Category: Words

“I could never tell my coworkers about my weekends,” he chuckled to himself as he slipped on the second glittery gold platform heel. He was careful with his nails as he fastened the strap. His hair was perfect. The night was his.

He watched himself walking toward the  mirror, coming to a stop nose to nose with himself, a smirk painting his glittering gold lips. “It’s a shame, really.”

“Do I look pretty, Judy?” His wife had given up long ago and in secret followed his fashion advice. In some ways she had a girlfriend. Still. She wanted a husband… “It’s a shame, really.”

“Exactly” he exclaimed, tearing himself from the mirror with a flourish of his draping silk blouse. He squeezed Judy’s cheeks between his palms, his acrylics shying away from contact. “They’d adore me, wouldn’t they! How couldn’t they!”

With Sherry on his breath and Cher on his mind, he sauntered toward the door. “Have a good night, my love! See you in the morning!”  He slid into the limo and told the driver the way to the first stop, to pick up supplies, as he poured a glass of champagne.

The cab pulled up in front of a dilapidated motel. His heels were first to hit the pavement. He stood up with an easy poise, strolled across the empty parking lot and rapped his nails on a door stained with the number 9, the metal fixture long since removed. “Get your ass outta bed, Benny!”

Benny woke up to anxious tapping. He immediately felt sick. How long had it been? “BENNY!” Fucking shit, it won’t stop until I answer it. Fucking Charlene. Dude, thinks he’s chick. Whatever, it’s not gay if they pay you to suck your dick. Plus, he’s good at it…

“About damn time,” Charlene said, glancing down at Benny’s tight briefs. He shook his head and wiggled across the room. “I don’t know how you waste your day like this, Benny. It’s 9 o-fucking-clock. P.M.”

His coke-covered dick sparkled like a unicorn horn. Charlene licked the residue of the last line off Benny’s quivering, smaller-than-average penis. Charlene slipped the two red bags into the lining of her sequined purse and left without saying goodbye.

The driver glared angrily into the back seat, anxious to get the whore out of his cab. She gave him an address and set to fixing her make-up in a compact. “Take it easy on the bumps,” she said,  laughing hysterically a moment later as she grasped around frantically in her bag to check her stash.

Her swagger into the club swayed with the energy of that last limo bump. She felt better than she looked, but her saunter didn’t know it. She swam in the disco colors and bobbed to the boy across the room. She had her prey. From a forced distance, the dance floor was a desert, the boy a starving child, and she a hovering vulture. Her wings cocked, she bounced to the music.

Here’s what she really looked like: her stilettos slipped constantly on the alcohol-slicked floor, her wig barely clung to the patchy black hair underneath, the sweat on her brow caked her make-up unnaturally around her eyes. When she clumsily thrust her hip against his thigh, the boy could make out a faint trail of white powder dripping from Charlene’s nose.  “Dad?” he said.

The silence on that ride home was golder than Charlene’s handbag.

This piece was created by Chase Springer and Alexander Tague through an exquisite corpse type game where they passed lines back and forth between each other. Alexander started it and Chase ended it. Sexy is back…

Humanity has an inherent obsession with naming things. A name implies ownership. It suggests dominion.

My urge to arrange everything arises out of a need to control. Not a negative, restrictive type of control. The control that I pursue desires order and understanding, not manipulation. For example, I arranged my G.I. Joe’s by color. It made them easier to find at the time, and later caused me to question my sexuality. In either case, Rubbermaid is a good investment.

I knew that someone had been in my room. The objects that I had so meticulously arranged and memorized had moved. My journal had been read.

Instead of asking me questions, my father had taken answers. He concluded that I was depressed and suicidal. He wan’t wrong, but he forgot that I was a teenager. My hormones lacked aim as they ejaculated on those coffee stained pages. That’s right. I wrote shitty poetry. That’s fine. We all write shitty poetry. The problem is that I wrote these pubescent bubbles down in a poorly guarded notebook. Even worse, I shared these premature denouncements of culture out-loud to over-caffeinated, captive audiences of disinterested and dysfunctional adults. Coffee shops and open mic nights gave my adolescent meanderings a false sense of grandeur.

In a tangible (more than a prayer), and in retrospect good-intentioned, effort to save me, my father, the doctor, prescribed me Prozac. The prodigal son, wanting a seat at his father’s side, swallowed the little green and white capsules.

I’ve never felt so alone in my life. Felt isn’t the right word. The problem was that I didn’t feel anything. Empty. Flat. Quiet. I didn’t feel sad or happy. I felt nothing.

Before I took my medicine, my mind would never stop. Billie Holiday and her black coffee were the only ones who would stay up with me. I was too young (and innocent) to drown the voices in self-administered relief. I needed a prescription. I trusted the man offering me solace. He had saved me before. Even his violation of my privacy was out of a desire to help me. He told me that he could quiet my thoughts. He offered sleep to a lifelong insomniac. A pill a day, I followed my script. I never expected to be alone on stage, delivering a soliloquy to an empty theater.

The death was slow and sudden, like waking up and realizing that the leaves have changed color. I didn’t notice. I didn’t care. All of the beautiful details around me smeared into a nice, neutral beige (“This will go with anything!”).

Two weeks into the medicated regimen, I was willing to go with anything. The random thoughts would still come by, slip past the moat. They were decreasing, but the ones that remained had a loudness and an echo that hadn’t existed before in the cacophony.

I was driving down a Missouri highway when one of those thoughts t-boned me. I recalled a simple fact that I’d consumed and filed who knows how long ago: Automobile accidents at 70 mph or greater are 100% fatal when not wearing a seatbelt. I was doing 75. I slowly and intentionally pushed my foot down on the accelerator. 80. 85. 90. 95. (I know it’s dramatic. I was a teenager. On anti-depressants.) Fuck this. 120.

The Swedish engineering of my Volvo 780 turbo station wagon was starting to shake. I had yet to even tremble. I’d run out of numbers on the dashboard. Then, I saw the tree. It was huge. Old. Wise. I drifted. Casually aligned with its center.

It didn’t take long to close the distance. I mustered an emotion of destined fate to hold my aim and grip on the wheel as I bounced over the shoulder and into the field. 1,000, 800, 500, 200 feet. It won’t take long. You won’t even feel it. And you certainly won’t remember it.

I hit the brakes. Pulled the wheel. Punched it. And swerved around the tree.

I hit the brakes again as I maneuvered my family car through a 360° spin that moonshot me back onto the road.

I continued down that road as if nothing happened. When I got home, I stared at the gelatin capped arrangements on the surface of the toilet bowl water. Sometimes, flushing everything away is for the best.

I could feel the death in his arm more than smell it. It pulled his entire left side down with its paralyzing weight. His shirt sleeve was filled with a thinness, like a deflated balloon animal that had slowly untwisted itself. This used to be an arm. At the bottom hung his hand, about as functional as a ball shoved into a tube sock. The skin at his fingertips had already started decaying. The dark purple mixed with the bright red of his calloused flesh like a blood orange.

When he stood up, the arm swung like an elephant trunk, swaying and searching for dexterity. He brought it back under his control by tucking it into the pit of his good arm, sending the errant limb to sit in the corner. With this pose he could mask the death with a casual nonchalance.

I wondered why he hadn’t cut it off. Wasn’t it more of a burden? Was he really keeping it for mere aesthetics? Of course not. He was keeping it because it was his arm. He was letting the pain and the necrosis slowly creep into his heart. But, it’s his. It’s his arm.

We stopped in the middle of a concrete desert. Or maybe we were just getting started. Either way it was hot. My skin was sticking to the ground like a tomato left to rot. I was sliding from place to place in the slick heat, but pieces of my skin peeled off on that rocky surface.

I had just spent the past hour trying to get directions from an overly articulate feather and all I’d managed to figure out was that we’re visitors here. I know that we belong somewhere and that somewhere certainly isn’t here. Holding onto the tiny pebbles for extra traction, I yell at Ant to get me one more beer.

“We need shelter. This sun is going to make us crack.”

Sometimes a man mistakes isolation for dominion.

“The lions and the tigers used to be the kings of the jungle and now they’re kept in zoos. I have a feeling that we’re on a similar path.”

There’s a battle, an epic battle, a struggle for life and death and for a mate, playing out in front of us, reflected in your eyes and your actions. His quirky narration comes out of the screen, pokes through the jungle leaves. The animal cries mix with your own sounds now. Instinct urges you to bite the head off first, but you really should take off the legs so they can’t get away. You’ll have more time to enjoy it: a shortbread cracker reenactment. I think that’s a buffalo.

“All these ups and downs, catching a wave, missing a wave… Dating you is like surfing.”

“Have you ever surfed?”

“No.”

“Exactly.”

SMITH Magazine and PBS are collecting stories of people’s digital life, but you only have 6 words to share within. http://www.smithmag.net/sixwords-digital-life/.

It’s like a mirror into a mirror: digitally sharing what we digitally share. The new limit is 6 words. 140 characters is too verbose. We need to compress our thoughts more, be more efficient. Soon we will be speaking in only emoticons.