A limerick, in the limerickiest fashion available

O'Conner was really quite dumb.

He drank a whole bottle of rum.

Then dreamt that Venus,

was licking his elbow,

and woke up, covered, in perspiration.

((oh man what is this even, seriously sista needsa get back in the damn saddle))

Fishhook, Picturebook

“i think things are only as hard as people make them be.”

is that right?

“mhm.”

well isn’t that something. you’re a very clever little girl.

“thanks.”

i bet you’re top of your class. are you top of your class?

“i don’t know. maybe. even if i’m not i’m pretty smart though. my teacher says so.”

your teacher? hm, well, your teacher's wrong.

"huh?"

cause you’re more than pretty smart. you’re more than pretty, too.

[she giggles] “you’re weird.”

weird? weirdly wonderful, right?

[she giggles again, jesus christ, i should just rip her from the vine right now] “nope! just weird.”

weird, huh. well your parents are pretty weird too.

“yeah. they’re pretty weird too.”

you said they put on a movie for you yesterday? do they usually do that on weeknights?

“no. they made me watch it for like an hour, too.”

they did? that’s really weird.

“yeah.”

i think i know why they did that.

“why?”

i think maybe they were doing sex things upstairs.

“ewww!”

yup, ew. I thought it was ew too when i was a little tiny kid.

“i’m not a little kid.”

you’re not? but you said sex is ew.

“it is!”

well, it isn’t for grown-ups. grown-ups know more about it.

[a wrinkle in the forehead, a frown, so so very close to that alluring no-more-ice-cream pout] “i don’t like talking about this.”

why not?

“i don’t like it. i think they were both just wrapping my birthday presents, and they didn’t want me going upstairs. they do that stuff around christmas too.”

oh, well that could be it. you’re such a little smartie. how old are you going to be?

“nine.”

that’s a wonderful age. i remember when i was nine. a friend of mine taught me a lot of wonderful secrets.

“secrets?”

yup, secrets. grown-up secrets.

[anxious, teeth on lips, tut tut don’t tear them up just yet] “why are you telling me this?”

i just want to help you grow up. you want to grow up, right? [there it is, there's that fillet mignon pout, she wants it when she doesn't even know how good it is]

“um.”
this is stuff that grown-ups know. you’re going to have to learn it sometime. i could show you now. [fillet mignon, la fille mignonne]
“um.”
don’t worry, a smart girl like you will learn really fast. here. [a friendly touch, innocent, just on the shoulder]
that’s not so bad, right? [she looks ready to cry]
“u-um” don’t cry.

Old black water, keep on rolling

The patchwork boy that I tried pot with for the second time was convinced that I had drowned in a past life. To him, this explained years of my childhood - the ones spent barefoot in a creek near my house. Shorts rolled way up past my knees, and soaked regardless.

“Those things sort of things stick with you,” he said, sober as a hearse driver beneath his Incredible Hulk beanie. We were right over a river, propped against the railing of its ailing footbridge. It had a terminal case of unoccupied youths. One of them had taken the time to graffiti a Keats poem - with meticulous, agonizing care - in the shape of a six-foot penis. It was in the middle of ejaculating the likeness of a man’s face. I can only assume it to be Keats.

And apparently, I wasn’t the only one drawn to the spot. The patchwork boy flagged me down on my way out of a psychology lecture, and said he saw me around that bridge all the time, and haha, was I out there scoping the place for trolls or something like that? Haha, yeah, something like that. I swear to you the blueprint of his hands was sketched by Da Vinci.

A few weeks later and there we were, at around two in the morning, smoking on a bridge and swapping thoughts.

“Well, I’m not phobic of the stuff, or anything like that. As evidence would show.” I gave a little ‘ta-da’ wave to the river, more curtly than I’m in the habit of being. My eyes were gritty and prickly-warm. And my head felt heavy, and hollow, like a helmet. This would be my last time smoking. “I’m not even, you know, fixated, either... I just think it’s nice.”

“Like... comforting, like?” He was an ex-English major.

“... hmmm, yeah. Kinda.”

“Maybe you drowned yourself.”

I wasn't sure how to respond to that. He had said it in all seriousness before frowning at my shoes and scratching his week-old beard. By the look of it, he realized he had kamikazed his buzz. The crickets clicked away for a long moment at either end of the bridge before he looked back up, sheepish, and then frowned again.

“What, what’s so funny?”

I saw the Seine when I was twelve. From the fishtank window of a foreign car, in a seat with no seatbelt, but it was lovely. I savaged the soles of my feet on the crocodile rocks of the American River, and minced around like a minesweeper for about a week after, but that was good too. I hear the Potomac is gorgeous.

Virginia Woolf just wouldn’t suit my style. I’d like to think I was Huck Finn, instead.

A scalpel blade laid beside my silver spoon

In Geography he found a spot on his arm: Santa red and sore.
(“Probably just a mosquito bite. Try not to pick at it.”)
but it itched, and he did.

In the shower he found another one: near the soft bend of his elbow.
(“Hey twerp, c’mon in there! You’re gonna make us late!”)
and they were, but not after he scrubbed hard as he could with a washcloth.

In Algebra he was too busy scratching: his arm and his elbow, and his neck,
(“-- pages... be sure to follow the directions on... for numbers ten through --”)
and he forgot, and was given his first check minus.

At a birthday party he brought a gift: a model airplane kit.
(“Oh man too cool! Thanks! I’m gonna make some like those jets at, at the parade, that -- oops --”)
and it slipped, because there were bloodspots on the wrapping paper.

At dinner there was a phonecall: his English teacher.
(“-- yes sir, I -- no sir, I will talk to him. I’m very sorry. It won’t happen again. Yes, thank you.”)
but he didn’t hear, he was sitting behind his untouched casserole scratch-atch-itching.

At the bus stop something in his shoulder ripped: his anterior deltoid.
(“Kid, you gettin on or what?”)
and he did, with a dead arm and his backpack hanging crooked.

In English he got his paper back: (“See me after class.”)
the ink was red, and so was the caked-on blood and hair and fingernails.
He put his head down on his desk and scraped a steely Jack-o-Lantern protractor against the deli meat of his thigh.

In gym he was given detention: Refusal to Participate.
(“Wouldn’t even pick up the ball!”)
His right arm was gone.

On the weekend his parents talked to him.
(“We’re just concerned, champ.” “You know we love you.”)
He nodded. But very slowly: most of his trapezius muscles had been peeled away. And his quadriceps, and hamstrings, and abdominals, and an ear. One cheek was gone. His throat caved inwards like a second mouth. His scalp was wet and pink.
(“You just seem so different now.”)

At clarinet practice she found a spot on her wrist: Santa red and sore.

(I've been reading Haruki Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. No, it has nothing to do with this post. But it is so sprawlingly wonderful that I would feel compelled to mention it even if I was writing about Dullard McBorington's Adventures at the DMV.)

Oh, Sinnerman,

The burial was brief and clean. And sudden, but Clark’s brother had been such a well-liked young man, that it was no bother for folks to drop everything and attend.

After the ceremony an uncle from Topeka muttered: “So damn young.” and when his wife scolded him, said: “What? He can’t hear me from here.”

It took a moment for Clark to realize they were talking about the priest. At first, he thought the man had meant Eugene. He snorted. On his way back to the house, Clark passed the parked cars and the men propped up against them. They were smoking and cursing and gossiping.

“Goddamn railroads.”

“Goddamn railroads.”

“-- too cheap to put up some -- some signs, or fences, or something like --”

“Not even fourteen, you know that?”

"Lemme get one of them Marlboros, Lou."

“You wanna feel sorry? Boy. You feel sorry for the brother. He was right there when it happened.”

“Christ. I heard that too. Tried pulling him out of there, and just couldn't.”

"Lord."

Clark went inside.

There had been mourners in the den, earlier, and so he took care to be silent as he passed in the hallway. But it was empty. So Clark relaxed, and reached his room, and felt himself tighten up again when he saw the door was open.

Roy was sitting on Clark’s bed. His back was facing the doorway, so Clark could not see his face, but Roy was the only boy in five counties that had the body of a man, at only fourteen, and a back that fearsome and shoulders that broad and hardened. At the moment they were trembling like a child’s.

Clark stood cautiously in the doorway, watching. “Parents are waitin on you, Roy.”

Roy was quiet.

The wood beneath Clark’s hand was turning warm by the time he bit the bullet and said “Roy? Why’re you in my room?” Then he frowned, thinking that maybe he should have said that to begin with. “Parents’re waitin out front.”

“Eugene’s too.” The man-boy’s voice cracked for the first time in years. “It's Eugene’s room, too.”

“Yeah, well you’re parked on my bed.”

Roy went quiet again. His shoulders were shaking and caving, slowly, like steel girders. Clark decided it would be wise to clear him out.

“We all had a rough day, Roy.” His dress shoes clacked against the hardwood as he walked over, and patted the older boy on the back. “Go on, parents’re wai--”

In Roy’s big monster hands - all crumpled, and dirty - was the train schedule. His shoulders rose and fell a little faster under Clark’s palm until Clark took it away, slowly.

They sat quiet.

“What’s...” Roy’s throat backfired like a truck as he cleared it. “What’s this doin under your pillow.”

Clark’s mouth would not work right for him. It squirmed. He took a breath, to try and steady it. “Roy--”

Then his nose exploded into the parade glitter-and-gold of fresh pain, and his sight went liquid and useless as he crumpled back on the floor. It was like Roy had driven a railroad spike through his head.

“You killed him, didn’t you!”

The shriek sent another guncrack of pain through Clark. He had been clutching his face, shielding it, on raw, panicked instinct, but then pulled his hands away in time to watch the creature of a boy pounce and throttle his collar.

“You’re a murderer. A goddamn murderer.” Roy’s grizzly arm cocked back, way up high, glossy tears smeared across his cheeks and the backs of his fists. “Your own brother, your own brother and you murd--”

Roy flinched and reeled when the other boy spat full-on in his face.

His arm wilted.

Clark had just spat at him, spat full-on in his face.

He sat back and stared.

“Prove it,” Clark whispered, and licked his lips. They were wet with his own blood. “Prove it, you dumb son of a bitch.”

Roy looked down at the little brother of his best friend. There were a few family traits that they carried. A sharp nose. Rounded ears. But the most of him, most of Clark, did nothing to resemble Eugene. Absolutely nothing. Looking down at him, Roy thought that he did nothing to resemble even a person. His eyes were sharp and flat and plastic like fishing lures.

They sat quiet.

“Get off me, Roy.”

He did. Slowly. Clark found his feet and stood, watching the boy who was watching him. They sat quiet.

The younger boy uncrumpled himself, squaring his shoulders. His chin was high and red and his eyes were hard and oily. He licked his lips again.

“Parents’re waitin on you, Roy.”

The train schedule was still sitting on the bed. Clark glanced at it, and then looked back at Roy with a silent dare.

“I’m gonna go wash up, now.”

But he stayed for a moment. Still watching Roy. Still daring him to try and make a sound story from such a wild, whirlaway tale, to try and sound believable as the grief-addled best friend. He stared hard at Roy.

Then Clark turned and he left. He was not there to see Roy’s wet face, shaking back-and-forth-and-back, his lips curling up and mumbling “Won’t do you no good.”


((Okay, this is a strange one. Last October I scraped up a ~5000 word story detailing all the events up to this point, and left it alone at the end of Clark’s shoving his brother in front of a train. I thought "Hey, the ending's only gonna be 300 words or so. I can mop that up later." And I did!... just... with an extra 700 words or so. But I still did!... just... nine months later. Ahem.

Still, I really think it's better as a stand-alone, flash-fiction type deal. It’s pretty much the whole story run through a compactor. And therefore tastier. I was gonna take a pair of shears to those 5000, anyway.))

Laaaast night

I dreamed that I was dreaming of you. You are not a man or a woman or a girl or a boy, or even a person, really, but the underdone meatmachine of my brain that has lately been nothing but trimmings has seen fit to fumble with its loveletter to you. (That is a lie. I call it a loveletter only because it would not fit on a gravestone.) It starts off:

Dear you - that is, dear Ursa Major, dear poppy tea, dear works of Ozymandias, dear sandalwood, dear Thursday in a foreign city, dear deceit, dear lovers, dear crust of bread, dear corpse of Christ, dear teeth of tigers, dear yellowfurnace stitch dug deep into the side of the man in the panic of becoming prey, dear kerosene, dear masochist, dear toolbox of the witchdoctor, dear spice of spring, dear oil of autumn, dear satin patch of sunlight in the flowerbanquet courtyard, dear cat lounging languid as a molasses pharaoh in the satin patch of sunlight in the flowerbanquet courtyard, dear vinegar, dear plague, dear boy on the swing at sunset with only anger to come home to, dear stumble in the gravel on the way to school, dear wideeyed girls graverobbing mother’s makeup box, dear cold cradle, dear draining heart, dear knotted mouth, dear empty house, dear boy and dear girl and dear boy and dear boy and dear girl and dear girl and dear twisted sheets, dear safety, dear ache, dear safecracker’s candied coaxing, dear rip in the hole in the wound of the surgeon’s helpless masterpiece, dear murder, dear gunman, dear hungry warclub scepter, dear tyrant’s baby rattle, dear red on the matador’s cape, dear bull on the matador’s sword, dear manic napalm hound staggering rabid in the spinal column streets of a city as dim and deep and strangling as the bastard sea, dear hound with lungs running short and hard like diseased engines, dear hound with eyes hot and small and coarse like pennies on a sidewalk, dear hound with litfuse tongue dangling like an honored guest of the gallows (because even in the bastard sea there is the cruel guerrilla gauntlet of a Cairo funeral pyre in your belly and such dazzling wondrous worldbreaking thirstiness

That is as far as I got.

Perhaps another medium would be better understood. I have shameful little skill with loveletters; I am much better with words.

("Last night I dreamed I was dreaming of you" is all Tom Waits but sweet Jesus can you blame me for stealing it)