30 April 2012

Nunca pinto sueños o pesadillas, Pinto mi propia realidad

I am asleep. Something, a sound, causes me to wake up in the middle of the night. I hear something outside, and I go out to the porch. There's a girl there. Her hair is long and brown. She is dressed in white, her face is in her hands, and she is crying. I want to comfort her, so I put my arms around her. I ask her what's the matter, but she doesn't answer. She just keeps crying. I tell her, "It's okay. It's all going to be okay." I examine her, trying to make sure she's not hurt. For some reason, I'm afraid she might be bleeding. I pull her hands away from her face and smooth her hair back, and that's when the crying stops, and I see that she has no face.

24 April 2012

Bruises

When I think of you, it hurts. But in a good way—the way that rough sex hurts. It's supposed to hurt; if it doesn't hurt, you're doing something wrong. These feelings I have leftover, I guess, they're kind of like a bite mark or a bruise. They're still here, even though you're gone and everything's over, and they really only hurt when I fuck with them, like when I think about them too much or look at them too hard or poke at them just to see. I've come to be proud of the bruise you left on me. I cover it up, no one knows it's there but me. Sometimes I forget about it, and then someone accidentally touches it or something and I'm reminded. It's painful, but I smile a little bit, thinking of how it got there. But your mark is gonna start to fade any day now. Someday I'm gonna hear your name, and I'm not gonna feel that quick, sharp pain like someone jabbed me in a hidden wound. I'm not going to feel anything.

23 April 2012

Your words

And then she said, "I am going to keep writing, but I want you to know that these words are not yours. They are not for you or about you or based on you or related to you. They do not signify that I love you or hate you or that I think about you at all. In fact, any resemblance that any of these words bear to your likeness is totally coincidental from this point on. I want to make this clear. These words are MINE. Because you're a little more dead to me every day. Your face, your movements, your scent, your sounds, your essence is vanishing from my mind a handful at a time, soon you'll be totally gone. Soon I won't recognize your face. I'll forget you completely. But I will keep writing. Every day, I will keep writing, and my words will outlive you."
He thought for a moment, and then said, "Okay." His face was blank, but she couldn't help but feel that he was suppressing a smile. She knew that he didn't believe her, the fact that she'd driven out to see him, to deliver this speech, was proof enough against her.

22 April 2012

Waking up at Jackie's

23 June 1966, New Orleans
It's six o'clock Sunday morning. I'm still in Jackie's nightgown, and I'm sprinting barefoot down the trolley tracks with my suitcase banging against my thigh each time I pick up my leg to propel myself forward. Last night's eye lashes are still glued to my eyelids, but I can feel the edge of the left one coming loose. It's fluttering around my eye, making it water, but I'm not gonna touch it. Just got to keep moving forward.
The sun is coming up.
I can feel the vodka sloshing around in my gut. I promise myself I won't get sick. I have to keep moving, or I won't make it in time. Jimmy'll come home to an empty bed, and that'll be it for me.
stripper pasties exotic dancer vintage afro african american go-go boots gogo dancer heart-shaped pasties fiction short story jackie new orleans strip club gentleman's club cabaret
I try not to think of Jackie, but she forces herself into my mind. That's the way Jackie is. Last night at the club, a man tried to feel her up. She got on top of his table and kicked his drink in his face with her gold platform go-go boots. Somehow that same man ended up spending eighty bucks a piece on the two of us. We had a good night. Me and Jackie make a lot of dough together down at the club; she says we make a good team.

19 April 2012

Moonchild, an invitation

Moonchild, I'm still banging my head against this bedframe trying to forget your name.
All I want is one last mouthful, though I know your afterglow will choke me.
Rip me open to find I'm just a black bag of blood. I sold my bones for this silver tongue,
Reminiscing about spinning you stories on brass poles, on bed knobs, on soft scrolls.
Your spark I sought to steal for my own, but my fingers could never grasp your throat.

Meet me at midnight, you pick the place, I need to see that heavenly face,
Even if you cannot be kind, I need that cool white skin on mine.

Bleed me like an ink pen used to create the blackest night, use my dark to feed your light.
Use my black to make your white glow brighter; use my scream to make your voice sound quieter.
Read these pinpricks as signs that I, your sky, am shamed, sullen, sick to my stomach.
You, moonchild, your silver, sweet glimmer steals my sight, your ether eats up my appetite.

Meet me when you see the stars, I need to feel those crescent scars,
Even if you will never be mine, I would starve to taste you one last time.

16 April 2012

Young and Out for Glory


“Yeah, they deflowered some freshman, straight Almost Famous-style,” buzzed a small freckled freshman to her murder of gothy friends.
Across the hall a football player dished, “It was a gang bang with a married guy, a bus driver maybe.”
A nearby cheerleader corrected him. “No, I heard it was a gang bang with that kid with the mullet. He fucked all three of them.”
It was just another Monday morning at Wentzville Holt High School, and the hallways were alive with chattering of the weekend exploits of The Whores on the Hill.
Collette Queen was proud of having fucked thirty-eight dudes before she had reached her seventeenth birthday. She even kept a list of their names in the composition notebook that she carried with her everywhere. Marla Farrell boasted possessing “the ability to take it in the ass with grace.” This talent was confirmed by enough guys for it to be considered fact. I was nicknamed “The Destroyer” because of the number of hearts I’d sunken my teeth into and spit back into the faces of their previous owners. I owned three t-shirts and a bracelet that featured my nickname, and I wore them often. Collectively, we made up the clique that the kids at school called “The Whores on the Hill.” They thought they were being clever, maybe cruel.

15 April 2012

She

Frankie, Maggie, Mag, Kit, Kitten, Jinx, Lia, Iphis, Artist, she, you, who am I missing? Each character I write is the same kind of fucked up unforgettable, a version of some sorry dead girl I can't blot out. The women who walk through the revolving door to my life are the same breed: beautiful, emotionally unstable, charming, vindictive, never shut up, manipulative, spontaneous, kindkindkind until someone's feelings are hurt, cruel. And each time I shut one out, a new one bursts through the door and begs me to write her, and I do. I do every fucking time, not realizing she's the same fucking woman with a new name, a new haircut, new hobbies, maybe. She tortures me until I put her down in words.

14 April 2012

Objet petite a

Maggie, you are my fantasy. You are that unattainable aura, that faint glimmer of something attractive, something I need and will spend my whole life chasing after, though you'll always remain two steps ahead of me. You are a trick of the mirrors, an airbrushed memory that I'm tearing my mind apart trying to hold onto, trying to make real. Maggie, you are my illusion, my delusion, my death drive. You are my fantasy realized and thus my nightmare. You are the ideal woman come back to strangle me, to kill me in my bed. Wrap your slender fingers around my throat and squeeze. Maggie, I know you only exist to give me something to cry over, to give me a reason to wake up, to give me a reason to participate in this principled reality and to need an escape from it. Maggie, you haunt my unconscious and swallow me up. You pull my strings, and I can't stop. You murder me and bring me back only to keep out of reach, to keep me reaching. You keep me dazed, craving to possess you the way you so cruelly possess me. I drag myself mindlessly in your direction, I reach out a hand to touch, only to wrap my fingers around nothing. Maggie, when I finally get my hands on that moon white skin, I'll have one moment of sheer ecstasy before realizing you're not my Mag, not at all the girl I've been searching for.

13 April 2012

Windows


The following story is based on 10 interviews, which took place April 1-5, 2010. Names have been changed to protect the privacy of those interviewed. 


“I believe that organic sex, body against body, skin area against skin area, is becoming no longer possible, simply because if anything is to have any meaning for us it must take place in terms of the values and experiences of the media landscape.  What we’re getting is a whole new order of sexual fantasies, involving a different order of experiences, like car crashes, like travelling in jet aircrafts, the whole overlay of new technologies, architecture, interior design, communications, transport, merchandising.  These things are beginning to reach into our lives and change the interior design of our sexual fantasies.  We’ve got to recognize that what one sees through the window of the TV screen is as important as what ones sees through a window on the street.”
-- J. G. Ballard

They filed into the room one at a time.  There were four to start, but more trickled in over the course of two hours.  Each was between eighteen and twenty-two years old.  Looking at the lot of them, they were a perfect group of nothing specials, ideal for my questioning.  I set up the recording machine in the middle of the floor as they got settled.  I told them they were welcome to the refreshments that I had placed in the middle of the room.  Everyone sat on the floor, passing around the tray of cookies.  I took one before I began to explain what I needed from the group.  I switched on the recording machine and read the statement I’d prepared the day before. 

12 April 2012

Maggot

The first time I saw her she was screaming.

I'd heard of her before that day, a friend-of-friend situation. I think it was Bridgett who first brought her up, referring to her as "that skinny bitch that Tom hangs around...you know, that wispy little blonde that never shuts up?" I had no idea who Bridgett might be referring to.

No One Watching, 3

The third chapter of the novel I started writing 2 years ago. This chapter ends very abruptly. I'm not sure why I did it that way. I remember I was really weird about writing this and didn't want to tell anyone that I was writing it until it was finished. That was my master plan. I was going to write this whole novel and end it with THE END and print it up and dedicate it to this person who inspired it by not being in my life and then I was going to send it to this person and never ever think about him/her again because I would have already written THE END, our story would be over and there'd be nothing left to say. Needless to say, things did not go as planned. 


On January 4th, the quote of the day was from Doris Lessing. Frankie had never heard of Doris Lessing, but she found the quote to be insightful: “All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh.” She was lying in bed contemplating sanity and flesh and what things she found to be delightful when Tim entered her room.
“Oh, come on. You’re not out of bed yet? The bros are coming over today,” Tim whined at his apathetic roommate.
“The ‘bros’? Since when do you have ‘bros’?”

Man and Wife

Here is the crappy AIS story I wrote like 3 years ago. Basically, I've been through my computer and deleting things, and I keep finding things that I forgot I wrote. Someday I will maybe rewrite this, though this is the second version of it. Originally, they were ice skaters. I probably have that one somewhere, too. I think this was when I wanted everything I did to be plot driven and not character driven, and I don't really know.


           “Adam Birch?  I ain’t seen you since you were in the ninth grade!  You must be graduated by now.  That right?” Mrs. Jameson asked, walking up to the glass counter of the butcher’s shop.
           “Good afternoon, Mrs. Jameson.  Yeah, two years ago.”  Adam added quietly, “First in my class.”
           “I always knew you’d do well!  You got a good head on your shoulders.  You goin’ to school?  A smart boy like you oughta get himself a college education.”
           “No, ma’am.   Can I help you pick anything out today?  We got a real nice special on this smoked turkey and we—“
           “Last I remember, you had a pretty little girlfriend.  What was her name?” She struggled to remember, Adam offering no help.  Finally, it came to her, “Eva Jane! Eva Jane Wilson.  That was it.  Whatever happened to little Eva Jane?  You were absolutely head over heels for her.”
           “I never knew a girl named Eva Jane, ma’am,” Adam replied coolly as he bent down to reposition a large ham in the display. 

No One Watching, 2

The second chapter of the novel I started 2 years ago to fill in the space of someone I missed (still miss?). 


As Frankie made her way to her car, she realized that a black t-shirt had been a poor choice. It was a typical summer day in New Orleans, replete with stifling humidity. Getting inside her decrepit Honda, Frankie scorched her hand on her seatbelt. It seemed to be at least twenty degrees hotter inside the car, despite the fact that neither of the windows in the backseat rolled up all of the way. On a good day, Frankie could beat her dashboard until the air conditioning kicked on, but on this day, she was not so lucky. After eight minutes of banging her fists against the dash with all of the ferocity a skeleton could possibly muster, Frankie gave up and cranked the windows down as far as they’d go.
Twisting the volume knob on her car’s stereo, she found that Garbage’s “I Would Die for You” was skipping in her CD player. She instantly recognized the CD as one of Luly’s mixes and remembered how long it had been since she’d driven her car. Her mind flashed to a memory of roughly ten weeks ago when she’d spent three hours sobbing hysterically in her car and mouthing the words to the songs on Luly’s mix. Tim had been forced to remove Frankie from the car forcefully when a woman from their apartment building became irritated with Frankie’s refusal to quiet down and threatened to call the cops.

11 April 2012

An observation on the theory of survival of the fittest, as applied to airplane attendants


The man in the orange baseball cap leaned back in his chair.  He casually glanced around the terminal for any sign of an attractive woman, but there were none in sight.  Even the nearby stewardesses left much to be desired.  There had been a time when it was a requirement for all stewardesses to be attractive, but that time had come to a screeching halt after a wave of equal opportunity law suits were decided in favor of the ugly people of America. 
“The world is going to shit,” thought the man.  “Far too much equality for the world to function the way nature intended it.”  

No One Watching, 1


Once upon a time (2 years ago), I missed someone very much and began writing this novel in attempt to get my mind off that person:   

            The quote of the day was a bible verse from Corinthians. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. Frankie was not a religious person. She did not necessarily believe in God, but she did not think about those things enough to consider herself an atheist. Theistic beliefs aside, Frankie liked to consider herself a fairly spiritual person. Lately, however, she was feeling very unspiritual. In many ways, Frankie felt sanctified when she created art. Unfortunately, it had been days since she had felt inspired enough to get out of bed, let alone pick up a paintbrush.
As a result of Frankie’s lack of inspiration, all that she had created in two and a half months was a page of worthless doodles of her cat, Jean Beignet Ramsey. This is not to say that Jean Beignet Ramsey was not a worthy object of Frankie’s doodling. Beignet was the cutest ball of orange fluff that anyone had ever seen, and Frankie loved her more than she loved most humans. Frankie’s cat had even been the source of inspiration for one of her best paintings: the cat once spent hours playing in a cardboard box, which caused Frankie to do a painting of herself in a box. Her art professor interpreted the painting as “a feminist commentary on the modern day sexualized female.” He put it in a big art show. It won some award that Frankie had never heard of, and Frankie got her picture in The Times Picayune.

09 April 2012

The Ballad of the Busboy

If only I had the same
pomegranate palms
tangerine phalanges
fizzypop fingernails
that the shortskirt sugarplum fairies
carry on the ends of their arms
when they dance in the dreams of
every boy who ever lived
For now I can barely talk
them into dining from my finest
china let alone eating out of
my perpetually sweatsoaked sootstained
soft as hardwood hands

Butter or Jelly?

Every day when you wake up
you’re hungry to get me hot
and stick things in my slots,
but where’s my thanks?
And whose gonna clean up
the mess you left inside me
once you take out what popped up
and head to work?
You’ll leave me in the kitchen,
until you return home
for your lunch break,
during which you never
take me out even once.

Wish

This was the first flash fiction I ever attempted (I think it's from 2009): 


“What are you doing?” Cassie barked through a mouthful of minty foam.
With my face still pressed against the bathroom window, I decided it was safe to leak my secret plan to my big sister.  I told her, “I’m gonna find the biggest, brightest star and wish Dad home to make pancakes for me tomorrow.”

08 April 2012

Symbiosis

I tell Lacey I'm thinking about cutting my hair. Charley's girlfriend Mina says when I wear my hair long, she forgets I'm not a girl. She gets confused when I go into the men's room. Charley says that Mina doesn't know what she's talking about.
Lacey says she thinks I look good, even if I do look like a girl; she kisses me, hoping to distract me but failing to do so.
Charley pipes in, "Don't worry about. It increases your options, if nothing else." When me and Charley go out, I'm sometimes I'm mistaken for his little brother, sometimes his girlfriend. I guess, honestly, my role in his life is somewhere in between the two. Or maybe that's not right. Maybe it's something totally different, like something other people don't get because they haven't experienced it.

01 April 2012

Prove me wrong

Well, brother, I have my reservations about you.
You seem like the type to tell me that pain in the shape of a heart is unnatural.
Unnatural is a natural born killer.
He took the lives of eight adolescents just last week, but no one has the balls to put unnatural on trial.
No one has the guts to stand up and say GUILTY!GUILTY!GUILTY!.
We are victims of hatred, murders, suicides, sins.
We have not been granted immunity, and we've all helped hide a body or two.
We are too small to peer into the mirror, unafraid that unnatural will stare back.
We are all too small to stab the sharks in business suits, too small to string unnatural up but his $400 cufflinks and leave him to rot.
We are too small to shatter our bathroom mirrors and cut unnatural out of our faces, out of our chests, with shards of glass.
We are too small.