold winter snow from their shoulders. He looked through a small window that let in the fading November light. There was a break in the clouds where a column of light shone through as if God were pointing down at something significant.