The Truth Told By a Liar

Water's Edge

2011-11-23T00:23:00.001-08:00

Gliding on the bay, we're floating
Underwater I'll drown
Dig your oar in deep my darlin
Through that hush of sound

Lying on the dock we're smoking
Losing all track of time
Kiss me so sweet my darlin
Lost on our magic isle

So whisper your darkest secrets
Wind is blowing on our side
Haunt me by moonlit shadows
Bodies meeting, intertwined

We're pointing at the stars
As we wander arm in arm
In the night we'll play by the Milky Way
Oh let's go fly to Mars
We don't need no train or cars
Just you, me, and the sea
And the milky way

Sighing, back home we're walking
Never, never to return
Hide you in my back pocket
Find another way to burn

We're pointing at the stars
As we wander arm in arm
In the night we'll play by the Milky Way
Oh let's go fly to Mars
We don't need no train or cars
Just you, me, and the sea and the Milky Way

2011-11-23T00:21:00.001-08:00

Skills to pay the bills.

2011-11-23T00:18:00.001-08:00

Smoke rings within smoke rings.

My girl JoJo is tres talented, no?

Found a bird

2011-11-23T00:14:00.001-08:00

And I love him.

Maniac Maxmillion Squeaker McGee

A.K.A

Chubs

Fire Escape

2011-11-23T00:05:00.000-08:00

I've lost friends& I've won friends
I've thrown them away like used shirts
I never meant to hurt you darlin
But I try to go first

The day came to leave you honey
It's never what I had in mind
Too bad you couldn't change back my babe
But that would've hurt your pride

The trees change, the wines age
You stalk a new prey from your lion's cage
Wet noses touch, my heart erupts
Stalled out on the side when you hit the clutch
Thrown at the mirror, my heart so dear,
You do what'll cause a tear

You're perched out on the sidelines
You're watching me like I'm cabaret
Your touch, now a vacuum
Why'd you sit there just watching me pray?

The trees change, the wines age
You stalk a new prey from your lion's cage
Wet noses touch, my heart erupts
Stalled out on the side when you hit the clutch
Thrown at the mirror, my heart so dear,
You do what'll cause a tear

Poison Porcupine

2011-11-23T00:02:00.000-08:00

Do what you don't want to do
Think of what you've done
See what you made me do
Don't even try to run

Don't tell me what to do
I'll stomp you out so fast
Next time it will be worse for you
Just think of our happy past

I curled up in a ball
I went as far as I could go
I know you heard me crying
But you didn't care. No.

Don't say it's over now
I loved you so bad
Loved you til the sun went down
Love you til be both went mad

Duet with Me

2011-11-22T23:47:00.001-08:00

Love is like a duet
Sing it til it's through
Each one knows their counterpart
To harmonize as two

The parts may join for moments
In octaves or the same
I like the way you look at me
The notes lie down their claim

If you don't know I love you
I hide the tremble well
My stomach knotted in my throat
My heart a gong, a well

Your drums they hit me, hit me
Hit me to the core
The rhythm pounding, pounding
Pounding, waves on shore

If only wings you'd sprout
And fly out in the sky
And grab me tightly by the hair
And never say goodbye

The End of Suffering

2010-04-09T13:42:00.000-07:00

Today I would like to commit to taking responsibility for my own happiness. I would like to take today to quash those voices that tell me I must be active, productive, effective, responsive, and lucrative to be happy. I would like only to stretch my abilities until it hurts me, physically, in that lovely way that muscles hurt after exercising and are only helped with a big dose of potassium from a banana.

No longer do I need to ask "what if?" questions that only bring pain. From now on I vow to take deep breaths and think clearly before speaking. I will no longer act out of fear and hurt; now only out of joy and love. If others throw punches, I vow to duck! If someone doesn't like my choices, I'll just remind myself that they are my choices, and I will take responsibility for them--- that a difference of opinions is not a matter of emotions or cruelty or pain. It is a matter of rationale disparity, and it is with my rationality, not my ache-exhausted heart, that I vow to examine them.

Each day I vow to sing, and stretch my abilities. I vow to spend twice as much time as I spend watching television and indulging my procrastinating, lazy foolish habits, into being creative and synthesizing new ideas. I vow for every hour devoted to house-cleaning, there shall be an hour devoted to house dirtying. I shall wash my face and hands in the morning, and smear paint across the floors and pages at night. I shall watch my sloppy spoken words, but I shall write recklessly, wildly, freely.

I shall spend time in the sun, drinking it through my skin, and I shall burn away the darkness with harsh, painful, raw garlic. I shall begin creating a new past, one that starts at the beginning of my happiness, and I shall never forget the place from which I spawned. I shall laugh at my shortcomings and never forget that I carried that weight that led me to be exactly where I am in this moment.

Sun Worship

2009-10-07T23:15:00.000-07:00

Smelling mighty nice. How did I get so lucky as to have this bright afternoon promontory to my windy-less self? Thinkest thee my rain will burn red, awakened from its hibernatory slumber as the Sun hits iris and begins the release of eye-opening cortisol? Come in, come in me too. Flood my gates, my insides through my skin sides, organs glowing red beneath the vesicles stretching.

Glorious Sunlight, do not wane, for in you holds the release of pain. For you, if no one else would do it, could suck the snake’s poison from my veins with violent white pearlies, slice my skin into a bloody cross with sharp, smooth stones, draw the liquid death from tired capillaries all to ready to give up their function to the sweet paralyzation of the serpent’s snarl, angrily awaken me from selfish slumber.

And you, if no one else would, would burn out the snake’s brain after saving me, using that same rock to puncture its skull.

In the shadow I see thee, frenzied and still-stalked, while I yearn for remembrance in the sun’s gaze. As my fingers stiffen with cold, cracking into eggshells, I beg for her mercy, not for thine.

Peruvian Ruckus...

2009-09-14T01:39:00.000-07:00

A steady hand is a handy thing when filming off the cuff performance...

A steady hand is a handy thing when filming off the cuff performances... :)))

Sticky and Sweet

2009-03-05T13:45:00.000-08:00

Sticky and sweet, the ulsifying smell of Day Lilies choked Sandra as she struggled to sit still. Dinnertime at her aunt’s was always a trial. Never quite dispelling old Muriel’s doubt, she took the blame for her family’s failings. Muriel’s glance never failed to spit fire.

“How is it, Sybil, that you’ve gotten so thin? You must eat more. Is Sandra’s cooking that terrible?” Muriel shoveled more steak and asparagus on her sister’s plate, looking hurt at what she considered to be an insult to her own cooking.

Sandra, seeing her mother’s dismay at the growing pile on her plate as if Muriel planned to force-feed her the rest, intercepted a ladleful. The mashed potatoes landed on top of her cold, wet salad with a splat. Shocked, Muriel’s eyes turned to slits. “You greedy girl. You could have waited your turn. How dare you cut in—“

“I’m fine, Muriel, darling. Thank you. I’ve been eating a bit slower, that’s all. Nothing to be concerned about.” Sybil shot her daughter a look of secret gratitude, but if flies past the girl, her head bowed determinedly against Muriel’s vitriol as if to slice through a wall of icy wind.

“But the girl shouldn’t be allowed to do that, Sybil,” Muriel says. Returning her attention to the girl, “Your mother may run your house, but I run mine and you are to show respect, do you understand, young lady?”

Sandra hurriedly chewed her steak and nodded placidly, knowing if she looked up she would betray her inner contempt. Little did Muriel realize that she, Sandra, ran the house now: fed the dog, cleaned the bathrooms, vacuumed the floors.

Chewing thoroughly, Sybil allowed her sister to do most of the talking. When the steak would stick in her throat, she’d clutch the napkin in her lap, pressing the neatly embroidered “M” and “O” into her thigh while Sandra stared at her own lap, trying to picture Muriel as a newly engaged woman fervently embroidering towels and linens with her new surname. Then her reverie would break, her mother’s shapely fingernails catching at her skin and drawing blood beneath the floral print of her skirt. She could smell her mother’s pale-faced fear.

Muriel, meanwhile, detected nothing, or if she did pick up on her sister’s distress, she too chose to engulf it in conversation. Petty matters to drive away the fear. Her pedigree dog’s claim to first prize in a recent show, the new narcissus bulbs she planned to embed about the marble backyard birdbath, the “diamond” earrings Uncle Seymour just bought her that looked so real. And no, he wasn’t going to be back soon, but he’ll be back soon enough, thank you. Just as soon as he gets finished with his project in Nebraska, you know how it goes with artists and delays.

Uncle Seymour was a photographer who, over the years, had grown more dastardly handsome and more absent as Muriel’s waist-size had grown. Sandra had liked to sit in his lap when she was young and have him tell her stories of each photograph he’d taken, his unassuming voice ranting about the lighting, the patterns, the focus, the animals. Most of all, she liked him to tell her what lay outside of the frame. Was a chipmunk or raccoon hiding on the other side of that tree trunk there? Did a butterfly get caught in his hair or a snake startle him from the brush?

As a result, Sandra liked to watch the world through her own lens, making two L’s with her fingers and pressing each pointer to the opposite thumb. Imagining she was doing just this, she viewed her aunt and mother.

The table was illuminated by five floating candles gliding back and forth to bump the glass anew each time her mother swallowed, as if the dining room table were a sloop at sail on the high sea. Sybil and Muriel, although phenotypically related, had each taken all of her opportunities growing up to diverge in personality, temperament, looks and identity.

Muriel, heavy set with fluffy dark hair, had become a hairstylist after marrying Seymour. Although she’d finished high school, she’d never quite found her forte, and her unexpended energy was released as frustration to those around her. She still cut hair in her living room on the weekends, despite developing arthritis in her left hand. Earl Grey was always prepared for her customers as she sized up their style.

Sybil, on the other hand, was slight and fragile looking, but when she was younger she’d been known to be a tomboy, always dressed in her boyfriend’s jeans and plaid flannel shirts, her hair swinging over her shoulders as she pounced her retriever in a pile of leaves. Now her hair was short and blonde, although recent developments had caused her to forgo and forget another dye job. Her roots peeked out like dark shoots of babybells from tightly packed spring snow. When she’d had Sandra she’d quit her computer-programming job and picked up a paintbrush, dashing daring abstractions that filled their house like pensive oceans before a storm or dusty deserts stirred by lightening. But even that seemed impossible these days. She looked so defeated, struggling to swallow, and her lack of formal work experience meant that social security would pay for nothing. Sandra closed her eyes and imagined she was floating away.

“Muriel, dear, will you get some more bread for us” Sybil asked. Muriel rose from her chair, and as soon as she’d left the room, Sandra sprung to her feet and hurriedly cleared her mother’s plate onto her own, sinking into her seat just as her aunt re-entered the room.

“That’s more like it, Sybil. Cleaning your plate will put the color right back into your cheeks.” Sybil smiled obligingly and changed the subject. Sandra remained silent, stuffing asparagus spears nauseously down her full throat.

After some tea and coffee, the Ehstadt’s were ready to leave the O’Flannery household.

“You’re going to let Sandra drive? Are you crazy, my dear? She’ll kill you both with her recklessness! You know how impulsive she is.” Muriel took her sister’s hand in her own.

“We’ll be just fine. We are a strong family, “ Sybil assured her, her eyes crinkling to a sunburst. She took her daughter’s arm, talking quickly to distract her sister from her hesitant steps. She convinced Muriel to leave them at the door, and with one last kiss and a scowl of disdain for Sandra, she clicked down the hallway to tidy up the kitchen.

Out in the cold front yard, Sandra breathed a sigh of relief. Her mother was silent now, focusing on getting down the stairs, and Sandra surveyed the dark lawn. “Mom?”

“Yes baby?” Her mother leaned heavily on her for support.

“When is Dad coming for another visit?”

Her timidity eluded her mother, who shrugged and pulled at her daughter’s sweater with another step. “Soon, sweetheart. You know this has been hard for him to deal with.”

What about me? Sandra thought, but appalled at her own selfishness, she remained silent. She and her father were not speaking much after a recent spat. He’d moved out almost a year before and only visited the house during the day, when Sandra was in school. She had insulted his new girlfriend, and he’d refused to speak to her since, arguing that if she wanted to be an adult, if she wanted to be his friend, she would have to treat him and his friends with respect. But all Sandra wanted now, after years of fighting for independence, was to be a child again, to be her Daddy’s little girl.

“Ok, hun, now put your hands under my armpits and your knees against mine.”

“I know, I know.” The wind was whipping through the threads of their clothes, their teeth, their hair, slowing their blood like lumber piled in a river’s impasse. She lowered her mother into the passenger side gently, and strapped her seatbelt around her waist. Sybil’s stomach grumbled, and Sandra knew she would have to prepare something of the right consistency once they got home.

Slamming the passenger door, she waved at Muriel who had suddenly appeared at the window. With an inaudible Harrrrumph!, her aunt turned away. Sandra slowly sunk into the muddy path, crossing to the driver’s side to steer her mother home.

When they were both in the car, Sandra paused with the key in the ignition. “Mom, why don’t you tell her?”

“Tell her what?” Sybil asked, avoiding the question.

“Tell her what’s happening to you. Maybe she could help.”

“Darling, if she wanted to see what was happening, she would see. We cannot force our problems upon others. We must silently bear them, and pray for relief.”

“You’re just as afraid of her interference as I am”

Sybil looked at her daughter with disapproval. Then, with a sigh, she leaned her head against the passenger seat, her neck exposed like a turkey’s giblet. “I’ll tell her then if you need her help.”

“I don’t need her help. But I think you need each other. Think of how aimless she is without Uncle Seymour. She would attack our weaknesses as if she were fighting a war. Who knows? Maybe she’d even find a cure for you.”

Sybil laughed and didn’t say what Sandra knew they both were thinking. She was choked again by the smell of Lilies.

Skunk Weed

2009-03-05T12:41:00.001-08:00

Suddenly I am overwhelmed
By the skunk weed’s smell.

Its pounding in my ears dries
my tongue, and I get lost
in it, sickening. Why did I just now
choose to clog my brain’s arteries,
alone now on my couch, compelled
to keep writing, but only
by the gridlocked lines crisscrossing
in crests and waves across the page.
The blue-cheese burger weighs heavy
my stomach, dragging
my eyes shut and my
dreams distant to immediate.
I think of language unfolding
the page like llamas
running on a landscape,
like Lamda’s drawn
across the wall.

Why is the change from
activity to activity not
enough to spark me,
trip my wires,
snapping to?

Since it is as hard as Kat Williams says to get unhigh,
I’d best pick my highs wisely.

A New Page

2009-03-05T12:33:00.000-08:00

Up until now
my heart was
squandered.
Boys and men
who felt for me
the pull of intrigue
tug of desire,
nothing more perhaps?

Two in madness
Circular union,
Current of electricity.
Touch of mouths between legs
sparking electricity
without energy expense.

Two hearts beating in synch
Pump blood to muscles
Straining and tearing

Take Me Away

2009-01-29T08:08:00.000-08:00

Mama I walked thru the storm all day
For you there is nothing that I wouldn't say
For you there is nothing I wouldn't do
Just gimme your best advice, I need you

So don't go
Oh oh
So just don't go oh ohohohohoh
(Take me away, take me away, i'm gone)

Papa I heard you sing your sorrows
Haha I know you'll be good tomorrow
Sista please don't walk the line on home
Brotha please don't leave me all alone

So take me away
Take me away
Take me away

You leave me with nothing at all
Leave me with nothing at all

Singing woah
Take me away
Take me away

I'm gone

love

2009-01-07T17:44:00.000-08:00

red, red wine
is luster to you
is just what we do
to feel so good
o im feelin

i love to be in love with love, that's it
you know in love I am the finest pick
the tree's on fire, it's burning red
if i could just crawl in your head

if you be so certain,
then you must be deserting
and what can i do but bid you adieu

i do it for that sound
so play loud
it might be you in the crowd

so pluck me slow if you know me
play me sweet and oh so slowly
you know you gotta hold on me
my neck between
your fingertips
on my lips

i play for you
it's like an oak tree overgrown
and you know it's
a list too oversown

and if you be so certain that you must be deserting
what can i do but bid you adieu

so pluck me slowly
play me sweet and slowly
you got a hold on me

Drink up

2009-01-07T17:43:00.000-08:00

You know we talk a lot of bullshit
but when it gets down to it
you tell me, Beau, are you playing that shit
i wanna know what makes you tick

so just drink up my baby
let's go, let's move along
we're closing at the end of this song

too soon we fall into the clutches of the earth
too soon we fall into the darkness of desert

so take a drink, take a bow,
and go riding down the road
flirtin for certain

so drink up my baby
let's go let's move along
let's drink up my baby
the world is ending at the end of this song

i know you wanna know. wanna know

drink up... let's go let's move along
drink up my baby
i ain't gonna cry at the end of this song.

(oh no.)

Sashay

2009-01-07T17:41:00.000-08:00

honey and roses never smelled so sweet
when we're dancing cheeck to cheek
you salsa up and down all round town
and you correct me when i look the frown

sashay with me thru the mountains
sashay through the the grounds
sashay through with me thru midnight hours
sashay with me and go-! g-o!

lilies and flowers never shined so bright
when you're with me all night
saw nectar and poppies of the day
reminds me to play

sashay with me through the mountains
sashay with me through the fields
sashay with me through the
longest night of the year

do we do?
you, with you
lying on the glass'
rippling rain

so sashay with me through the open fields
sashay with me away through the deepest water
sashay with me all thru the fire
sashay with me in circles
circles

twist me a hot spot
twist me what i like, stop
taking the burning sweet
to a summer treat creamsicle beat

sashay with me
want you to
come
sashay with me

open your eyes
to my surprise
sashay with me
sashay, sashay with me

Cuz the truth is all there is

2009-01-07T17:40:00.000-08:00

You’ll find the truth

I’ve got nothing to hide
Look deep within my eyes
You can follow my thighs
Don’t listen too close to what I say

You’ve got nothing to hide
Look in my eyes
Look in my eyes
We’ve got mountains to climb
Just behind me

Oh oh oh

Oh oh hohohohoh oh ohhhhoh

We’ve got nothing to show
I said woah
Down on the down low
Some corrections to solve
It’s not between the fall
And winter days

I contemplate you
In my mirror
You haven’t got a clue

I’ve got nothing to hide
Look between my eyes
You can’t undo

But with you
I see the prince of fools
Walk a mile in my shoes (oh)
Walk a mile in my shoes (oh)

Oh h o h o h o h h o o h o h
Oh h ohohohoho

Sideward Motion

2008-09-27T17:13:00.000-07:00

(Sideward Motion
A sestina, 12.7.04, final draft)

I had the aisle seat and the view was only of treetops, not road
on my long trip to your kitchen. In my haste I shattered and knee’d
the oven door, flailing where you’d been cooking beans- always pinto-
knocked the towered sliced cucumbers into a stream of light in the sink
With slick seeds spread in the explosion against the steel, you took a picture
and when we finished marveling the vegetables, they were tossed

We love the movement, to have our lips dragged apart, then tossed
together on our hidden shipment in the tremulous sea of a long dirt road
We are terrible with words- stories are relayed by the window’s moving picture,
and the slow burn of breaks serves to satisfy any earth-dragged need
Beyond that found on the flesh cushion of the hard-backed benches is a sink
of mind and activation, entanglement of worry and future lucidly split into two

It was only your stagnant breath- your dry palm and cold back too
which drove me to act until every capillary burst, precaution tossed
With an unknowing punch that flies from wall to wall, to sink
into a socket with eyeball freshly removed. Vulnerability rode
Honesty, tearing at its jugular with its sharpened teeth, to knead
out soft veins, peel at them like cannibals in our prune-dripping picture

Headlights silhouette a kitten- and yesterday’s gruesome puppy picture
stops the hurried dialogue, as well the car. The mother’s teat to
lip stream of milk is guzzled; satisfaction of the babe’s endless feed need.
The monkey-squeaking fuzzball is squirming by our tire, then is tossed
from the burnt concrete illumination by a mother now suspicious of road
By the nape of its as-yet-un-gnawed neck, they disappear into the sink.

I used to hate the mornings you’d wake up and put all your butts out in my sink
before I’d had a chance to wash the runny eggs melting from the plate’s picture
But after waking to the nude strips of a sunrise pointing to the leaf strewn road
we’d never go to work, instead speed heat stuffing our lungs with cold air, to
Swerve to a humming heartbeat, past the whip-trails of sparks wind-tossed.
To reject anything outside of the room is to remember what we really need.

The speed heat slows the step and melts sweat from sculpture as we knead
each other into abstract stockpiles seven stories high. As five fingers sink
into an unsuspecting thigh of corrugated sand, we are lightly tossed
about like an island cut loose from its land bridge anchor into a picture
of pleasure forbidden to those across the street in prayer. Osmosing two
fingers, laying with only the music of our breath and the silence of the road

Promises all tossed to bounce orbits, aching for the dissenting road,
they sink into our big empty eyes with the swooping and spreading of the Two

Please be ok.

2008-09-27T16:47:00.001-07:00

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Winter vacation, later. I have been considering for hours what to do. Not carefully of course, and so I dawdle and I saunter, and I enjoy myself, enjoying a break from my responsibility. Krista and Graham's father makes us tea, strong, as usual: always loose, and steeped for at least ten minutes, then a shitload of milk and sugar the way they make it in India, he says. It is a long time that I have not seen this girl, the oldest of their house. She’s a tough one to stay in contact with, for she abhors the phone, and refuses to tell me anything of consequence if we’re not standing face to face. Of course, when standing face to face, our sudden closeness overwhelms our recounts.
And now, it’s morning, late. New Year’s Eve. We go to Mel’s in the morning for hot waffles with bananas and whipped cream, endless cups of coffee brought by the blinking saddle bag-eyed owner, while the blonde brings us water in three inch tall cups. Conveniently the liquor store is next door. I’ve been shooting whiskey all winter and can’t remember the last time I’ve had wine, or champagne. Krista is eager to show off her skills, having just returned from Australian wine-tasting classes and I’m happy to oblige. For myself and the party, I pick a Chilean organic red. I listen as she describes oaky, tarred, bloody wines, wondering all the while whether tethering tastebuds with language limits them. Is it true that, like coffee and wine, all these things that come from far away we consume with such pride because they are not organically ours? In a world of metalogues, this culture can become one of taking and not giving. Here we are, absorbing relentlessly, demandingly and decidedly consuming everything we can get our hands on that is not ourselves with such enormous passion for the unknown, not even knowing what to expect, or why we expect it. Here we are, invading the world with our stupid little children ideas, not even able to implement democracy in our own country, and yet proclaiming it forth while abroad. Here we are killing innocent people, in the name of democracy, this idea that these people and our people should have the right to vote for whatever the fuck they want, but who can stop them from rigging the voting machines? Here we are sitting before the TV, listening to Bush saying nothing, doing nothing, intending nothing. Yes, indeedy, please don't write grafitti for the leading authority in Buddhism, Mr. Reknown recommends not just non-violence but Resignation!! Lie down at the feet of destruction, people! Why is the world so determined for stagnation? Oh, tell us again how Hamas’ party must change their beliefs, tell the world's people that they voted for the wrong thing! No, of course master, the people cannot think for themselves.
In the midst of buying the bottle I get a phone call. My fake I.D. wouldn’t have worked anyway so I run out into the sunlight, the planes gone and the air free of air traffic. I am light! The silence is amazing!
“Are you Cynthia’s daughter?” The woman on the line asks me.
"Yes."
“I’m sorry to tell you honey, but your mom has gone to the hospital. She’s very sick.” I only hear the last part. Of course she’s sick. “Her breathing has been very, vary bad all day and we finally sent her to the emergency room.”
It happened.

I have to go, I know I have to go. I rush back in, flustered, panting.
“We've got to go. Can you give me a ride to the train station?
Krista takes her time paying for the wine. "What for?" I tell her what I've just heard, but her eyes are not as wide as mine. “She’ll be ok, won’t she?” Her ease makes me antsier and she tells me she’ll take me back to the house where I can get a glass of tea to calm down. I don’t answer because I don’t know.
When we arrive back at the house, I run inside, slipping on the ice and banging up my knee on the stone steps I always fall down in the winter time, acrid salt in my mouth from the walkway. I just keep going. Her mother stops me at the door with more questions, “Are you Ok?”
“It doesn’t matter how I am.” I answer, shuddering her off and hurrying to my squat. My stuff is amassed in the corner of the family room at the far wing of the one story house, and I plop down invisible on the mattress, invisibly wedged between the pool and ping-pong tables, and pack a bag. I need to go. Shit. Shit, shit.
“So do you think that someone could drive me to the train?”
“You really need to keep your stress low. Have some de-stressing tea.” Distressing tea. My friend chimes in, “In fact, take the whole box!”
“Thank you so much," I say slowly, "But I don’t know what I would do with a box of tea right now. Could you drop me off? I have to hit the ATM too, to pay for the ticket.” Mother and daughter stand over the teakettle, their hands nervous, not knowing what to do as I round the water-cooler and compost to check the schedule on the wall. "There's one in fifteen minutes. I think I'll make it."
“I have to run to the gym. Why don’t you take the car?” She puts her hand on my shoulder, suddenly rooting me with a gravitational reminder.
A wave of relief floods me- driving into Boston will save me so much time. “Won’t someone need it to get around? It’s New Years after all.”
“No, fuck it.” She leans in, grinning. “I don’t want to drive tonight anyway. I’ll see if Kush can do it.” I want to slap her face, wake her up to the fact that it just doesn’t matter, that there are bigger things at stake than how much inebriety one body can take.
“Have fun, ok? I’ll be fine.”
I must not have sounded convincing because she squints her eyes at me and asks, “Are you sure you don’t want me to come in with you? It could be good to have someone there with you.”
Bad idea. It would only compromise my own ability to stay calm to have an outsider to pity me. I don’t need my hand held. “This isn’t about me. I’m the one that’s ok, remember?” I decide to jet before I get bitchy, before I start taking it out on her that in this world we are all ultimately alone in our minds, our bodies, our actions, our coffins.

My hands are trembling as I take the wheel. Spinning along icy lanes of pavement, I start receiving phone calls from family and friends, wondering about her status, asking if I know what’s going on. Telling them all the same thing with anger in my voice, "I will find out and let someone know," I hang up the phone with a sharp stab of the thumb, so much less cathartic than slamming phone into the receiver of now obsolete land lines. My family doesn’t live in the area, I am the only one here in these hundred miles.
Graham has given me the Garden State soundtrack. Just what I need, crazy people music. The first song that comes on is Coldplay’s Yellow, and first thing I see when I get to the hospital is that yellow. That sick yellow. Not the yellow of straw, or blonde hair or sunrises or rust or stickers. It is the yellow of sallow, clammy skin. The yellow of a woman who cannot breathe, the yellow that mixes into veins stifled by a tourniquet, the yellow that drizzles from a nose.
In the elevator from the parking garage I begin to shiver, trembling in the stillness of my vertical motion. No one will tell me which room is hers, but I find her, bursting through the yellow curtains like they are the entrance to a saloon because I feel fucked up about seeing her hollow body made of pure light with no energy left to focus within and expel out. I can’t even be sure she sees me, or that she knows I’m there, but for the tiny, tiny squeezes of my hand as I watch this bird struggle with a cough.
My phone rings, and the doctors are pissed. But I don’t pay any mind. The nurses and doctors scuttle me out into the waiting room, pissed. I’m making noise. Imagine. Patients that can hear noise of people that are not sick. Why is everyone so afraid to hurt her? Even is she is physically fragile, clearly she is resilient enough to withstand any bullshit, any disappointment. For what is more disappointing than losing yourself, your body, your control? Even if you still have your mind. It's my mother’s best friend calling from Egypt, and I can’t even get a word out, because each time I try to say how she is, I want to make it sound so good in case my mother is listening. In case she, somewhere, knows I’m sticking around, and she, somewhere, knows I believe in her. Crackling over continents my voice quivers because I do not know what will happen.

When I re-enter the room, my mother is talking to a doctor. Or should I say, the doctor is talking at her. He must be only in his twenties still but definitely NOT my type. He stands over her as if he were a massive sailboat and she were but a manatee to be plowed down, barraging like he fucking owns the place, and even though she clearly cannot speak, he eggs her on. What, What, What is wrong with you? Why can’t you just tell me? He reminds me of myself when I was fourteen and impatient still. Hasn’t anyone taught doctors about bedside manner yet? Isn't the purpose of healthcare to heal? My mom is visibly upset, and when she sees me, she is already crying. Ignoring me, he presses on with the fruitless interrogation through her pale breaths and heavy tears.
I step to the other side of the bed, dishing it back to him. “Ignore this guy,” I cut in, “If you can’t talk, he’s just going to have to wait. If it takes you too long, who gives a shit. It’s his job to listen.” He stands up straight, obviously caught off guard, but I don't even bother looking at him, eyes only on my mother.
Shaking her head at me, bottom lip curled out like a wet petal to betray the white teeth behind, she is embarrassed that I am calling this man out so blatantly, so tactlessly in her defense, even though I am defending her honor and her well being. She grins. Then coughs, so weakly. My internal violence vanishes. It was the amount of air that it would take to blow away an eyelash from a dry fingertip. Is that all she can do to get the plugs of mucus free?
“Can’t you see this woman is sick?” I say accusingly, suddenly turning on the doctor, who still looks shocked at my arrival. . Make her well! I want to say to this man. If only I were wearing heels, it would complete the picture. But, instead, I am in hiking boots and a dirty shirt with this doctor looking at me abashedly. He is shocked, standing facing me from the other side of the bed, and takes an unconsciously self-aware step back from my glare. Who the fuck gave this guy a license to practice? He is irrelevant. He’s not going to help her. All the people who walk into these rooms are robed in yellow cellophane protective suits. It's not sterile, it's not even for the behalf of the patient, it's for the supposed protection of the doctors and I staying in my normal clothes and not wearing some heavy cloak of fear. I came out of this woman’s womb, what the fuck do I care what she has that she can’t give me. Fuck it. If I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die. But it's gonna be because I get hit by a bus, not because she coughs on me. I turn off my phone. Making as much of a scene as I can, I talk loudly, but my mother can only blink at me, raise her eyebrows in assent or dissent. “Is it dry?” I ask, referring to her cough. I’ve taken the doctor’s place. I do the translating for him when he misses her words, I fill in the sounds lost between her coughs, I finish the sentences she can barely start. Finally, the doctor acknowledges she is sick, sending in a nurse with oxygen and a machine for cariac arrest.
“Can’t someone get this woman a humidifier?”
The nurse's eyes move quickly down to the right. “No, we don’t have any of those. How about some Vicks?”
“That's a start. How about, I don’t know, tea?”
“No, we can’t bring tea here.”
“Why not?”
She doesn’t answer, pulling the curtain closed.
“Mamma. Are you okay? Are you gonna be okay?” She nods, and suddenly her cheeks puff out as she tries to keep in her vomit. It goes stuttering down her chin like a spilled basket of eggs. Then her eyes open, she keeps nodding as I wipe her chin. I check her call light, a poufy plastic air squeegy she can lean her head onto, and open the curtain with a flourish. “Don’t want them to forget you’re here,” I say. But then it happens again, dripping down her neck, down the crease of her chest, below the surface of her paper nightgown. She tosses her head back against the pillow, and then forward again, hunched over like a limp wrist. A younger nurse comes in and starts to clean up, smiling at us. "Do you think I can step out for a second?" She nods.
I go down and get her the tea. She breathes it in, slowly, barely diverting the steam from the surface of the cup. I know she likes coffee better, but I figure if you’re going to give a sick woman anything, shouldn’t it be chamomile? The coughing subsides a little, she is able to sleep. “She’s fine,” says a nurse. "Go home, for God's sake." I laugh bitterly in this woman’s face, and she turns her pink and yellow jumpsuited ass away. I stay with her two hours, watching her breaths and timing their rhythm.
When I do go, it is running. I forget to validate my ticket, so I can get out with only a fifteen dollar parking fee. My eyes are swollen, I try not to show it, but the man at the ticket desk holds my ticket when I take it, so it is as if we are touching. I sigh.
FUCK I say. It is an extra twenty minutes to take it the non-toll way, but I do, for who can afford to visit their dying relatives in the hospital these days for more than an hour? Have they forgotten that they have families? Is it important that some people aren’t fucking loaded, that maybe there’s a person in this million dollar hospital who doesn’t have any money to pay for it. What about them? They're trying to kill me here. There are so many people watching me stumble to the car, people trapped like dogs in cages in the kennel. It can't be cruel to keep animals in cages when we as people can live so happily in these apartment buildings, these little cubes?
When I start to drive, Yellow comes back on. She was not so yellow when I decided to turn my back on her. I didn’t not really turn my back on her, but I feel so hypocritical these days feeling like I need to take a break from all the death and pain. “Are you ever afraid that she’ll die?” asks my friend, who pumps herself up on antibiotics for common colds and sees specialists to diagnose her smoker’s cough.
“Yeah,” is all I had left to say to her, “But aren’t we all terrified of things we don’t have control over?” Instead of going in and seeing her, I had spent my morning so peacefully eating my eggs, and had it been another time, I would have been too late. Even on the day of her surgery, a week later, I didn’t show up until midnight the night before. I wanted to record her voice, and I wanted to do it when we could be alone, but why did I wait until twelve? Was I smoking? Drinking? Wasting time? I promised her I’d be back before the surgery, and when I showed up she was already in, and ten minutes later she was already out. Really out. Out of a voice. That was the New Year.
It was still the old year when I hopped into the car. Cold. Cold that freezes your bones and fogs your windshield with body heat, crystals dissolving when you rub your scarf across, making claw mark trails against the frost from the ribbing. I’ve already gotten 12 phone calls in my absence. Everyone wondering why I’m not at the party. My best friend calls me.
She is wasted. “Will you make out with me? You’re gonna get so drunk, and then you and me and Samantha are all gonna make out.”
“Umm, yo I’m on Storrow, I’d better not talk. I’ll be there soon guys.”
Kush gets on the phone. “Hey, are you Ok?” He asks.
I'll pull into the driveway and pull out my bowl. I can’t face these people until I am fucked up. Filthy old glass thing, faithful. When I go in, the first thing I’m doing is taking a shot. It will be warm in my hand because it will have been sitting in my glove compartment while I’ve been blasting heat and trying to figure out how the fuck to get back from the city down these WIN-DEE withering streets of Boston. Brick laid streets crushed beneath the foot of the Big Dig. Hmm
In my little vesicle it is dark, but for the match that I light.
I suddenly see my own face illuminated in the rearview mirror, and flip down to keep out the bright flash of my stoner bomb. What I see is not what I expected. What I see is horror, the same horror that I scorn when I look at people’s faces when I’m watching them audition for my singing group every semester, when they know that they’re doing badly. Come on guys, at least fake it, it’s a performance. I’m doing something, I think in a singsong tone, but I’m not doing it right because she’s not better. Perhaps I should be blending more. Even in the calm moments in those hospitals when I lay my starfish bodies out among the nurse’s station like a panopticon of fingertips from the palm, I could not calm. Even when she was calm, even when she was quiet. I knew that it comes in waves, and even if one may pass, another may still rise, depending on what? The moon? The trance? Her mind, her body? Her nerves, her muscles, her fucking calcium?
I put on mascara, change my sweater, put the bowl back, stick the matches in my pocket, put on lip gloss with my fingertip. The gloss sticks to my finger and I wipe it on my jeans, digging it out of the grooves with coarse cloth. I light another match, knowing they can’t see me behind the shrub blocking me from the house. I have been smoking with the window down so I can hear the music. It is eleven-thirty. I want to be drunk by twelve. I put on my happiest face, and breathe deeply every step toward the house.

Mi Padro

2008-09-27T16:45:00.001-07:00

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Why is it that I am always sitting here these Tuesday mornings, Monday nights, hoping you’ll ring me. Why is it that I wait for your unsure hum these evenings idling my apartment as if waiting for a call. Why is it that you left me here to listen to Penis-sts, puerily wasting my time, like you never do when I’m listening to your wavelengths diffusing across the air, through my cable to my computer, plugged into the same outlet as my phone, which you’re not calling. How is it that you ran from my closed eyelids, innocent in sleep, as if they were vats to be lost in when opened? When did you untangle that orange scarf you were threatening to give me from my ankles. Where did you learn to fold its curling edges so that they’d spring alive when I awoke, my palm pressing cold cotton cloth to my skull. Where do you reside, so deep in the depths of Brooklyn, lost in the suburbs with the rest of them. Wake up! Don’t describe to me the pretty girls at work. Don’t bitch about lack of the girl of your dreams when she sits in a bleach-stained slip and torn tee shirt at your feet, letting you play her like the conga, pound with your foot pedal, tabla her titties. Where are you now that the institution has cut you loose? I am restless in your absence, if only wishing to thank you for the scarf.

CHAPTER 33

2008-09-27T16:43:00.001-07:00

We rolled out of the festival early in the morning, circumambulating endlessly in traffic ordered clover patterns of road as if it were a tomb, driving toward Elvis' tomb. Exhausted from four twenty hour waking days of music and wading in the afternoon shower's mud pits, smoking cigarettes and dousing our crispy skulls in sulfur fountain water pouring down the trailer sides. Fucking gloriousness. Hell, let's go live on a honey farm down in Lousey Anna where the alligators chatter their teeth. We'll burrow in the dark mud, drink streaming clouds and dream a humming bee lullabye.
Graham and I turn up the music. The radio is utterly unsatisfying after so much bleeding, fainting passion, whirling passion, hours of nodding bodies and heads, crowds just all curving with the individuals in a yinyang cradle of movement. The landscape rolls like stacked bales of hay, and a big white bus takes us up the hill to see Elvis' shrine, wardrobe, charitable acts and gold, platinum, titanium records. I try to get us kicked out for swimming in the pool, but Graham stops me of course, herding me past the gawkers to where we waited for the bus to take us across the street.
On the way to Kurt's grandmother's in Memphis there are so many good billboards we start writing them down, mostly because they are all some combination of red and white lettering on a blue background saying something like, "Jesus Saves. Isn't it time for Jesus?"
The funniest part is, Kurt looks a little like a younger, goofier Elvis, his hair swirled and his southern drawl like fingers in a back. His grandmother seems to adore me, smiling but weary as she fusses about the house to get us showered and toweled. On the way out to dinner she stops me.
"So, honey pie. Have you heard the accent around here?" She is seated so regally in the middle of an old green velvet couch, sipping iced tea and reading a magazine. Her white hair is tucked cleanly away with invisible pins into a tiny bun at the top of her head, beaming.
"What accent? The boys are already out of the door, sitting in the car and trying to find a lighter for cigarettes between the seats or in the folds of the comforter. Oh, yeah. I love the southern accent. It's so right and slow, it just feels perfect for the summertime."
"No, I talking about the Black Accent." I stop, dead in my tracks, my hands frozen in the act of zipping my sweatshirt, not sure exactly what she's talking about. "Oh, you know darling. What do they call it around here?"
"Umm. Do you mean, Ebonics?" I ask, trying to hide the incredulousness of such a proposal in the crinkling of my eyes. We are utterly alone in this house, the afternoon sun wrinkling onto the burgundy Oriental rug through the leaves of her plants.
"Sure. That must be it." She looks up at the ceiling as if trying to see a face she'd forgotten. "Why do parents let their children learn that stuff? Having that accent makes it such that you can't get a job, and no one takes you seriously. It's an un-educated accent."
"Ebonics is an intact language in and of itself, but it has a slightly different set of rules."
"Listen to me, honey. I tutor kids in English and it drives me nuts! And these are African American kids, mind you. I tutor them, and I just have such difficulty teaching them English grammar. That accent signifies ignorance and a lack of education, and these kids certainly don't take my education." She is upset, her voice rising. "Why do these parents teach their kids such waste."
"Ok, woah. I really wouldn't go so far as to say such a thing as that. Elsie. Listen, I understand you tutor, and that it upsets you to see kids not learning what is going to be required in this horrible world of competition influenced by the invariant environmental factors of youth, but how can you judge the people you criticize and undermine without acknowledging the connection between factors of poverty and a lack of education, instead of simply race and this accent. Do you not see the social factors"" I'm really getting on a roll here, "Hell, this is the south! I'm sure you're aware of the decades and centuries, eternities of oppression right here between people you call your neighbors and your students!"
Just then the boys walk back in, trying to figure out what is taking me so long to get ready. We both straighten up and put on our masks, Elsie saying with a genuine smile and an impressed eye, "Emily honey, make sure that strap of yours doesn't slip now."
I smile back, "Oh thanks, Elsie. This was a great conversation, we'll have to continue it later." I pull on my eyebrows as we walk past her African Grey parrot. He winks as me, but I'm smoothing down hairs, thinking about the way the follicles had clung to my finger when I tried to flush them down the toilet below the giant charcoal painting of a loin-cloth sporting Black man.
"What were you guys talking about?" Asks Graham.
"Sort of something about the racial gap in Memphis. There's a definite color line here, despite the fact that the city has a majority of African Americans. Hey Kurt, you go to school in Vermont, what's with the painting of a slave in your bathroom. It was really weirding me out."
"There's a painting of a slave in your bathroom? Dude!"
Kurt turns from the driver's seat to sheepishly scowl at me. "Hey, it's not a painting, first of all. Second of all, my grandfather drew it."
"Did your grandparents have slaves?"
"No. My grandfather just died a couple weeks ago though. I think he was a really big influence on her, and she's just trying to figure out where her personal opinions lie."

Later that evening, I am hovering above a displaced kitchen chair, wondering what to do but read the book he's handed me, heavy in my hands. Kurt leans over my left shoulder. "The best story is the first one." He says. I open the first page.
"I've never really read any Hemingway." I say, turning as I speak. He's in inches, eyes looming close at this distance. The right side of his mouth twitches expectantly. He takes a step to his left, so we're facing.
"Can I kiss you?"
"No."
"Oh. I thought so." He doesn't move back.
My eyes open wider, unsure where to go. "Sorry. I can't."
"Really? Are you sure about that?"
I nod my head, fingers pressing down on the pages as if to suppress the pink flush heating my cheeks.
"But I felt something, a vibe, a connection. I don't know what." I just shake my head, afraid to speak my inappropriate sqwawk. "I was wrong?" He seems so perplexed it's as if someone'd just stepped on his favorite bug.
"I mean, I like you a lot. You're really cute, and nice, and we all had a really nice time, but..." I trail off awkwardly, thinking of Graham upstairs, knowing I can't do this. "I don't know."
His demeanor suddenly changes. He rolls back on his heels and sizes me up, pushing the sleeves of his gingham shirt up his forearms. He grins. "You're nervous."
"You're mad!" I exclaim. Hemingway falls to the floor, my hand flies to my cheek.
"Well then you must just be one of those Ba- Da- Ba personalities," He says with a scowl.

ERD 5/10/06

CHAPTER 25

2008-09-27T16:34:00.000-07:00

“Why should I have to sacrifice!?” He screams. “Why must it always be negative with you?”
“What do you mean, negative?” I am under the covers, reluctant to scuttle across the room to gather my underwear and socks. I pull the covers up beneath my armpits, sitting up straight on the mattress pressed to the floor by the moving sun streaming in the windows and flicking off the workers with my free hand. They dangle from the window sills, coarse in Carharts, restoring the facade of the building across the shaft and peeking in at our private strife.
“Close the blinds.” I add. Their whistling is audible, they’ve already seen my ass, uncovered like the moon from a crown of cloud comforters. It was a sweet awakening, drowsy, drunk on dreams and swung straight into sensuality. Before opening my eyes.
He finished buckling his cords, zips them as he crosses the room at a monotone pace to lower the blinds. Light cuts between the slats, gutting the belly of the rug, but he goes back to dressing. Annoyed, he flicks a cigarette out of the pack with his middle finger flick, lighting it as I scramble to twist the blinds closed. I am so conscious of the illuminated blue veins shimmering in my white thighs, transparent skin betraying my innards as if under a microscope.
The sad room, blue lit with the blinds closed, darkly fills with smoke. “What do you mean, negative?” I demand again. Instead of answering, he watches me fumble with my clothes. His blue eyes scrutinize, making me acutely aware of why I am not a dancer, furiously upheaving the room to find my missing thong, tossing papers and sweaters in every direction, to no avail. “Don’t look at me,” I add, avoiding his gaze that follows me like a leash. Hopping on one foot to stomp down my inverted pant leg, I zip up and straighten up, closer to feeling on equal ground.
“Don’t look at me?” He asks, incredulous. I take a step back and lean against the fridge, glad for something solid to lean on. “What are we doing here in this room? How can you push me out so suddenly?”
“I’m sorry, but I...”
“That’s what I mean.” He stabs a finger through the air as if through my cold, brittle heart.
“You’re more interested in sex than a conversation.” I accuse.
“We’re conversing right now. Come on, be rational. Why can’t we just talk?”
I want to beat him with my boot, slam it into his jaw, feigning innocence as he nervously smokes. He doesn’t ever smoke in his bedroom. Instead, I cling to my clothing, strange for a girl who cherishes the air on her skin, happy with the clothing heavily shrunk-wrapped with denim and wool. “When,” I ask, “Have you ever stayed up all night to talk to me? How many times was I late for Music Hum in the morning because you would wake up and want to fuck, knowing full well I don’t work well under pressure? That I take longer.”
“Oh, it’s not like you wanted to go.”
“ ‘Too long,’ you said.” Bitterly, I take a step, snatching a cigarette from the dashboard desktop. “I could take the time to inconvenience my education, but you can’t waste a second of sleep if it doesn’t involve immediate pleasure.”
“Oh, come on.” He protests, lighter in hand. “I needed to sleep that night.”
“Those nights. Those nights were important.” My anger is suddenly overcome by the thought of those trembling mornings, his hot breath raising my heartbeat from sleepy paralysis. I reach out my hand, palm sideways for the lighter in an effort at peace. He doesn’t get it, staring at his cigarette crackling between clenched fingers, so I tread on my heel and go to the kitchen to light from the stove. The blue flames singe my bangs, I hear them crackle, and when I come back in, we are both disgusted by the dirty air. I sit at his feet on the bed. “How can you ask for my trust when you’ve already taken it and thrown it away?”
“Is it even possible to get it back?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know.” I’m crying, dry dirty sweaty tears that turn down my puffed red cheeks.
“Why can’t it be good?” He cries. “Why can’t we live in harmony?”
“We can’t. Or maybe we can.”
“Well then, why fight?”
“Because I’m not happy and you’re oblivious. You have to have sacrifices or this isn’t a relationship!”
“Why sacrifice! I shouldn’t have to compromise myself for this. I’ve never sacrificed anything for this relationship.”
“Exactly!” I explode.
“What have you sacrificed then?”
“My soul, my heart.” I start to sob. “You’ve ruined me for love. I can never trust anyone after this. Especially not you, because you do it again and again.”
“Do what again and again?”
“Leave me at the bar when we go out together and with friends. Demean me in public and private.”
“How so?”
I stop, thinking of three minutes before and his reactions to my statements as those of irrationality, of silliness. “This is irrelevant. You can’t spare a brain cell beyond physical content, you never could. You couldn’t spare a thought for me on Valentine’s day, and yet bitch at me and pressure me to move to California with you. What have you ever done to make this relationship better?”
“I didn’t know it needed fixing.”
“Well that needs fixing!” I scream.
“Well tell me what to do to make it better and I’ll do it!”
“I can’t tell you that.” Though fully aware of the paradox moat I construct around us, I do not have the answers any more so than does he. I stand up and stick my fingers between the space between the blinds, stubbing my cigarette out on the window ledge. A little grunt escapes as I open the window to clear the room. “I don’t know.”
He leaps up angrily. “You don’t know. You don’t know, you don’t know, you don’t know! That’s all you ever say!!!”
I shake my head, blotting out the scene with my hands, pressing knuckles into soft eyelids to watch the colored lights spin. “I don’t know what to do.”
“This feels like a dream! It’s a dream!” Jumping to his feet, he flings his arms around wildly in a spin, clapping them to his forehead. “It’s the same shit as two years ago.”
I picture myself curled like a shell in the corner of my couch in my apartment. He’s right. It is the same, but at least I’m not wearing a bathrobe. I stand up, eye to eye, and grab him by his arms. “Well, what are we going to do?” Squeezing, wringing the closeness I crave from his biceps.
“Tell me and I’ll do it.”
I shake my head, feel the blood heavy and motionless in my cheeks as I drop my chin. We are still, listening to the workers outside scratching at the surface of the edifice behind the glass, then he grips my chin between pinky and thumb, forcing my neck stretch to look into his eyes. I want to sink into the fingertips, but instead look up, trying to pull him into my pupils.
He coughs, off to the side in my right ear, then kisses my neck.
I pull away. “I need to go.”
“What do you mean? Why?”
“I can’t breathe in here.”
I rush toward the door, but he grabs my arm. “Can we talk about this later?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Maybe? What the fuck? Forget this. Forget it, just go.”
“I am.” I say, running out the door, free by following my inertia.
He follows me into the hall, silently walking me to the elevator. “Wait-I...” I start to turn around but keep my body moving forward. He sneaks up on me and grabs my hand with one of his, grabs my neck gently with the other, too gently. I wish his nails were digging into the skin, sinking into the jugular.
“I’m sorry.” I say, closing my eyes to his looming face.

ERD 5/10/06

Intent on act

2008-09-27T16:08:00.000-07:00

Lapis drips from open sky
Heaving heavy on horizon
Drink my notes on lips of grain
Melted salt and sand beyond.

Face me look behind me
Take my alphabet and sigh.
Leave the only door ajar
Welcome in the flies.

Do not talk of lunch-time fear
Couched in ketchup rigatoni
When you slurp jam from my crust
Your swallows suffocate me.

ERD 4/28/05

The usual procrastination, in Harlem

2008-09-27T15:59:00.000-07:00

CONSUMPTION IS EASIER THAN CONVERSATION

We are going merely to lounge, aimless, on my roof’s roof, two flights of porch stairs and two ladders lightly bolted into brick from my door, which is now propped open with a folding chair. Cubes and I make the slow motion creak up the ladder, disturbingly jerking the iron from its niche in brick. Although I know it won’t, I wait for the structure to fall, toppling backward to let me plunge the six stories into the green molded shaft below. It doesn’t. We proceed to get comfortable on the hot tin roof, laying down our water and cigarettes and cell phones in the shade, peeling away sweaty layers and adding them to the piles beneath our sweaty backs. Not just hot, the roof is a sauna, pinning us horizontal, and the silver floor blinding in its accurate representation of sky. There’s no beer left, and I’ve put down the New York Times as I can’t stand to read any more cold truth and cold circumstances that slice only certain lives and butter others. Cube’s shoulders are sweat through, and I look at the beads already accumulated like dew in his army-short hair and eyebrows above squinted eyes, then down at my own white stomach. As I bend, the sheen bunches together to make rivers along the path of my waist, compelled by gravity to the roof beneath my back. I tell myself not to think about rolls, instead admiring the way my fine stomach hair ceases to be invisible when slicked wet, but it doesn’t work, so I stand up and stretch as best I can on our sarong island, then sit back down. Cubes hasn’t moved. As I reach over his belly, still marred from the pit bull attack, for the cigarettes, his hand snakes out to catch mine. He knows I’m trying to quit.

I say, “I feel like dying!”

He says, “Why?”

Dramatically: “Nothing is worth living for. I’m stagnant, frozen. I don’t know why I’m doing any of the things I’m doing, let
alone what I’m going to do next!”

“Well let’s start simply. What are you doing right now?”

I’m agitated, and sit up. “Nothing. Or virtually nothing. I’m working for this environmental la-di-da company my friend started, doing- of all things boring- paper products research.” I make a face, “And when I got back from my road trip they patted me on the shoulder and said, ‘Isn’t it great we’re all doing this out of the goodness of our hearts?’ Nobody warned me about that! I’ve been meaning to quit for a week. It is such a waste of my time.”

“No. I mean, what are you doing right now?”

“I’m trying to get a job, but no one is calling me back!”

“No. Right now.”

“Ahh, touché my good man. I am toasting and drinking the happy sunlight as if it were from my faucet.” It is good to remember to be obsessed with THE current state of being.

“So quit.”

“It’s not that simple. I have an obligation to finish the job I started.”

“What job? I thought you said it wasn’t a job.”

“Well it isn’t, but I have these assignments that throw me into the computer lab. Alone.”

“Wait, hold up. Let me get this straight. You work for a job that isn’t a job because they don’t pay you, only because they didn’t tell you they weren’t paying you until they’d already stolen your soul? And now they put you to work alone doing things that bore you? Can you tell me why you’re doing this?”

I reach for the Drum again, and begin the activity: bend and lick and rip the paper, pull the tobacco so like the Spanish Moss we pulled from the vines in South Carolina and lay it down in the paper canoe, tuck the corner into a circle with the left thumbnail and twist. “Oh, shut up Cubes. I don’t know why I’m doing it. Probably because I’m afraid if I have nothing to do I’ll get bored, and them subsequently, depressed.”

“Depressed? Let’s think about all the things we’re doing right now. I can think of two: Jack, and Shit. Are you getting depressed tanning on the roof, sweetheart?”

“No. Well, the sun does me good, anyway. I need to quit. You’re right.” I lay the cigarette at my side, no fire with which to ignite.

“And then we can do this everyday.”

“We already do.”

“Oh yeah.” He pulls a Marlboro from behind his ear, lighter at attention before it hits my lips. He administers the drug like a lullaby to put me to sleep, and I recline as he moves the light diagonally down.

“I’m really going to quit.”

ERD 12/11/05

Shall I be?

2008-09-27T15:05:00.000-07:00

Shall I be?

Waiting
Waiting
Waiting for that polka dot dress to dry
Humid thunderstorm

Waiting
Waiting
Waiting for web interception
Snagged with a stolen password

Waiting
Waiting
Waiting for my nose to dry
Snowboarding in a snuff box

Waiting
Waiting
Waiting for myself to die
The genome lie

Waiting
Waiting
Waiting to be skin and bones
Damn appetite

Waiting
Waiting
Waiting for the chime of dine time
Right place wrong time

Waiting
Waiting
Waiting for you to wake
It isn’t home without you

Waiting
Waiting
Waiting for the levee’s break
To be by the river drunk

ERD 11/23/06

The Arc of Godfrey DiGiorgi

2008-04-02T13:48:00.001-07:00

Written by Emily R. Doherty for TakeGreatPictures.com on March 26, 2008

Accolades: 548 words
Godfrey DiGiorgi refuses to call himself an "art" photographer. Quoting David Vestal to me from an article titled "Improper Nouns" (in the latest issue of PhotoTechniques) he says, "‘If my stuff is art, and fools are only ever sure, my photos must establish that without making claims... I'll stake my claim by making no claims.’" Arguably, DiGiorgi has no need to stake a claim. Despite the fact that he has been a professional photographer for a mere three years, and that he has only just formalized his business with the state of California this past January, DiGiorgi's work already graces galleries up and down the California coast, and in Italy.
DiGiorgi manages to encompass a huge variation of theme and subject in his photographs while still giving each collection its own unique photographic voice. His images honor everything from tiny, patterned objects found on his daily walks in Sunnyvale, to friends' kitchen tabletops, fences crisscrossing the countryside in Wales, to a collection of exhilarating and quiet human moments. Across the collections there is a distinct crispness of intent visible in the way DiGiorgi frames his subjects. The goal of his work? The "expression of the inanimate.”
The collections themselves, many of which are available for viewing on his website, www.gdgphoto.com, range drastically in style and subject, reflecting DiGiorgi's own sundry professional interests. DiGiorgi took to photography "like a fish to water" at the bright-eyed age of eight, beginning a life-long infatuation with photography. As a freshman in high school he received his first piece of professional equipment. Mentored in the enterprise throughout secondary school, he continued to study independently, often taking night classes in photography to supplement his regular college lessons. Because of his fascination with science and technology, DiGiorgi returned to school for a degree in mathematics at UCLA. After earning his graduate degree he took a position in a photo processing lab, a job which he described as enabling his photographic impulses but ultimately unsatisfying. One day, while visiting a friend who worked for NASA, DiGiorgi mentioned he was looking for a new professional direction. His friend suggested a job in the NASA Jet Propulsion lab doing imaging science with radar data. To DiGiorgi's surprise, he got the job, which was a perfect meld of his mathematical capabilities and photographic knowledge: almost a decade before the rise of the digital camera DiGiorgi created image data in the digital domain. He produced analyzable photographic image data plotting everything from ocean currents to fresh water make-up in Antarctic glaciers.
Eventually, DiGiorgi set out to reclaim his love of photography as a more serious and creative professional endeavor, and that is where you may find him now, a camera undoubtedly close at hand as he jokes, "I may not be able to buy a bowl of soup, but I love what I do! I love every minute of it!" The perspective he brings to photography as a result of his experience developing imaging technology for NASA before the advent of the digital camera is inarguably a unique one, and this open-minded approach is evident in the conglomerate subject matter he tackles. DiGiorgi has a book cover out in France for an academic piece called "Jardins" by Robert Harrison, which may be anticipated in the spring of this year, 2008.

Q&A&Q&A&Q&A&Q&A&Q&A&Q&A&Q&A&Q&A&Q&A&Q&A : 1,381 words

E: What do you think distinguishes you as a photographer?
G: I come to photography from a point of view with many years of experience with the technology itself. Initially I was not studying technology in science; I was studying writing and art. And as I look at things in the world, all that history of literature and art and painters and other photographers comes to the fore. This is where doing something as mundane as walking around the neighborhood and pointing a camera at random things becomes an interesting endeavor.

E: Would you say that some people perform for the camera when they are aware of it?
G: Oh certainly. Everyone does. As soon as you see a camera, and…the consciousness of the person behind the camera is apparent, you are acting for the camera. This is natural. You can see it if you go into a place where there are security cameras around and watch people who are perfectly aware there's a camera looking at them. And then take out a camera and then point it, anywhere. You will see people change the way they move. The distinction is that a security camera has no intent. It's simply there. When you're a photographer and you have a camera in your hand, what the person on the other side of the lens feels is your intent, not the camera.
E: How do you think photographing affects what you're photographing?
G: As a photographer you're always influencing something. It's sort of like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: You can't observe that which you are as part of the system (laughs). People are conscious, intelligent, sensing creatures who respond to your own activity, so you're part of the scene whether you're the event director… [or] you're a candid photographer. How you handle yourself affects the scene around you. Normally as a photographer covering an event, I want to operate relatively unobtrusively. Someone who's obtrusive catches the attention of the event and changes the way it flows. Someone who's unobtrusive allows the event to flow as he observes it.

E: I think many people find it very difficult to break that interpersonal barrier necessary to photograph strangers on the street. How do you go about your street photography?
G: When you're photographing people in public, what really gives people a sense of intimacy is that you are physically close to them. You want to catch their natural expressions too. You want to catch an expression of them talking with a friend, laughing over something, being angry over something, without your influence on their expression being the overriding factor. That requires operating candidly, but that's not necessarily covertly. Covert means that you're taking a picture and they're not aware of you, whereas candid means you're taking a picture [and] they may be aware of you, but you're not influencing their activity. There are all kinds of funny conversational dances that you play with them... because you want people to express themselves. We're not doing this on a stage. We're trying to capture the event.
Q: How does the technological imaging you were doing at NASA relate to your current work?
G: With radar data you can look at characteristics of the world that are not visible to the naked eye. When you use radar, you're using a wavelength of electromagnetic energy that's invisible to the naked eye, but that passes through a cloud as if the cloud wasn't there. By doing that you can see the structure of the surface of the water that you couldn't see with your eyes. It's actually a photograph, but the photograph is following the rules of electro-magnetic energy, not light.
E: Would you describe a large contrast between what you were doing at NASA, compared to, say, your Neighborhood Details collection?
G: I'm actually doing something very similar now, [drawing the distinction] between the emotional character of what's inside what I see, versus the physical character of…what I see. When I'm doing something like the Neighborhood Details set I'm looking for... the expressions of the inanimate. A follow-on series that… has developed out of them is called "Ground Signs". It is the signatures of the world that we have difficulty translating, but that we can respond to emotionally. It is a project that I've been working on for two years. It's one half of my fascination in terms of what to do art-wise. …The other half is people and gestures of people in motion.
E: Since you've mentioned how important lenses are, what would you use for your two foci in photography: Ground Signs, and People on the Street?
G: Both of those subjects tend to require relatively similar lenses, typically from a medium wide to a very short portrait telephoto. I need something that allows me to work in a broad range of light that isn't too heavy and that has really nice imaging characteristics. When I'm shooting Ground Signs, …these very delicate compositions that are highly detailed, I need something that's very sharp. When I'm shooting people, sharpness is less important because people move, and I need to be able to capture and separate them from the environment that they are in.
Q: How much do you find that you alter your photographs between taking them and showing them?
G: I'm not one who does a lot of compositing and manipulation... I like to capture the scene, but I might shape the light just as I would in a darkroom. One of the differences between film and digital photography is that in film photography we worked in the future. You could never see what you were doing at the time that you did it. When I took a picture I had to previsualize what I was trying to achieve. What digital photography has given us as photographers is that not only can we instantly see whether we acquired the data and acquired the image we wanted... but it also gives us the post-visualization. I can actually pull out…the emotion that I wasn't actually conscious of at the time that I first saw it, but… [that] affected me to take it.
Q: So you mean, you might not always know until after you've taken it what it is about the picture you're taking?
G: This has always been true: We're always unconsciously, subconsciously, motivated as well. Something about a particular scene, something about the color of the light on a particular day just affects us in ways that we might not know. When I come home, the emotions I was feeling…become apparent, and I can draw them out.
Q: It sounds like you're working on a couple different projects. Where do you see your work going in the future?
G: My target is book covers, illustration for magazine articles, editorial works. I'm also very interested in getting into the combined multi-media of still bound and video interlaid. A lot of modern photojournalism work tells stories in this manner: web-only. I want to do this for things that are not necessarily just reportage. I want to do things that are interpretive. I want to do things that are stories. This is actually stuff I was interested in doing 20, 30 years ago, but we didn't have any technology to make it feasible at the price that I could afford.

Q: What advice would you have for someone considering the same transition you made from a more conventional profession to a freelance photographer?
G: Be wary of disappointment, know that it's going to be tough, and believe in yourself. More important than anything else, keep working at it. It's much easier to have a job, to get a paycheck, to simply do work that someone hands you. When you're going to work in a creative vein as an independent photographer, the number of jobs that are regular paid jobs is scarce, so you have to be very strong. You have to let that which is your work flower, and you have to work for recognition. Nobody is a master simply because they're a great person. They're a master because they produce great work, they show it, and other people recognize it. Be ready to change if the course of your work is not taking you where you want to go.

TIPTIPTIPTIPTIPTIPTIPTIPTIPTIPs: 776 Words
Tips for photographers who wish to capture the essence of their community:
Tip#1
Don't obsess about equipment. Better equipment doesn't make you a better photographer. A clear idea makes you a better photographer. Look carefully at what you need and what you're trying to achieve. What I need is stuff that works reliably, stuff that allows me to work without thinking about the equipment itself to achieve a look, a feel.
Tip#2
Read the manual. Reread the manual. Go out and experiment with your camera. Reread the manual again. Take whatever you have, use it a lot, and study very carefully what it is that it does before ever thinking about buying something else. You want to work pretty much every option without having to think too much about it. The more time you spend trying to figure out how to set the camera, the more opportunities you miss.
Tip#3
Use a sturdy tripod whenever you can. Nothing will give you the best quality that the camera and lens can produce like a rock steady camera, and a tripod is the only way to do that.
Tip#4
Slow down and think. Making a photograph is something that happens in a split second, but it doesn't mean that you are always in rush. Look at the scene, both with your naked eye and with the viewfinder. Look all around the scene. Is there something around there that is in the way, that doesn't look quite right? Where is the light coming from? Is your subject in shadow, or in contrasting light? Do you need to make any adjustments? Ask yourself these questions and answer them before you start pressing the button.
Tip#5
Observe and allow the scene to make itself apparent and ready. You want to always be watching, and to be calm and be ready. When I go out shooting, I don't immediately take the camera out and start thinking about what I'm going to photograph. I start walking and looking. If I'm out on a two mile walk, it might be half that distance I spend just thinking, "What is happening today? What has moved around that I saw before?" If I'm in a new situation, I need to assess the situation. I [was] in New York in December... and I went through Grand Central Terminal. I stopped and I just stood in the main hall and I just watched things for about 5 minutes, and then I took out the camera. That became a little set which was the "Kaleidoscope Light Show".
Tip#6
You can only capture a picture once, so move instantly to make the photograph. When you watch a Zen Potter making a pot, they move very quietly and deliberately, but with incredible speed, with full conscious intent, and with abandon. Those are the contradictory notions that make their art so spectacular. It can only happen once. They can only throw their hand over that spinning piece of clay once in all of time in that exact way.
TIP#7
A really good lens is worth it to me. I'm very sensitive to the quality of the lenses. I don't need a lot of them, but I need good ones that give nice, rendering quality for the kinds of subjects that I work on. I do need a really good 40 mm lens because I want to capture beautiful nuances of people's faces and of the scenes around me.
TIP#8
Choose equipment that will make you smile. I've had a lot of very good equipment that, after serious examination and a lot of enjoyment using and learning it, I came to the conclusion that it's a very nice [piece of equipment] but it doesn't actually make me smile. And far more than an MTF curve, or a number of lines per meter, it's got to make me smile.
Tip#9
Always be prepared. I make it a habit whenever I've made an adjustment to the camera or a lens setting to accommodate something special going on in front of me, and whenever I've finished that set that I've made the adjustments for, I always return the camera to whatever normal settings are. That way, you're always ready.
TIP#10
Take a friend. It's very nice to go photographing with a few other photographers so that you have that diversity of what other people are interested in to inspire you. This past Sunday I went out to an area where none of us had any experience, and we had a grand time because we each found different things to shoot. Exercise a way of learning other ways of seeing.

Making L-O-V-E (unfinished)

2008-04-02T13:42:00.000-07:00

“Is it yours, or not?” echoes around the room, such dizzying reverberence off sheet metal walls, a voice to inspire forgetting why we’d made this together, why we’d poured our energies for constructing an ideal into flesh. Her eyes flash pine needles at me as she waits for my reply.

“I get so tired of these stories of war,” I say, looking at the word “L-O-V-E” spelled out like Sesame Street characters upon the table, and turn my face to vomit against a wall. The vomit slides down, slumps in the corner. Her face has softened when I turn again to look, but I twist my gaze instead to examine the bloody form at length, the pulpy goo of bloated clots smeared all over the table’s white sheath. Across its blank-faced sheets lie the remnants of our creation; that word, that word, bloody and seeping. Once, this barely pulsating symbol had thrown back its head with spite, whinnied out its higher evolution and superiority to all previous models and incarnations. Unlike all the other versions, this was the one that had thrown itself headlong into us. We had flowered and crisped, the three of us.

From where I stand at the head of the cutting room table it is as if along a poinsettia-patterned dinner table runner. I look to where she stands at the foot, by the e. At my end of the table is the beginner, the l , swooping symmetrically with a strong start in all matters cerebral. We’d done well with that one, keeping it lowercase and humble, each stroke of the pen made flesh with a perfect mix of my insidious containment, as she would call it, and her unbridle-able emotions. “And for what?” I say almost mistakenly out loud as I consider the rationale to create in a world cutthroat and murder happy. Indeed, death evens all in due time, regardless of our color, our strength, sensitivity, or diligence. “Everything living is doomed to fail. This word was once living, but here we watch it take its last gasps.”

“For what? Do you really mean that?” She blurts out. I refuse to look at her, focusing all my attention at the throbbingly grotesque cluster of symbols before me and hear her take a long, slow breath. Then she sighs, not out of annoyance, but out of patient wonder. Her fingers emerge from below the white sheet and across my line of sight to the word laid out before us. She leans over her side of the table to conduct my sight, dragging it, pulling it, enticing it to rest where her fingers hover over the middle letters heaving on the table, the indicated area ugly with blood. I find myself looking only at her finger as it shivers slightly.
“Can’t you see?” She asks. “The neck and shoulders? They work in perfect tandem because you cannot tell where one begins and the other ends, where one ends and the other begins.” I venture a look and see the place below where her index spins with spirals untraced by any other hand, recalling Buddhist wisdom. “And ours: look at it. It curls round, as when the snakes bite one another’s tails and thrive by digesting while being digested. Our sweetest o never ends. Even in this destructed mass it breathes on from within, carrying the simple secret of eternity and its cycles.” The circle emerges from within distrustful bones, and from below encrusted bottoms red with bedsores. Her digits tease out symbol from shape. “There is no end. There was no beginning. We brought this into being by simply being. By existing, we, in two, made one.”

“O.” I say, rolling the vowel around in my mouth, thinking of the way she used to choke on the lung-fuls of smoke I would blow between her lips when she was kissing me, accidentally swallowing instead of inhaling. It would make her so dizzy and sick that she would lie down, and I would lie down beside her, our bodies in parallel lines, our chests heaving with effort through clogged nostrils. Eventually, her heart rate would subside, and our bodies, by then entwined, would then again raise it.

Hard, like a lump in my throat, I swallow these ideas and, regretting my decision almost immediately, feel the o slide down my throat and wipe its coal upon my esophagus. Rubbing my Adam’s apple with my free hand, I become dizzy and place both hands on the table, hanging my head, knowing her eyes implore me to be present, to be here and aware with her of these moments and realizations. Instead, my mind wanders incessantly, my present infiltrated and expurgated as I swirl through the possible realities created by my senses. Head cocked to one side, my eyelids fluttering, fingers dancing, nostrils flaring, tongue pushing at the sides of my mouth, I fall into fantasy. Just as I grip her nips with purple lips, I hear a humming. Vvvvv, it hums, comes straight at me from the clavicle to tunnel into my heart and sink to my belly. Experiencing this low, untraceable rumbling sound, I know it originates either from my gut, or from her grumbling throat. Suspecting the latter, I open my eyes to see how she carries the sound so long and clean without a breath between, only to see it is not she who hums. Yet something periodically pounds my insides like a Carmina Burana Kettle drum, form into flesh… vvvvv.

Vibrating with the voiced labiodental fricative, I clench my cheeks tightly, fearing that my insides will fall out, feeling my intestines strung out upon a viola as a cat’s might be while sounding a Smith’s song.

“This one here has taught us a lot about the belly and its urges,” she says over the humming.

Sheepishly I look up at her. With a flush still upon our faces, we face one another across the long white expanse, staring at the last element, the foot of the word: an e indistinguishable behind toes like chopped hamburger. “No wonder this word could not carry itself another step,” I conclude, sadly.

“But not maimed forever. It may have grown too heavy to balance its natural lilt, but this bleeding essence is meant to be said without force. Its sound is that of an after-breath, made when you drag lip from lip. Its puff lifts from your teeth the unpreventable hum.”

“The v bounced from the e, I see. But look at this e, its soles. They are worn with the weight of pilgrims’ plodding. Inches have grown around the warts and stones embedded in its flesh, creating pockets and pockmarked entrances to its core. Its weakness is exposed when exposed thus on the counter.”

“What weakness? I see no weakness,” says she. “What I see is a grand insecurity that allows such stones to burrow into flesh. Insecurity that builds upon itself, separating the core- which is strong- from the fresh air. What needs to be done with this e is to scrape it clean of this excess flesh.”
“You must not see it. It is so raw.”
“But I wish to massage it.”

“Why did you bring me here?”

“Because you stole the word from me. Because this word is still between us. Because it is true, it is living in some way and cannot just be pushed aside or down the stairs or off a cliff.”

“But what good is it? What good is it to revive something already bloody and marred?”

“It is scratched and scraped on the surface, and paying attention presents the problem of appearances thinking and doing. But it is yours and mine! What is at its essence is the hum, the vvvvv, the o! o! o!” She slams her fists upon the table, rattling the room. “It is not that is can be qualified as good! Can you feel it breathing? It is still just between us.”
I look at her across the table, then down to the bloody mess on the sheet. Suddenly I understand. “Yes, it is mine, too,” I say, “to destroy…” Pressing my palm onto the l in front of me, swinging a knee upon the table, I feel the head of the word crunch beneath my hand, combusting like a popcorn kernel. With one leg up, and one letter down, I wait for her, pausing so prettily at the other end of the table behind the e.

Her initial shock given way to agreement, she too mounts the operating table with a crunch. Blood spatters her hand, but she keeps crawling toward me as I to her, swinging legs upon the table with a solid smash of symmetry. We come together over the table, crushing our creation letter by letter until we are eye to eye once more, pink wolfish tongues lolling. Hands and knees drag destruction across our word, crushing its outer elements until, finally, the fleshy middle gives its vulnerable insides to a new embrace.

************************

“You know,” I said, lightly brushing her honey soft loosened curl from my eye, “We had to overcome our inertia to get that word.”

Traveling to obtain the word….
Living to obtain the word

We find it in the back? We find it in our bodies…. The word bleeds out of us, tears that we swallow- we shit out the word love!!!!!!

We lay,

Then, before my eyes, her honey red hair drains white, as does her pallor when she is upset. Though undetectably thinner, it is still tender to my cheek. It blinds me, forces me to compromise. To blink. And in that space of a blink, I see it all. I see the diamonds in the sky that twinkle every moment. I survey the stars before me in their nakedness, without the sallow epidermis of city cancer.

I find myself utterly overwhelmed, at a loss for words and desperately wanting to swallow, to swallow, to swallow the lump in my throat.

My eyes may be glazed. I blink them so as to awaken, enliven them.

So many eyes, eyes lurking from all sides, I hide from them, ducking below my eyelids at the pages before me, shying from their challenge, their sparking ignition. I am again in that old coffee shop uptown, filled with strangers elbow to elbow who never make conversation. I too bury my head in my work, watching all from my periphery.
With a twist of her neck, the waitress shifts the bangs from her eyes, asking my name and spelling it upon the receipt with Romanian orthographical flair. I tease, entice her from across the room, holding my gaze with hers long enough to pin her to the back wall and allow her to undress me, lick me. It is Penny, blonde and wearing black gloves, pressing me to my piano and climbing atop its slick surface, letting me use her like a swiffer across its mirrored edges.
Then I wake up, and I am in the bathroom with my pants down on the toilet, a tub of Vaseline beside me. I decide to relax my bowels while I’m at it, pushing out the letters with a satisfying burst. L, hyyuuuuggghhh, oooooo-o it splashes as it hits the water surface, vvvvvvv the sink to the bottom of the bowl, e. Empty.

My heart still pounding within my chest, with the all too recent memory of her chiseled fingers dragging currents through my chest hair no longer infecting my cerebral folds I, sufficiently relieved, get up from my seat and pull up my trousers. My phone is ringing, and I hurry across the room to get it, knowing before I reach it that I’ve missed the call. An unknown number, I have no need to track down the interested other line, and yet I call back over and over, sure that I am late for something, missing in action and disappointing someone, I can feel it. As smog trapped in my capillaried lungs, the ache of responsibility hovers.

Throwing the phone across the room, I watch it smash against a windowless wall, shattering brittle plastic against sheet metal. Instantly, another phone is in my hand. I smash that one too, watching its lights abruptly cease with a sharp shutter click, the buzzing, vibrating, shuddering machine silenced by erratic, irrational, irascible human violence. I kick the piece of shit across the floor, but as it spins and slides like a hockey puck, I see it has begun to ring again. This time, I answer in time.
Her voice is there on the other end. “Wake up.” She says, kindly. Too kindly, simpering like the natural compromiser that she is, spineless. Too flexible.

Well, there’s no such thing as too flexible.

Tides of Wine

2007-08-18T14:28:00.000-07:00

www.myspace.com/eternaljamnation

TIDES OF WINE

Baby it's not the time
To wake me up with cocaine and wine
O, I think I love you all the time

Baby it's not the burning
Of your cocaine and wine
Summertime is not returning
O, I think I love you all the time

Dancing in the setting sun
Feels as autumn's just begun
I love you more than sweet, sweet nicotine
Oh but baby it's not the time

Oh, but burn me.
Oh but burn me with cocaine and wine
Baby it's not the tides

Oh, the ocean's burning
Baby it's not the tides
That pulled me to your cocaine and wine
That carry me all the time

Rolling film in the dark

2007-08-18T14:26:00.000-07:00

At first, as the door closes, I flick off the lights. After one last glance at where my materials lie, I collapse in the darkness as a relieved heap upon my stool, battered leather soft between my fingertips. The immediate relaxation of darkness is the world’s best kept secret, which provokes deep, comfortable as sleep breaths.

My eyes are closed. White patterns dance across my field of vision, at times bursting with specific color before again being overwhelmed with whiteness, shivering beech branches against a tornado-brewing sky, or wet, black bough layers on a silver New York City skyline, yellow on violet, orange on cobalt, red on green.

Everything flashes as the light extinguishes as if traveling deep into my mind to escape its electrical annihilation, burrowing into my head until I have clamped a hand over my furrowed brow to still the illumination. I am all too aware of my other hand twirling a habitual curl below my left ear; not through direct awareness of feeling the curl, but by the sound it makes, which resembles rice stirred by wind upon pavement, or the crinkling of a paper flower in hair.

Into focus comes my breath. In. How far in does my air go inside of me, through my mouth, past my teeth and on the slip slide of my tongue, through esophagus acidic from afternoon’s fried onion tower tunnel, past the closed-off wing and into handfuls of tired lung tissue, pressing against my diaphragm and my jeans’ hip band.

Am I breathing deeply enough? Am I breathing too fast? Within two breaths I am already panicking as to where I knocked the can opener, and as to whether or not my breathing patterns are normal. Chill the fuck out, Emily, I tell myself. Sometimes you breath fast, sometimes slow. My breathing quickens. The body knows what it needs, so chill out. Breath. Chill out! Breath.

“Chill out,” I shout, clattering the opened film container across the table. The film, flimsy and fragile, flutters to the ground, and I quickly snatch it up protectively. If dust patterns get on the film, that unique picture (since I never snap a shot twice) is ruined if it scratches it. Each picture is a gold mine of promise, mysterious under its shrouded state in lightless cubicle.

First I unroll the film so that I can then stretch it horizontal through a spiral hand roller, which is to prevent overlap where one part of the negative touches another, and to ensure that all parts of the material get equal exposure to the developing chemicals. I begin to relax after checking once more that the door behind me is locked, finding calm in the fact that no one can disturb my plight of sensory depravation in this complicated task of rolling dexterity. Even it I was to need saving, there would be nothing I could do to escape my plight and finish the job without exposing my film.

Enjoying the maternal coddle of the act, I stroke the film with my clean and ever so slightly sweating fingertips. Pushing images of destructive lines of grey and white upon black, I try my best not to make clumsy oil prints upon the film. The smooth material rested two-dimentionally between my thumbs and forefingers, just waiting to be treated and rinsed, treated, then rinsed again. Then, the imperceptible images between my fingers where shimmying to each other, We’ll be shaken like inside dark-proof containers as if we were tubes of blood to be kept from clotting.

If exposed to the light untreated, the pictures- snapshots of reality recorded in the grainy and yellowed lens- would each in a moment shine with unbelievable brilliant clarity, before being wiped to black in an overload of sun exposure.

Panic. Panic. Leave me be, Panic. I need a drink! Alas, there is no liquor to be found. Only me, a leather stool to sit on, and a wastebasket under a simple wood table bolted to three walls beneath a bare bulb giving no light to guide my fumbling fingers as they struggle to insert the film that unrolls with every digit twitch into my lap and across my shoe laces.

Got to stop this thing, got to lace it into this stupid- crank backward with the left hand- fucking…- forward with the right while simultaneously turning between pinkies pressed to ringfingers to keep it flat- white twister fuck! But the more I try to get it in through the spiral, the worse it unravels, and the more complicated the threading becomes.

You have no choice, I remind myself. You have to get the job done. No one’s going to do it for you, and even if they could, would you want them to? Over your shoulder, checking with their greasy paws these negatives about which they feel nothing, but for you which mean the entire world?

My heart pounds with anxiety. I can’t do it! It screams, wringing its hands. Then brain takes over, prodding, No! This is a matter of self-inflicted principle. Out of pride? Perhaps, but only noble as a duty to myself. Painful? Certainly, but necessary if I am to see and have control of the fruits of my effort.

With a giant sigh, dramatic and throaty enough to fill this coffin of a room, I let the film drop, let my jaw slacken. In so doing, my clenched eyes open just a millimeter. At first, I see my hands below me. Blue veins I detest wearing visibly emerge from the webs between my fingers and pulse like the vein beating through my brow. The rhythm of my blood gives the dizzying drumbeat of a hallucination fading back to black, the epileptic feel of a trance club about to erupt in cold steam on riled and bursting crowd.

Instinctively I put a finger toward my mouth as if to chew, then resist with horror at the idea of saliva ruining my negatives with thumb and tooth prints. Eyeballs straining against lids thrown back in shock, I search, search my visual field of clues as to how to wind and unwind this delicate, dependant ribbon between my fingers. Lost in the wave of panic that wells from my understanding that I can depend on no one to get the job done, that I cannot open my lightness chamber until the film is rolled correctly in its place and then encased, I buckle down to the task. There is nothing to see, though I strain and strain, leaning over the table wit its edge pressed shardly into my soft belly button. It’s you. Get your shit together.

Suddenly I hear a noise behind me, a whisper that, although most likely originating from my clothes touching the stool, resembles disturbingly a human voice, whispering the answers, the wrong answers into my ears, worms of faulty advice. Instead of listening I hurry to act, relying on knowledge of what to do when feeling accosted with negative information and drowning it out. I begin to hum, “Jeme qui tu pais… Et a tublie tu…” in a stumbling minor key, warbling my lost state against sensory infiltration.

To focus on the inflection in my voice is the art of taking my mind off the whispers. They say the blues will drive sadness and evil into the corners of a room, allowing me to turn my other lanes of attention on supporting the dire folds of plastic from greedy gravity, twisting with left and right hand sequentially, cyclically. My eyes never adjust to the never-ending vacuum that pulls the light from my memories as I stare at nothing and feel for everything.

The blues give my hands a rhythm to obey, allowing the strips of film to follow new laws and disobey those of gravity as they trace my desired path through the roller. Without another thought I have completed and am elated by the end of the song.

One State Solution

2007-08-09T05:42:00.001-07:00

Once there was a Master and a child. The child, young in mind but old of body, sought to get to the bottom of the meaning of things and work his way back into the world. He sought to use every part of his brain, and he had been told by a group of Snoerdvahkys that the Master, born of stone and bred of flesh, was the man to consult for such an awakening.

The child arrived at the Master’s home after many cycles of searching. Beneath the sullen, pregnant, harvest moon they met, faces yellowed as reflecting orbs in the cove’s lagoon. The Master lived within sheer rock walls that curved into a cave shape with jealousy and protectivity around an inlet. The Master had carved many things into the rock face, the least of which was a bed for the child. The child slept, and when he awoke, he joined the Master in his booth, also carved into the rock face, which overlooked the covered inlet and the lagoon.

The child asked the Master many questions, and the Master answered them, not always in a comprehensible way. Often the Master’s answers were riddles, and the child found himself continuously baffled during his stay. Not to mention the matter of food, for neither he nor the Master did any hunting, yet there was always fresh game swinging from the trees when they awoke from their rock pallets.

Mostly they drank tea and climbed the Master’s elaborate staircases cut into the rock. The staircases were the most baffling part of their location. Into the sides of the walls were hundreds of staircases, crisscrossing at every angle, going deeply upside down into the rock, cutting across Axes X,Y, and Z. The child loved to wander the stairs when he grew bored of meditation, those moments of weakness when he could no longer be the listener for his own redundantly banal worries and thoughts. At times he would wander down a staircase into the side of the cliff face, thinking to have found a way back to the rest of the island, only to find himself exiting from the cliff face on the opposite side that he’d entered from. The Master called it his “Universe”.

One day, the Master refused to answer the child’s question, stopping the child completely in his tracks. The child had asked, “How does one go about fixing things?" It was a naive, but very important question, for the world outside the cliff walls was rife with suffering and struggle. The Master stated calmly, “Until you pour this tea without spilling, you will receive no wisdom, no sustenance, and no justice.” And so the child did its best to pour the tea without spilling. On his first pour, the water, skittish in his shaking grasp, came careening out eagerly, splashing in a sheer plane across the walls of the cup like a skateboarder hitting the half-pipe. The cup into which the boy would pour was very shallow. Like a wave, the water, wildly inertial, flew from the side of the cup and over its other side onto the end table beside the Master’s elbow.

Fool! The Master thinks me a stupid fool. In a great deal of despair, the child snivelled with fear. The Master, unfazed, placed an outstretched hand for his prize, the golden mushroom tea. The boy licked up what was left on the linoleum. He was happy to count his blessings that the table was fake wood; unabsorptive and unruined. He was able to salvage it. It was a minor spill, after all.

The Master drank the scalding tea in a gulp. “Pour me another, please.” Said the master. The child abided confidently, swaggering a bit as he tipped the porcelain kettle so that its blue flower formation defied gravity. The filling of the cup went splendidly until the moment of severance for the tea’s stream came. As the mid-air river’s diameter decreased, the stream slowed. Not ready for the unsteady let up of force, the child delayed sundering the outrush of the kettle’s contents. That is just the moment when the tea took a last moment to poise on the lip of the spout before executing its final swan dive into the waiting cup which lay legs-spread below, dry and thirsty as a bone. At the moment of realization of the liquid’s precarious balance the child twisted his hand, but it was too late. The tea drop slid down the spout like a tear that had been blurted out. In his head, the child decried the stillicide.

The Master is ashamed of me. I do not deserve his wisdom, although I know in my heart I would use it well. The child bowed his head, closing his eyes to picture the moment of failure. Why had he spilled again? It was such a simple task, and yet it seemed he could not pour smoothly with a spin. In fact, he poured tea worse than if he were aiming a ball into a basket or the last rung of a fire escape. He could not pour his Master’s tea without spilling. Like a winding tunnel with scenes opening upward and outward foreshadowing his infinite failure, he looked into the blank face of his Master. His head was spinning like disc through open air with scenario after scenario. The water’s own essence came into critique by the boy. He saw no end in sight for his failure.

The Master shook his head, swallowing with a hardened jaw, and the air was infused with anticipation as the Master gulped. One swallow, an eternity. “Another, son,” The boy thought he heard, and his heart leapt with joy for his third chance. Hurriedly slurping tea from a newly and mysteriously oak table as the Master stared inward with a blank countenance the boy saw, for the first time, the innocence of the water. It was not water’s fault it flowed, he fathomed with cognizance.

He resolved at once not to hesitate. It was time to take a chance. Finishing his cup and setting it down, the Master faced him with bland eyes and hands. The boy was already flurrying across the room, teakettle in hand, before realizing that the Master had never asked for another glass. He might not get a third chance after all.

Have I lost my only opportunity to prove myself? It is me. I am the one at fault for the pouring of the tea. The weight of this possibility starts to drop from its supports onto the child’s shoulders, and perhaps because of this new burden, as if the shift its weight and drive it off, the Child darted impulsively toward the Master and snatched his cup out of his hands so quickly not even the Master could intercept. The Master could only stare, impressed by the speed of the child who was now looking up at the cup with a studied glare. The Master inwardly grinned.

“You read my mind.” The Master stated silently, almost letting a quiver of lip give away his pride in the Child. The Child did not hear him. He was grasping the kettle against his palm, crumpling his fist against lean handle, and weighing its worth. The Child could feel the tendons straining perpendicularly on the top of his fingers. Pouring liquid suspended in air, the Child created a steady overflow of molecules that crashed once more against the sable ceramic, swooping the spout toward his elbow. Yet, overflowing with annoyance, the Child once more spilled. The drop clinging to and dripping from the spout’s parted lips was like precum drool slipping over the curves of a tulip. The Child was wild with fury, blind with sadness, and then, glancing up at his still blank-faced Master, it dawned upon him.

Oh, of course! There is something wrong with the construction of the kettle. It is neither my fault nor the water’s fault. I will never be able to pour without spilling because the design is faulty. Only when the kettle itself is remade and re-membered will I be able to drink from the sacred cup of vermillion. The Child bowed deeply to his Master and, with eyes closed, gestured toward the sacred cup, resigned to his lifetime of tea service. When he opened his eyes he saw the Master gesturing in turn toward him.

And before he could protest, the Master handed the Man his cup.

Missed Connections: The 3rd Ward

2007-08-05T20:08:00.000-07:00

http://newyork.craigslist.org/brk/mis/390223669.html

We could tell our children that I met you on my two hundred and forty first date, spontaneously embarking on a voyage of trust and secrecy.

Out of the haze I stumbled, eager to relieve myself of a crowd so weary and leering in their deception that I had realized my own double-edged sword. From within the blood orange stalls, tagged silver by my blind ex-roommate’s artistry, I emerged with sullied hands. I sought to clean them with the twist of a garden hose faucet, but no stream of water fell forth from the rubber tubing. You found me wringing my hands in narcissistic splendor and blocked my exit, forcing me to re-examine my quandary as I pondered my dry reflection above the sordid bathroom sink.

Decisively I stepped in your direction, you who did not see my skin so sticky with other people’s sweat. It was you who stopped so adorably in the door jam to this forbidden enclosure, smiling a grin so comprehensive in its pleasure that I found myself on board the submarine of spectator lust.

Lifting my hem from the muddy floor, I approached the exit, instinctively moving while you made no effort to anticipate any next move beyond full delight in our intersection.

“Happy Birthday!” You said, crisp curls unraveling by your neck in asymmetrical waterfalls as you tossed them back in a whinny.

“Happy Un-Birthday to me,” I explained, coyly fingering the ‘My Little Pony’ cardboard cone that was strapped askew on my own set of ringlets. I took another step, thinking you would remain a /soora jamil/ in the doorframe. Instead, you took one step toward me.

We were then kissing. Our lips met as matter and antimatter, as one quark in two different places at the same time, as neuronal blossoming through dendrites. Your kiss annihilated me and everything I’d ever been, immediately re-writing my pathways for fresh and generous connections.

We broke apart mere inches, by now entwined in each others’ arms, yet not yet latched upon anything beyond smell, taste, and touch.

“Umm. Hi!” I exclaimed, softly, into your earlobe.

“Hello! You’re….” You began, but, distracted by my neck, you trailed off.

“Where did you come from?” I inquired wispily.

“Over there.” You’d replied, indicating a room ripe and red to the right.

“Oh.” I’d replied, indicating a musky, grey room to the left. We swooped upon each other once more, soft lips lapping up each other’s needless words. Under the light of a flashbulb we found our way into the hallway through the loo line, blind and lost in each other’s bodies.

Then, on impulse, we’d separated to our separate habitaciones, our hands moving down each other’s forearms with regret until our fingertips were the only element caught. Then only our eyes, the space between us widening as we were swept apart by opposite tides of a crowd sea.

I would tell them how, dizzy with wonder, I had stumbled onto the dance floor, looking back in your direction. Bypassing acid apples for pure exuberance, I flung my arms into the air and danced my little dance of Dionysus, paying tribute to lucky chance, moving onward and around, up and down with my solitary restorative gyration.

Minutes, maybe hours passed until you reappeared to encounter me on my wicked spree of un-renounced, un-announced glee. And those with me thought you knew me for how familiarly you greeted me, how easily you held me as myriad blurried. Embracing me, you called me crazy, even though it was I who first dubbed you mad.

Every other day on Earth I had faced a door shutting to the blue basement secrets, but this time you were all mine, divine green eyes reflecting mine, divine. Divine night time that morphed into sunrise light shine.

But I did it all wrong, for you said yourself, the moment was one of a kind. Magical chimes don’t keep the time of everyday. You said yourself that if I walked away I would regret it my whole lifetime. So I walked away with you thinking we could be together without begetting of each other, and that is when we separated.

I ponied out and blamed confusion, as if a memory lapse in our time together endorsed unaccountablity. Instead of side-stepping your roommate’s irrational irascibility, I should have flung forth the bathroom door so wide as to boot him in his whiny tighty-whitey bottoms. How did you know it was me when you met me?

Most of all, I should have flung you across the sunstreaked sheets, slurped up the grit from beneath your fingernails and laid myself bare to you in your bed, enveloped as it was in iridescent pink dogwood blossoms floating in from gnarled and dark branches.

But since we will have no children to tell, I will tell each dogwood tree in its unfolding splendor our story of spring and how you kissed me with a misspelled name through a thick Eastern European accent and told me of the things you’d do to me. I lay in silence beside you, discovering you were right, the sun would blind me through my sleep, but you did not mention it would render me dumb, and so I merely kissed your back one mad moment more as if it was goodbye.

Cloisters

2007-08-05T18:25:00.000-07:00

I'm always being thrown out by the timekeepers. My natural rhythm is not holiness in abundance, but longing for it. I go for long without a glimpse and then it floods. Then it is lost again. The birds sing their funny, shaky melodies, symphonies of slightly altered baselines in chaotic unity. Sitting hunched beneath the red eaves, hummingbirds look to icicles for their nectar.

On my side of the glass are naughty medicinal herbs of phosphorous, lavender and root aloe limes. Will they shut the gates on me as you, Sun, climb below muddy clouds and pink-rimmed horizons? Their blank, dark faces lost in Sky’s brilliant reflection... or is it River’s countenance? Oh my, how do we time dear Spring’s arrival? Salt’s brush off from grey to blue pavement?

Nay? To beige suede boots clacking in twos into your glowing orb? Oh, stiffen not my fingers with your ever-lengthening shadows, pulling us into remembrance that is not you!

The trees wear the snow like lingerie across their curves, casting sexy silhouettes across the lawn in a cat stretch of your resplendent colors, elegant green white brown bark royalty.

It is in the way the world sings loudest to cover the ring of my cell phone, raunchy breaths stirring fir needles, babies screaming with ecstasy. In lucid and pure babble do I hear you atop this Fort. Here there is memory of silent and treacherous war, murder for billions of invisible value. Yet no one is weeping?

Quiet the outside forces, I beg you Sun. Warm us so that we remember your divine glory and live, not kill, for it.

*************

Cat Scratch Suicide in the Bathtub

2007-08-05T15:45:00.000-07:00

In the shower just now I realized something, water dripping over my waxy body as it shimmered among dull white tiles, pink pale with blue veins pushing through disappointment’s brilliant defiance. It housed, like a bubble of promise (calm down!) patterns of the future when I picture my blood red arteries spilling blood in millions of tiny fountains, like an army in the softest point between elbow and wrist. No suicide, but the cat has given me the wound of war. Its feline hook into repeatedly new depths of epidermis is flesh terrorization if I’ve ever seen it, so unlike the clean slice of glass across my angry fists like the almighty universe issuing a warning of the manner in which violence gives of itself and is given back in sick and pooling circular cycles.

And then is when I realized, Oh! Ah! It doesn’t hurt at first, not at all when the flesh is cut like the slice through butter. No, butter feels no pain when rifted. Then, only after the fissure has been sought, is there pain in unbearable, if short-lived, proportions. Like tripping on a rock and tumbling, then jumping up, gleefully pleased with one’s resilience before realizing that one has leapt out of one’s body.

And then: Oh! So this is meditation!

Typing Into Respite

2007-07-31T17:43:00.000-07:00

The whining noise was killing her. With legs crossed in a yogic twist, she hunched over the typewriter, as no singer should have done, curling her spine as if to take fetal comfort from the horrible sounds emerging from her new record player. The one she was using warbled, and the previous model, finally hidden away in the closet under piles of unworn clothes, had never been played since during the entire 6 months of its time plugged into the receiver it had been lacking a needle.

No discipline, all it takes is discipline, she thought to herself. Talent is nothing. But what do talent or discipline matter when your so-called permanent product can’t even be comprehended in its initial powerful form if the apparatus it requires to be experienced no longer works. She was, of course, referring to the Vivaldi record she could not comprehend over the loud whirring of her machine. Although she considered screaming, she focused instead on punching at the keys with her stout and strong fingertips, bruised from getting caught between the thick typewriter keys.

Using the machine in the intervening months following the official super-saturation of her 30 gig hard drive, an event that had taken four years to occur, had taken practice. The violence necessary for a typewriter was nothing like the smooth manner a computer keyboard slipped out the letters with the slightest flick, yet she seemed to prefer the stamping of the keys. In fact, the violent overhaul of homeostatic letter positioning was a method of catharsis for one with so much on her mind.

The mechanical nature of the thing appealed to her. She was, after all, the daughter of a mechanical engineer, a self-professed “socially illiterate” man who refused under any circumstances to believe that every problem in the universe did not have a simple answer. After spending her childhoods watching him disassemble and assemble their family car, tangible gears made the most sense. This was in contrast to the computer, which seemed at times to be deceiving her, hiding her work under unfamiliar names in unfamiliar folders, making things she’d painstakingly saved unrecognizable and lost to her sight. Currently the Mac was only useful for storing music: Billy Holiday, RJD2, Cee-Lo, Ani, and songs about Fido’s too long leash and the Lebanese war.

Since its memory had filled she’d taken to printing everything by hand, filling up one 3rd grade marbleized spelling book after another with unintelligible handwriting, ripping out the pages from between the ludicrously fluorescent covers and taping the pages to her wall. Soon the walls were full of scribbled ideas spread meticulously across the whitewash like ships in a fleet, allowing her to see what she’d thought, what she was missing in her parabolic takes on the world.

In front of her, at the skeleton with machinery almost too obscure to explain, she stared, glad for its simplicity as she quelled and caused its rocking, epileptic motion with her little jabs. From each of her sturdy presses upon the keys, a little golf club leg flapped horizontal, slamming its heel against the white underbelly of a suicidality rating recycled from her day job. Symphonically dancing across the keys, she played the typewriter like a piano, triggering squeaky hammers from their dormant, rusting slumber into communicative action against the empty page. Coming out of her angry stupor she began to type.

****
Letters to the Earth
****

She wrote, ripping open an already raw cuticle as her fingers jam between the keys from where she’d chewed it earlier that morning. Sucking on the pink, hot, throbbing flesh, she inadvertently began to chew the flesh away, thinking about what kind of letters she would write to each lover she’d lost, about what she’d write to mothers and fathers she’d never met, about what she’d say to the trees and wind to apologize for her race, human kind. Tearing automatically, she gripped a tiny outcrop of skin from her cuticle between her front teeth delicately, tugging sideways and carving a deep valley into her fat cells far from the skin surface before realizing with disgust and self-hatred what she was doing.

Certainly dogs lick their own wounds, she thought to herself, still sucking dust from the sticky, porous indent. And spittle, she continued silently, from a victim is the only true neutralizer to remove blood from a stained piece of cloth. She’d learned this one the hard way, thereby saving herself from a lifetime of embarrassment, after bleeding on her white skirt and an acquaintance’s white couch simultaneously, managing never to be found out. Then again, she thought, the human mouth is one of the dirtiest orifices in the world, perhaps the dirtiest!

She was finding little comfort in the intellectualization of the matter, instead preferring to act like a baby with an oral fetish. The sucking felt good. Somehow the act put enough pressure on the wound to cancel out the throbbing sensation. Somehow her thick, wet tongue clumsily moving against the raw flesh was enough to actually convert the angry flesh into a puddle of pleasure and numbness.

When she stopped sucking and started typing again, her pinkie, the injured party, would weakly plunge down the “A” key before slipping out of place on the dank keys, getting stuck beneath the “Q” and the “Lock” keys. Her flesh raked angry against the sharp navel of the little labeled squares.

After a moment or two of this self-effacing behavior, she found herself exhausted. Laying back, legs still crossed, she attempted to confront her purpose with a sleepy mind. Trying to remember what she was about to write to the earth, she was overcome with confusion as her mind began to dream without any conscious accompaniment, taking her on a millennium of a second that lasted a lifetime journey along the pathway of her existence. As dull and imperfect as she could be she continued to suck her finger, feeling dizzily close to her purpose, pressing her hand vein against the brutally unforgiving, cool, concrete wall next to the futon.

If I don’t do it now, if I don’t write the entire story of this typing story, she thought, what would I write about tomorrow? If I don’t get it all out now, what will be left for me to think of tomorrow? Why must I be confined to a pathetically constrained human memory that allows me to be so shortsighted in my struggle to tell the story?

The record, she suddenly noticed, had stopped it’s oppressive straining. Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” had worked perfectly for once, perfectly enough for her to sing along and try to imitate the ruby robin-like quality of the young Joni’s voice. She wanted the precision that made Joni wild versatile in the days before modern-day production’s “magic” that seemed only to separate the listener from the original emotion of any modern radio song to such a degree as to disguise any power in the guise of auto-tuned perfection. No, Joni was real, she thought, just as Amy Winehouse is the closest thing to real now. I can learn from them; not just how to sing, but how to feel, how to feel a song.

In the intervening moments she tried to fill the silence with her own strains of soul, only to trill a trembling tremor of disastrously off-key surprise. She was ashamed of her own lack of control over herself and her voice, immediately stopping the sounds and dropping horizontal to contemplate her nipple-shaped light fixture with frustration. She closed her eyes and sucked her finger contemplatively, overwhelmed with thirst.

The ink began to dry before it had hit the page, another sign that she should take a brief break, but as the thoughts of desire for cold water flooded her consciousness she fretted that if she got up to get the water she would lose focus entirely. She continued to type, not paying attention to the words on the page, automatically smashing the keys into the machine before acknowledging that if she sat there long enough she would be too thirsty to work and be constantly distracted by her unfulfilled desire.

In the end, of course, she got up for the water. Breaking half-melted ice and its cocoon-like puddles of the water into her stolen one-liter Bohemian Beer Garden mug and filling it with tap, she chugged an entire glass before filling it once more and returning to her room.

Her head, when she finally sat down once more before the keyboard, rested atop her scrunched up shoulder, barely aloft. Eyes insufficiently focused to look at the keys, she typed faster, hurrying out the words instinctively, knowing her hold on reality was slipping. Her raw finger hit the “Q” over and over, lining up for pain.

Flipping over the George Winston tape she had left in the cassette player, she fell once more into a deep sleep under the glare of the golden nipple and old Christmas lights from two seasons past. Her sleep was dark and fitful, full of the usual strange men trying to kill, rape and hunt her in their public and much unappreciated nakedness. Throughout the night she cursed like the sailor her great-grandfather had been, like the fourth grader she’s once learned the words from, using the words at the volume of a sergeant to shatter heads in gruesome, bloody pie-shards with every invasive act.

Perhaps it means I’m a killer, she thought to herself after waking in a cold sweat with her cries stalled upon her newly awake lips in an intervening period between nightmares. Or perhaps it is my brain’s way of preparing me for some ill-fated future episode. Or perhaps it just shows how alone I am, how I have no one to protect me. Ah well, if I am to die, I die alone. No, no. Not back into the nightmares, she thought wildly, I do not wish to fear. My body refuses me in this foggy zone, too weak to open a water bottle. She drifted away, her fingers still taking refuge upon the keys.

RIP Winkie. I'll never get your hair off me.

2007-06-23T12:07:00.000-07:00

I wipe down the bike with one wet paper towel and one dry one, knowing the water can do little damage to the already rust-soaked frame. Two of the brakes are stuck on either side of the wheel, pressing their black planes against the orange silver unrelentingly. The gears no longer shift, but I know from years of experience with this machine, the only one in the garage with both a seat and two wheels, that consistent pressure will get me far.

I leap on this old relic and begin to pedal, wobbling a little at the start with feet dangling carelessly from my too-high perch, leaving behind me the knee-high fields of wheat I can’t cut until I fix the mower, and the rippling roof of my plastic-coated shed. I pedal forward with great effort and feel rewarded with a breeze that cuts between my curls, wiping clean my neck and sweating forehead. Down the road I go, toward an older man, red-faced and bald and pushing a mower with his son at his side. Hello! He says sheepishly, then, Sorry, watch out there, as his mower shoots a large rock between my spokes. I smile and look down at the rust-cracked yellow frame in what must be a demure way, continuing on my way and thinking, Glad it didn’t hit me.

I walk the bike across the main road, looking left and right with rhythmic swings of my head, and turn left at the sidewalk. I pump my lets excitedly, trying to get the speed up to a wind-cooling state, before remembering that I have no brakes.
Thinking with panic whether I remembered to lock the gate or not, I suddenly remember my dog is dead, and realize such worries no longer apply. Immediately I choke, my stomach wrenched in knots, my heart wracked with guilt. What if she had gotten up in an hour or two? What if she needed to just get a couple more liters of fluid through her? What if in an hour there would have been a miracle?

Indeed, over the course of the interaction, my dog had gotten progressively more alert to her surroundings. The doctor and my Uncle, self-satisfied and justifying their correctness with degrees and specializations, prattled on in the background, and I’d done my best to tune them out as I fingered my dog’s soft fur and bendable long ears. Winkie was lying on her left side, her head stretched back in an arch, her body motionless. When I pet her, stroking long lines from her eyes to her belly, she pulled her head down a little, otherwise remaining unresponsive, and staring straight ahead at the blank metal wall. Petting her furiously, I ran the risk of agitating her with my fevered attempts to rouse her from virtual unconsciousness. But when I pulled her head toward me to look at me she stubbornly resisted, keeping her head arched back.

Through wavering fields I hear a loon call out to its mate. Its tune is low and hollow, swooping up and then down again in cadence to match its movements. The sound of that loon used to drive my dog crazy, sending her into a snuffling frenzy through the light underbrush to sweep out her victims in jest, never actually killing anything. Off she would go, never a look backward while wading through the thick mud of the shore, returning matted with bristles and burrs but with her tongue lolling out of the side of her wide grin as if to say, I showed that loon.

Instead of following what would be her lead and abandoning my post to hunt down my blessed loon, I remain on my bicycle seat, certain that if I cease this inertial flow, I’ll never get this bike moving again. I creep forward with the grain of traffic, feeling as if I’m going backward as the cars pass me one by one, squinting through my puffy eyes and pedaling, footfall by footfall. Ahead of me the clouds are receding along the runway created by the road stretching upward and into a point ahead of me. The yellow and white lines converge at the lip of a puffy cumulous cloud being nudged down below the horizon by another cumulous cloud, who in turn is being elbowed by another cumulous cloud, all the way back to where I came from, each anxious to make it over the edge to the other side of my ever-elusive horizon.

My bicycle carries me in a rocking motion, the same motion I use when I’m sitting in bed trying to write, West to North to East to South to West to North to East to South and around and around. The doctor had gone on and on about how if we didn’t euthanize her, we would have a lawsuit for animal cruelty on our hands, but later, as I sobbed over her slightly responsive dog-body, he apologized for his insensitivity, and confessed that he regretted making me more upset than I already was. I didn’t hear him at any time apologize to my father for accusing him of neglect, nor did he even acknowledge his rudeness to our dog’s devoted owner, since the only one to blame for her severe undernourished state would be those put in charge of nourishing her while her master was gone.

Her ribs played like a xylophone beneath my fingertips, each bone with its own pitch. Her right shoulder blades cut into the cold vet air, drawing characters with their curving into her legs and paws, but her left leg was stretched out with an I.V. catheter attached, and was stiff beneath her weight. I traced the hollows in her body, still trying my best to rouse her, but she only sniffled and looked away. Picking up a soft, black ear that covered her deaf drums like a flap, I whispered my good will into her skull, speaking hopefully of her recovery, but bursting into intermittent tears. Have you made a decision yet? Asked the vet. I shook my head and he left. You heard the vet, my uncle urged, ‘It’s a no brainer’ to put her down. He is stood behind me, above me, and I angrily told him to leave me.

Shaking my head, I suddenly remember where I am, balanced atop this mustard machine. The houses are all gone now, it is just me and the woods. Wind stuffs my ears silent as if with cotton and whispers falsehoods and evil presences into my straining lobes. I cannot hear a thing besides the swish swish of my leg’s work, and the rush of wind abated only if I turn my head sideways, and the constant skreeeech of my brakes against the wheel. Scenery drifts by, all the same, the naked legs of the pine trees visible in the open expanse of the woods, unhidden by non-existent underbrush. In these parts are where the legends kick in, where the Jersey Devil is said to swoop up little children to dine on them, where the KKK still meets to plot murder, where the Pineys rest on guard with their shot guns for intruders. No where to run if they try to kidnap me… I would bet the ratio of normal people on this road is 20 to 1. Take me away then, I think, pedaling faster. Fly-Like-the-Wind-Winkie, give me wings to make it to my destination!

I have never been known for my tranquility while alone, but of course, since the only person able to record this trait is I, what I mean to say is that I feel at my most vulnerable when I am acting alone. Hamilton State Park lake is where I am riding, a favorite haunt I have visited many times in the past, but never via bike. Word in the neighborhood is a seven mile-away hypothesis, but no one’s ever biked the distance before. Seeing as the last time I biked seven miles was four years ago when I lived in mountainous Vermont, I am afraid my body won’t realize when we should have reached our destination in the event that I’ve been biking the wrong way. I tend to do that a lot, bike in the wrong direction, so I’ve become accustomed to preparing for the event of realization with temperance.

The doctor had called me yesterday morning in a panic, saying if I didn’t hurry to manage my dog’s euthanasia that we would have a lawsuit on our hands, Very expensive, very expensive to treat… I’m not one of those animal freaks, one of the ones that loves animals more than people, like some of my staff, He’d said, hiking his scrubs tight between his legs to get comfortable squatting on the floor of the room of locked metal cages where my dog lay, spilling over the edges of her cage limply.

If you can’t control your staff than that is your problem, and you don’t need to take it out on me when I’m already clearly suffering! He had apologized immediately, shamefacedly to my back, but I was otherwise engaged with Winkie, whispering, I know how you feel, these people are idiots, but no one but them can fix you. Do you want that? Or do you want to rest? She had not answered me, but continued staring blankly at the wall with the look of an egg.

I pedal faster, whirling through the canopy of trees, past empty horse apartments, mud and wood cracking in the direct afternoon sunlight. Is the heat much greater at this time because the distance or angle from the sun is less? How did I get so burned on the bus yesterday?

Suddenly I remember the vet as I pulled in on the bus, then the vet building as I pulled away in my Uncle’s bright green Honda to go get Rita’s water ice. Rita’s! He’d said, positively gleeful with surety it would cure my worries.
What worries? I’d wanted to say. My dog is dead and I emptied my bank account doing it. There is nothing left to worry about. There is nothing left. The wind picks up, rushing in bursts through my hair and lifting my chin so that the sunlight hits my eyelids. I swirl my legs in circles for a few rotations with my eyes shut, watching bursts of orange melodies dance across my optic nerves in synchronicity with the shadows criss-crossing the white-bellied deciduous leaves fluttering above like a fluid sieve.

I’d called the various other members of my family, each residing in a distinct state, to let them know my imminent decision. To my surprise, no one protested, with the exception of my doggy. My father spoke to her as I turned up the volume and pressed the earpiece into Winkie’s cavernous bat ear, trying to penetrate her deafness as best I could. Although her eyes were clouded with a grey film, she had begun to blink, and found within her the strength to open her mouth and pant, the corners of her lips curling upward into that old familiar smile. Her toothy mouth brown with the decay of decades of chewing and not brushing, her mouth smelled thick and mildewed as I stroked between her eyes and down to her parched nose, crackly to my touch. I had spit on a cookie to soften it, then placed it between her open lips, bright red and black with ulcers and skin freckles.

Looking at the pavement, its spots running like rivers behind me beneath my feet, I think about when Winkie was younger and how much she’d changed. When we’d first gotten her, all the black freckles against her pig-pink skin had been centralized around her belly, which hung snug and round like a cantaloupe nuzzled into her ribcage like a scoop to a cone. Of course her fur was speckled- she was a Springer Spaniel after all- but the skin freckles were seemingly distinct to her fat puppy tummy. As she’d gotten older and thinned out, the freckles had spread to her nose and the insides of her legs, then even to the inside of her mouth. It was the ulcers that disturbed me, for it looked as if they’d smart terribly if she ingested anything. Perhaps from spitting up too much? I wonder.

My father, having paid his dues and bid his farewells, hung up the phone, and I’d set about calling my sister. She began to cry, tearing down my own walls against emotional displays and allowing me the comfort of knowing I was not alone in my grief, and we sobbed loudly into the phone. I cut her off, reminding as I remember suddenly the power of tone of voice with dogs, and we both pull ourselves together.

There was a time when Winkie was terribly bad. One day, at the tender age of 14 and she at that of 2, I had pompously gone out in the yard with a promise to my mother and grandfather that I would get from her jaws whatever dead animal or piece of trash she was jealously hoarding from us, for we didn’t want her chocking on bones, nor did we want her puking up rotten body parts later in the day. Winkie and I had squared off, each facing the other with raw determination to outdo the other. At last I’d cornered her and reached with curled fingers toward her snout. Her lips had curled back, showing just a hint of teeth, but I’d known it was a bluff. With one swift movement, I’d clamped my pointer and thumb around the orange peel she held between her front teeth, precariously possessed. But for a moment we lay in gridlock, each of us applying our full force on the preoccupied fight to be blessed with this sliver of fruit rind.

Just then, Winkie had pulled one of her savage animal tricks, tugging toward her with all her might to edge my fingers closer, and then letting up on the orange rind for a half of a millisecond in which I was convinced I had the upper hand, before surging forward to getter a closer grip on the peel, in her inaccuracy clamping her jaws down upon my finger and pulling. She pulled the skin open, her teeth down to my bone and dragging open a canyon of fat and muscle from my joint to my fingernail before leaping back in horror at the taste of my blood. She’d seemed to realize her mistake immediately, but I couldn’t contain my rage, screaming in fury before realizing that I should seek professional attention for the wound gushing blood in rivers from my appendage. Winkie had followed me inside, slinking hurriedly into her cage as we dialed the hospital.

My sister cooed at top volume through my cellphone into my dog’s ear, and she continued to pant fervently, her breaths increasing as if excited by the sound. Her tongue lolled uncontrollably against the wooly blankets under her head, slurping up her own drool as it torrented from her mouth. Suddenly she licked her lips and closed her mouth, letting out a dog-moan. Did you hear that! She’s talking! I’d screamed into the phone. Keep talking! And my sister, in the wonderfully high musical tones she and Winkie shared, continued to talk to her dog of 12 years. Winkie in turn responded, still blank eyed, with the whirring noises of a motor almost catching.

I begin to sweat, pumping my legs and feeling my bad knee catch with every downward thrust of my left leg against the pedal. I bite my lip and, looking around and seeing nothing in front of me, and nothing behind me, I suck in my stomach and take a deep breath, deciding to enjoy the pain of each step, to relish this palpable form of suffering. It hurts, and I deserve it, I want it. The distance ahead of me is interminably long, no mile markers for many minutes now. With no sense of direction on this perpetual upslope, Imust rely on determination and faith alone as inscentive to continue pedaling, to keep going where there is no hope in sight of my beloved lake and the shivery chill of its waters I await, Just around the next corner.

My uncle had come back in to my turned back, for I’d practically climbed in the cage with Winkie, sheltering her body with my own. Well, He asked, his newly thick New Jersey accent closing ‘ah’s’ to ‘oo’s,’ Have you made up your mind?

Wouldn’t you like to know? I thought to myself, already knowing the answer. I’m still talking to my family.

Well, just remember. You are the Doherty here on scene. You know what decision needs to be made, but I need you to come to that decision. He spoke as if he had made the decision for me and needed me to agree with him. I was not going to make the decision based on what he thought, for I could sense his toe-tapping urgency to get to a choir party he’d scheduled for that day. I tried to separate myself from his pressurizing words, ignoring him and picking up my cell phone again. I need to call my Mom. You need to give my 15 more minutes, ok? He looked almost disappointed with what he perceived as my indecisiveness, but got up to go nonetheless. I, in fact, was working to preserve the privacy of my family’s mourning rights, their individual rights to say goodbye to our fifth family member.

In the silence made by the passing whirls of wind drowning my hearing, I catch a whiff of Tomaso Albinoni’s Adagio marching steadfastly through the trees surrounding me. Afraid that the melody is a trick for something sinisterly imminent, I whip around on my bicycle seat as best I can to trace the source of the music, no longer aware of my grief. As I turn to the left, I catch another strain behind me, the notes moving forward in simple, slanting melodies. I wonder how close I am, I found myself thinking, then, Did Winkie ever wonder that? Or did she just focus on the pain entirely, feeling only her old bones heavy under weakened flesh? My cuticles are stretched tight and feel dirty, stinging and biting in the wind, raw and newly bitten down to a pulp from the bus ride to the vet yesterday.

Once I’d gotten rid of my Uncle again, I had then called my mother in Boston for a long time and listened patiently to the typing clicks and equipment whirring between her intermittent phrases, the phrases made audible by an automated voice. She only types 6 words per minute, but she chose them well. As I updated her as to Winkie’s status and asked her if she wanted to say anything to Winkie, a dog in the neighboring kennel began to bark and yap in an unbridled way. Love her, said my mom, and just then Winkie began to woof and moan some more between her saggy dog lips. She is a very good girl, continued my mother, and my dog began to woof, open mouthed, the way she used to when she wanted us to take her out for a walk.

Woo, ghwooo, whooo, wooo! She said, nodding her head up and down.

Is that her, asked my mother.

Yes! Yes! Do you hear her?!

Winkie lifted her head suddenly, and, opening her jaws, let out a howl! Putting her weight on her left shoulder, she lifted her head and twisted it toward me, looking me straight in the eye from the distance of her muzzle, her eyes grey with film but seeing directly into mine. Help me... She seemed to say, struggling to move her left leg out from under her, pushing against my thighs with her right paw with surprising force. I pulled at her neck to help her, but with a desperate breath, she falls back upon the towels and blankets and closes her lips once more, pushing moans and whines out in response to her barking counterpart and in the silences between my mother’s computerized words of support to my dog. Winkie yowled just like she used to, in a complete uproar in her impatience to go out, to get up and out and about. But no matter how hard she struggled, she couldn’t even move her back legs, let alone shift her weight from her left side. Over and over she raised her head to my mother’s voice, over and over, overwhelmed by exhaustion and weakness, she fell again to the bed. I knew she would never get up again.

It’s ok, baby. It’s ok. Emily’s going to take care of you. It’s ok, I’m gonna make everything ok for you. I’ll make it stop. If you’re hurting I’ll make it stop. Mom, I gotta go.

I love you, She said, and I love our dog daughter. I’m glad you’re there with her. I knew that, despite the monotone of the computer’s delivery of my mother’s words, she was crying just as hard as I was.

Ok baby. Listen to me, ok? I never expected to live this long, and you have always been my best friend. I can’t believe I have to outlive you. You’ve taken care of everyone, you know that? You did a good job taking care of mom, and then of dad, and always of Sarah and me. Winkie’s moans had lulled, and now, as if woofing in her sleep like she used to when she was a puppy, her language became muted to softer expressions. Her eyes, still open, blinked when I pet them, and she seems to nuzzle into my hand as I scratched her whiskery cheeks.

Thinking of this as I pedal, I start to cry, big drops clouding my vision into an underwater haze of light and liquid, the tears loping with gravity down my chin and onto my rusty handlebars. Shaken by sobs, I lose control of the bike, and almost come to a stop, the gasps I’m taking detracting from the strength of my footfalls. They made me sign the paper after I’d killed her. They made me pay almost a thousand dollars just to stop her pain and add to my own. What a sick business! What a cold-hearted business.

The woman who’d made me sign the paperwork on the cold metal table had folded it down from the wall with a snap, pursing her lips that were cut vertically from eons of scowling, each wrinkle like a tick mark of every unhappy face she’d caused. Of course, She’d said when I asked if they accepted Debit cards.

I couldn’t help but add my own Of course bitterly in response, knowing that she was making plenty of money from my sorrow, just as John McCain had admitted at my college graduation, “War is a terrible business.” Business is business, and you’re the one profiting, I mumbled when she left the room, angry that my dog’s long life could be summed up in a long list of veterinary charges, angry to be reminded that my love for her could only extend as far as I could pay.

Are you ready? Asked the doctor as he entered the room holding a long hypodermic needle, dripping with barbituate. It won’t take long, it will be real quick, she won’t feel a thing, He prattled on, but I doubted whether this were true. At this least I hoped she’d feel good.

Are you ready, my good girl? I asked, my sweetest, calmest voice stripped from my wrenched soul for my dog’s last moments. Are you ready, honey? You’ve been such a good girl, now go to sleep now. You’re such a good girl, huh? Yes you are! Yes you are!! You are such a good girl! Now that’s a good girl. Uh, huh, just lie still now and relax, you’re such a good girl. Good girl, good girl. Good girl, good girl!! You’re such a good girl! I love you, you’re so good. I love you Winkie, I love you. I love you, good girl! Good girl, I love you honey. Oh Winkie!

The doctor had crouched beside me and slid the needle into her green-bandaged foot. Her other paw, furry like a mammoth and the size of my palm, sat nestled within my fingers, and I squeezed it, repeating my mantra of positivity to her over and over. As the medicine coursed quickly through her blood-stream, her perfervid breathing slowed, digging her claws into my skin as she began to snuffle confusedly with her dry, cracking nose pressing suddenly against the cold metal cage as she arched her back. I stroked her head and moved her neck back so that she could move freely, pulling her squashed olfactory organ away from the sterile metal into the warmth of my skin. With my other hand on her temple, she took a deep, deep breath. That breath stretched from the tip of her nose to the claws on her back legs, and her flurried state of panic seemed to calm. Another breath, That’s it, my good girl. You’re ok now. You’re all right, and then another, and then a shallow breath, and then a light sigh, and then a slight gasp, and then a puff.

The doctor tried to push me aside to check, to stuff his cold stethoscope against her bald armpit, but I refused to let go of her paw. Her ribs, so pointy and sharp through her soft coat, had stopped moving, like in past times where her breaths were so few that I had worried she’d died in her sleep. But this time, observing the stillness, I felt no fear. Only sadness. Only a loss so great I could do nothing but weep at the absence of her soul in her body, a body and soul I had come to love so dearly over our respective lives. I squeezed her paws tightly, staring at comforting dog-body that had served her so well all these years. My uncle puts his hands resolutely on my shoulders to tell me it is time to leave her as she has left us, but I fall upon her, kissing her once more through sticky tears and frenzied breath. My sobs echo against the cold, metal walls, my tears drip down their sides without a trace.

Fly-Like-the-Wind, give me wings!! Give me the strength to do anything! I will find this pond, or I will turn around and find a better one, I think to myself. I pump my bike harder, suddenly aware of the constant screeching of my brakes, consistently resisting my progress. I whip down a hill, my chin lifting me higher to the sun, my muscles straining against the incline, encouraging my bicycle’s inertia.

Suddenly I reach my destination, a dirt road pull-off that shoulders a two-dam lake. I run for the sunset-colored water, stained shades of burgundy and organdy by the pine needles decomposing on its soft sand floor, and strip down to my fluorescent pink bikini, leaping head first into the water to dog paddle my way around cool summer haven I never wish to return from.

La Sirena

2007-05-28T15:11:00.000-07:00

LA SIRENA

Crossing herself one last time suspiciously from neck to clavicle for good laundry luck, she gets her bag ready for the step up from the sunken elevator onto the basement floor, cheeks still flushed from touching herself in the pink flush of her very messy bedroom. With the seasons’ shift to summer, the afternoon light had begun to linger into what used to be evening, and she couldn’t resist such diversion between a long day and a dull night to come. To coddle and clean were her shirts, jeans, panty-less lingerie, and dresses, all packed into the giant duffle slung over her shoulder like a conscience.

Not Catholic and no longer a devout Episcopal in a neighborhood of Baptists, she feels silly for crossing herself, as if caught believing something outside of her allotted faith. Not wanting to be labeled, she momentarily imagines a world in which reverence is possible without qualification or categorization, then sighs away the fleeting thought as quick as the flit of her beating heart. Maybe I should be enriching my life instead of escaping it. Not that being Catholic is bad, that’s not what I meant to think at all, she thinks. Although suddenly shamed at the rushed and nervous manner in which she was using an iconographic motion to hope for what she wanted (a washing machine), she hoped yet that her prayer be answered despite its sloppy execution.

If I’m lucky, if I’m lucky, she repeats to herself, hoisting the bag and impatiently feeling the elevator ease itself into place like an old woman on a toilet seat. Perhaps I could use a stint in a monastery, she thinks, noting the nerve-wracking way the elevator tucks its door into the left wall to reveal several inches of underbiting the freshly swept concrete basement floor, assuming I don’t die first when the floor of this elevator falls out. Just to see what it’s like. I’ll put my money in a CD and let it simmer, then I’ll work the land for my keep and meditate every day. And sing everyday. I’ll suffer in silence for several hours in the morning, and when the time is right, whenever they allot time for that kind of thing, I would fling forth the doors of the monastery with my acute-angled ladder and climb into the apple trees, picking cherries and composing melodies in the vast and open silence of the Himalayas, my songs clipped only by a rattlesnake’s chatter.

With the stocky steps of a woman overburdened in youth, she strides from the dangling dumbwaiter and surveys the room. The basement is decorated in the classic cold-war fashion: cold concrete blank-faced walls interspersed with mustard yellow signs indicating reassuringly the nuclear fallout shelter status of the basement and the first three floors of the building. The side door to the concrete patio looking over the park propped ajar with a crumbling red brick does nothing to reassure the woman in the event of a nuclear attack, but since she lives on the unprotected fifth floor of the building and is focused on her task of cleanliness, she barely registers the breeze blowing cigarette smoke from out of doors.

Of the four total, two washing machines sit side by side in the front row, nudging each other’s shoulders playfully in time to their internal whirlpools. In the second row, another machine spreads its lid with an angry “Roto” promise to ruin the clothes of anyone foolish enough to rape its white cube with laundry. With a spark of hope, she rushes toward the last machine in the second row, silent with a modest and closed lid. Thanks, she smiles satisfactorily, glad that whatever energy is answering her is good enough to overlook her half-hazard requests and just give her what she needs.

Bumping her hips against the front row of dryers and washing machines that grind methodically like high school seniors on the dance floor, she hurriedly tromps through the dingy drainage puddle, eager to put down her heavy load, only to find that her bag is actually too wide to fit between the machines. Like a greedy child trying to select a comprehensive handful of M+M’s who finds her fist too big to fit the handful of goodies beyond the mouth of the glass Atlas jar, the woman finds herself able to reach her coveted washer only at the expense of her clothing. Rolling her eyes in annoyance, she sloshes back through the puddle and props the duffle on her knee, trying to hoist it over the first row of machines. Muscles straining, she gets one edge up, but knocks over someone’s laundry soap. Fuck it, she thinks, I’ll get it in a minute. First I’ve gotta get this damn thing up.
With one last jerk of her duffle’s leash, she is tossed like a jockey from its steed, thrown into the bubbling puddle with grim success at wedging the bag between the machines smugly undulating. Wiping perspiration from her brow dramatically, she sets about her task, peeling the sticky black plastic bag from the sides of her Tide, and sorting through the cotton/lycra/acrylic mixes. I really need to stop buying more clothes instead of doing my laundry, she thinks, trying to remember in vain when, since she moved in six months before, was the last time she did laundry. It’s not like I smell. It’s not like I couldn’t wash them more if I wanted to. With care she removes her bras and thongs, casting a surreptitious glance over her shoulder to make sure no one is watching. The basement is empty but for her, but she can’t help but wonder with horror how she will get all her lace to the dryer.

With sudden premonition, the economy sized sink beside her washer begins to fill with the dirty water of the front row’s filth, a thick head of bubbles concealing the grey grit hurrying out of the hose. Pausing in her habitual rituals, the woman stares at the unabashed overflow and wonders how blackened her water will be when these clothes run the gaunt. Then she turns back to her task. What am I going to do with all this lace when it’s time for the dryer? She wonders, deciding at the last minute to stuff a sheet on top, just in case someone else checks her laundry in an hour when she will have inevitably forgotten about it.

Suddenly there is a movement behind her, sensed through the cloud of her self-absorption, a presence. Dizzy with surprise like a chubby girl caught hoarding candy bars in her bedroom, the woman whips around to see who had made the sound. Spreading like eagle wings to his hairline, the smile-lines of the tall man with slick black hair hanging over his ears standing behind the first row of washers mumbling, “It’s ok,” catch the woman off guard.

She scrambles to retrieve her Tide thoughtlessly placed on his washer’s lid. He raises a hand, shaking his head. “But,” she interrupts, reaching again for her detergent, wrapped up in its black Bodega girdle like an open container of alcohol.
“Please. It’s ok.” He interrupts again, looking at her clothing stacked high over her machine’s open maw. Then he warmly gestures for his machine to be the permanent resting place for her soap, protectively shielding her soap from unnecessary relocation.

She shrugs and smiles at his hospitality and turns back to her machine, digging for quarters in her change jar with a hefty rattle. After a moment of fighting the urge to look at him again she succumbs, developing the courage only when she believes his breath no longer to be a machine away from her neck.

The heart of the man sitting in the metal chair on the side of the folding card table farthest from the open patio door is beating very fast as he struggles not to stare at the woman’s head, twisting round a graceful neck. He stares at the ceiling, but can feel her eyes inspecting him curiously. Nueva, como yo? he thinks, not sure what to say.

He is very tall, even sitting down, with thick strong fingers and hearty veins. She thinks about smiling, shyly, but decides against it should he think she was flirting. His legs open in a relaxed pose but with arms crossed, he studies the ceiling with some degree of concentration. Suddenly aware that she is staring and that he might stare back beneath his upturned eyes, she looks quickly down at her soap, reaching for it and secretly glancing once more through lowered lashes before turning back to her machine.

When her back is turned once more, the man covertly turns an eye in her direction to watch her shoulder blades make a smooth diagonal as she reaches up with a free hand to sweep uneven curls from her neck. The movement briefly reveals two intertwined trees on a white nape before the curls are dropped like a veil over red lips. Her shoulder blades move like arched eyebrows beneath the roots of the trees peeking from below her reddish brown tendrils.

Turning round and looking at him courageously, having invoked a bit of confidence, she asks, “How much time do you think?”

He doesn’t quite hear her, so leaps up form his chair. “What? What did you say?” he asks, pressing his palms against the machine between them. She leans in a little, but not too close in case he can smell her breath for better or worse, and repeats her query of cycle timing. “Oh,” he says, with relief at knowing the answer. “Just five minutes or so.”

“Really?” She asks with surprise. Wanting to clarify if he perhaps is telling her how much time is left in his machine or hers, she rephrases the question. “How long do these things take?”

“I’ve been here just two months.” He responds, pleasedly informing her through a thick and sultry accent. It was an accent of a uniquely beautiful nature, the words opening like envelopes from his throat with silent ‘th’s,’ an accent with vowels heavy like a robin redbreast resting atop an umbrella. He had clearly mistaken her question for a different question entirely, but the woman just nods and smiles graciously, not wanting to confuse things more. He then inquires, “And you?”

“Who, me?” she laughs, disorienty in their conversation and drawing a nervous blank. “Oh, well, umm, I moved here in November.”

“I’m new.” He says, sheepishly, ducking his head and looking at her from beneath a heavy brow. They both smile, and the woman considers once more asking her original question. Ultimately she decides against it, deeming it a stupid question anyway. Now at a total loss for words and not willing to stand there forever like a smiling bimbo, she quickly grabs her change jar and darts between the machines to the chair closest to the open side patio, blinding with afternoon light like a portal, waiting for another machine to open up in order to wash the leftover darks.

He follows suit in silence, neither wanting to look at one another without reason for initiating dialogue.

“So, do you like it?”

“Huh?” He asks, leaning quickly over the table toward her, his ear turned pointedly in her direction.

The woman thought briefly of how old he could be. Possibly in his thirties for those smile lines cutting creases in his skin, but he seems so young and fresh for some reason, she thinks. He behaves with equal nervousness to my own. No, he must be in his twenties: excited and exciting. “How do you like it here?” she asks. “You’ve only been here a couple weeks, right? How do you like the neighborhood?”

Nodding his head satisfactorily while simultaneously shaking it, he answers, “It is very loud, you know? On the streets? But I like it. Yes, I like it a lot.”

“Loud? Oh it is the exact opposite for me,” she answers, momentarily regretful of initiating such banal conversation, preferring always to get to the soul of a stranger. She continues, wondering if he perhaps doesn’t like the street’s pulses of life in car alarmed, hip-hop, batchata splendor. “I live in the shaft and sometimes its so silent I can’t stand it, I think I’m going crazy. I am so used to the noise.”

“But that loud music.” He cuts in, lifting his eyes upward into a roll along with open palms appealing.

“No,” she disagrees, “I love the loud music.”

“You do?” He asks, with surprise.

“Of course! Especially all of the Spanish music people play. It is so alive, all these people moving in the streets to the same beat.” The man nods with a somber expression, thinking, and she smiles at him absently before nervously turning her gaze toward the open door out to the patio, as if looking for an escape from her tied tongue. Neither say anything for a moment, each listening to their own hurried breaths and wondering when the laundry will be done to give them an excuse to stand up once more. Both sit in desparate, pathetic silence, wanting very much to continue conversation, but unsure for just what to talk about.

The woman sighs quietly, breathing out some of her tension in acceptance that she has nothing whatsoever to say for any good reason except to speak to him again, just as he takes a sharp breath and says laughingly, “I do not want to go back up there.” She twists her head to look at him over an arm outstretched to her knee to see him pointing a finger at the ceiling, gesturing to his apartment above with a grin.

“Why not?” she asks.

“I have twelve people staying in my apartment right now.” he answers, conjuring visions of migrant workers sewing shirts in the back rooms of the tiny-front Canal Street stores. Just then his two machines shudder to a halt, and he jumps up, beginning to pull out his towel one by one and into the empty dryer. His arms bulge slightly from beneath his Tshirt, and the woman watches him move furtively, frequently squinting glances at his eyes to make sure they are not looking at her. At times she can see the right side of his right eye go dark, as his chocolate circled pupils swivel toward her with equal stealthiness.

He looked very distinguished, even under his casual garb, and the woman wonders if he is European for the way he wears his jeans so confidently snug. She figures, for the shape he is in, he can’t be much older than I, so decides to just relax and smile. He seems more nervous than me, she notes, liking the way his hair retains textured streaks of finger-combed strands, perpetually pushing back the curtain under which he preferred his gaze hid.

Just as she opens her mouth to inquire if his washer was open, the elevator beside her slumps to a halt, expelling a pot-bellied old man with white monk hair. Pushing a red wire shopping cart with a black trash bag slung between its four corners, he glances at the woman curiously and then at the man, who turns quickly back to his laundry. Suspecting to have caught the pair mid-conversation, he raises his eyebrows smugly and begins to unload his dry laundry by the armful into trash bag.

The young man looks at the young woman slyly, seeing her watching him. Gesturing subtly to his now empty washer, he smiles. With gracious relief at having an excuse to stand and pace a bit, she smiles back, hurrying once more between the young man at the washers and the old man at the dryers toward duffle still packed with dirty darks. Turning her back on both men, she concentrates on her task of gingerly loading the washer, not looking up until she has inserted four quarters and pulled back at the sliver slot with the swagger of a true gambler. The dark man all the while fights the urge to look at her, feeling the white-haired man’s knowing glance awaiting such a betrayal desire, determined not to dole such satisfaction for the stranger.

Finally the white-haired man finishes unloading, clamming the dryer door and crossing, unseen by the woman still dawdling at her loading task, to the elevator. The young man crosses to the car table and begins packing his dryer with Bounce dryer sheets until the elevator door has slid into and out of its hiding place in the wall, successfully concealing the departure of the old man.

Once he has departed, both breathe a sigh of relief, and the woman lets slip a slight giggle. She cuts in the washer-dryer canal back to her duffle bag, waiting until the dark, young man has finished transferring his clothing to the second dryer before asking her question. “So, why so many people in your apartment?”

“It is a special weekend. I am to be married.” He smiles, pleased with himself, thinking of his dark haired beauty in his mind’s eye.

Thinking she is mistaken in her hearing, surprised to meet such a young man so sure of getting married, she studies him for an instant and, not wanting to say the innopropriate response, asks for clarification, “I’m sorry, who is getting married?”
“Oh! Zat is me!” He answers, his smile broadening. “I marry this Saturday.”

The woman cannot help but feel a twinge of regret, then relief, at being faced with a man with whom she needs no- in fact, should have no- sex appeal. It can be tiring being objectified, and she decides this man is a good man if he is so ready to marry. Hiding secret disappointment at her loss of power, she taps into the relief and smiles courteously. “Oh, how wonderful for you! She must be very beautiful! Congratulations!” Her statement rings slightly false, her adulations falling flat on their faces despite her attempt to covey genuine happiness. He is just a stranger, she thinks, internally shaking her head scoldingly at herself for any and all brazen thoughts.

“Thank you!” He answers happily, unaware of her fantasy and dreamily disappearing into his weekend plans. The woman finishes folding her duffle and ducks across the man’s path toward a quick elevator escape, afraid to stay unless she betray the rush of envy that draws blood to her stomach. The dark man is surprised by her sudden exit, but as she won’t quite meet his eyes, she passes resolutely and without obstacle.

“I have about fifteen minutes, right?” She asks, turning toward him as she stabs at the broken button jutting out of the wall with a weak and bending thumb.

“Yes, about ten or fifteen.” He answers, his eyebrows drawing together ever so slightly.

“Great!” She tosses casually over her shoulder before stepping down into the quivering vertical transporter. “I’ll be back. Great to meet you.”

* * *

Upstairs in her apartment, the woman rushes to splash her face and dive into the awful work of cleaning. As meditative an undertaking as it can be to go over the same spot, over and over, just for the sake of decreasing allergens and appearances, cleaning never ceased to try her patience. Unable to think clearly until her surfaces are free of dust and cat fur’s choking hold, she tries to get through it as efficaciously as possible.

“Where’s the vacuum?” She calls out, pressing her ear against her roomate’s closed wooden door.

“Out in the most obvious place!” he answers. “But I don’t know exactly. The living room maybe?”

“I looked everywhere,” she replies, “I must be blind.” And sure enough, there it is, in the living room by the side of the doorframe. I must be blind, I must be blind… She tells herself, rushing into her bedroom and plugging it in. She vacuums obsessively, determined to get every hair out of the carpet even though her allergic lover is out of the country. She cannot stand the way the carpet balls up and hides stray kitty litter tracked by sweaty soles all over the house, so she vacuums until the vacuum becomes exhausted and stalls with a sob, its death punctuated by a gasp and a sputter.

“Oh shit!” She exclaims, frantically pressing the on/off button several times, only to hear a wicket whirr, followed by silence. “Oh shit!” She exclaims again, this time quieter in case her roommate hears she has broken his vacuum.

Suddenly remembering her laundry, she lets out another blast of expletives, louder this time, and hurriedly unplugs the vacuum. Tossing its listless shape back where she found it, the woman grabs her keys and stuffs her feet half way into bronze slip-ons before slamming the door behind her.

* * *

Heralded by her breasts, the man’s head snaps to attention from its resting place on the back wall when she emerges from the elevator frame. No longer waiting, he breathes a sigh of relief, and she notices his smile and instinctively smiles back, collapsing on the chair next to him with a sweaty sweep of bangs from her forehead.

“Phew!” she starts, “I vacuumed so much I broke the vacuum.” Then, without a second’s rest, she leaps from her chair and proceeded to load all of her clothes into the one remaining dryer. What luck! Such good timing! she thinks.

Devuelve, the man thinks, pretending to be uninterested by tipping his head once more against the cold concrete wearily while watching her under his lashes. She stands on tiptoes to reach deep within the mouth of the washer, morphing into a sweet and bent version of the Venus de Milo before his eyes as her arms disappear in the barrel. Moving always fluidly in his periphery, she suddenly swoops toward him, depositing a bundle of clothes wrapped discreetly in what appeared to be a negligee on the table beside him.

She blushes slightly, watching only her hands and trying to control her heartbeat with a slowing of the breath, to no avail. What is it about this man that catches me so off guard? She wonders, glancing once more at his upturned eyes. But I can’t rightly ruin my lingerie… Her thoughts wander. A man who wants to get married, she finds herself thinking, with a touch of ironic bitterness, Who knew they even existed?

Crossing once more to the dryer, now stuffed colorfully as a cow’s udder in the dawn, she reaches for her tomato sauce jar of loose change. With one swift movement she slips the quarters into the change slits and twists the knob, then returns to her seat at the table across from him. If only he would do the talking like the charming man I want him to be. If only he would take off the pressure I feel. Then I’d be free not to worry so much about being forgettable.

Just then he leans over the table conspiratorially. “Do you go out?” He asks, inviting her back into idle conversation. Her cheeks blooming at such direct inquiry into illegal pastimes, she answers in a flustered manner, turning the question back on him. He shrugs in response, saying, “I do not go out drinking much, but I do like to drink occasionally. So, what do you do on, I mean, in your spare hours?”

Feeling put on the spot in the wake of his probing gaze, she decides to hide the extent of her weak and addictive character, floundering for words prettily. “Oh, you now. I mostly stay in and smoke with friends. It’s probably terrible for me, but I take long walks through the parks on weekends.” Realizing how cliché she sounds, she immediately shuts her mouth, horrified. He just smiles and leans in closer, genuinely encouraging her. She continues, “Well, you know, it’s been such good weather, I can’t help but want to explore this area. Even now, after living here almost six months I don’t know it perfectly.”

“So you smoke?” He asks, reaching for his pocket.

“Yes, it’s terrible.” She says, excusing herself. “But I’m a singer, so it’s much worse. And yet there is something about them I do love.” She smiles sinfully as his hand reappears with a pack of Kool menthols, her least favorite brand.

“Would you like to?” He asks, fingering his lighter between thumb and index joint.

She grins and, giving one glance to the bright light of the patio, nods and starts to stand. “Alright,” she says, feigning reluctance. “Just to pass the time, of course.”

“Of course,” He answers, getting up beside her and withdrawing a cigarette. He hands her the lighter, and for a moment she is afraid he doesn’t intend to smoke with her. Pretending to light the small white cylinder pressed between her joints, she pauses long enough in the action for him to jump in, suggesting, “Let’s go out,” while stretching an arm to the door. She lowers the lighter from her lips with a smile, sauntering down the concrete and brick tunnel outdoors.

Having already accepted the cigarette, she feels compelled to smoke it. Listening for him to follow her on soft-shoes, she traverses the burrow and, sensing him behind her, turns her back on the wind and her front toward him as she lights the cigarette beneath her bangs, dragging on it disdainfully. She is afraid to tell him she has already quit smoking for fear that their conversation should end with the final exhale.

“Salud,” he says satirically, toasting her with an upraised wand. She smiles appreciatively and faces him with a calm smile, waiting for him to speak. He does. “Are you married?” He asks, bluntly.

She laughs, flaring her nostrils slightly with delight as if having been referred to with an undeserved prefix of “Doctor,”shaking her head.

Embarrassed for his audacity, he furrows his brow and his mouth flattens into a nervous line. “I’m sorry, that is not the right question.”

“No. No, no,” she interrupts, all to happy too address his sincere dive into the revelation of secrets that occurs when two strangers agree to step over the mundane and get to the nitty gritty. “It’s ok,” she finishes with a snort, “I’m certainly not married though.”

“Are you in love with someone?” he asks, staring her down until she looks up with surprise.

“I- Well, how did you know?” She asks, and he looks down at his feet, exhaling smoke in a strong lungful toward the street gate before looking once more in her direction. To answer, he shrugs, knowingly, and she continues, offering, “But he’s in Berlin, so it doesn’t matter in the slightest.”

“Berlin? What is he doing in Berlin and not here with you?” Utterly flabbergasted, he means to compliment the woman standing self-consciously before him.

The woman instead looks away, wondering if there is, in fact, something wrong with her that her object of affection is not located in her geographical space. “Beats me.” She answers, defensively. “I’m still trying to figure that one out.”
“Why wouldn’t he want to be here with a beautiful girl like you?” When she doesn’t answer, he asks, quietly, “Are you in love with him?”

“I suppose so,” She retorts reluctantly, obviously embarrassed about her current rejection. Suddenly angry toward this anonymous lover who with a hold over the innocent girl’s heart who does not appreciate her beauty and quiet grace, the man clenches his fists around his cigarette pack and lighter. She continues, “But he’s got his whole hang up about wanting to be alone and yet wanting me, so he’ll go for like a week without calling me. I can never tell what to do about him. I mean, well… Nevermind.”

“Oh now. He sounds like trouble.” The dark man offers comfortingly. “He is not worth your time.”

The woman takes a long drag from her cigarette, clearly at a loss for means of amending the situation. She fights the urge to shrug, trying to just the awkward subject matter to get answers about the thinking patterns of members of the opposite sex, thinking, He is almost a married man. Perhaps he can figure out this mess for me.

“I mean,” she proceeds, trying to explain her complicated situation, “I can understand his hesitation. I mean, we’re just out of school and need to figure it all out, you know? And he had this test. Well, it took a lot of time. And I do trust him.”

At this onslaught, the dark man looks at her without compassion. She persists defensively, “And anyway, I’m going on a trip. He will meet me in Europe and we’ll walk the streets together. We’ll, you know, wander.”

The dark man is quiet for a moment, looking her over and noting her small waist and the way her butt sticks out as she shifts her weight to one side defiantly. “He is not worth you.” He finally says, smiling confidently.

“Oh stop. That’s silly. What are you talking about?” The woman replies, skittishly sweeping the hair from her neck to preemptively cool an oncoming flush.

“Are you kidding?” He asks innocently, his eyes wide with surprise. “You mean you do not know how beautiful you are?” She flushes, and he slaps himself in the forehead. “I am sorry, perhaps you are embarrassed by this conversation?” She shakes her head, smiling and looking up at the trees, biting her lower lip ever so slightly. “You must know you are beautiful, don’t you?” he presses.

Modestly shaking her head at him to indicate to the contrary, he take it to mean he should continue. “But you are very pretty, and you have a very nice body, and-”At this she gasps a sputtered cough of disbelief, but he doesn’t stop there, defending his words. “You must know. Listen to me,” he insists. Mortified at such flagrant compliments, she finally looks up at him, but he returns her gaze unabashed, refusing to avert his steady gaze. “I must tell you that when you walked into the laundry room just now I had to catch my breath because I was so struck by your sexy body and your sweet smile.” She looks away in protest, but he continues boldly. “You must know, girl, that you could have any man you want.”

Except for you, the woman thinks, shaking her head and wishing the conversation would stop, thinking desperately of ways to change the subject away from her. “So how did you meet your fiancé?” She asks, shifting the focus.

Subconsciously adopting her pose, he crosses one foot over the other and wobbles one step closer. “I used to play professional baseball,” he offers, flexing his arm.

“Really?” The woman asks, looking at him with surprise. “Where did you play? Do you still play now?” She eyes his thick biceps with impress, unable to control or steer her mind from what they would feel like gripped between her palms.

He taps a bicep with a regretful thud, saying nostalgically, “Injury. I am in nursing school now. That was the best time of my life. You see, I am from the Domincan Republic, and one day my friend, you see, he asked if I wanted to play. Well, I had never played in my life, but PING! I had an arm, you know? So they picked me up and brought me to New York to play professionally when I was seventeen. It was wild!” He exclaims, tossing his cigarette over his shoulder and stepping backward to stub it out. “I had these little kids, my disciples I called them since there were twelve of them, and they would come to every one of my games and cheer me on, you know? ‘Oooh! Hit it! Thrash the King!’ The disciples always ran up after to ask for my autograph, and I would play basketball with them after games.”

“I can’t imagine!” The woman responds, trying not to seem too dazzled with his brush with fame.

“Yes, I seemed almost silly. But I never once had imagined to play baseball professionally, yet there I was. And one day I looked up at the stands and there she was. I saw her eight years ago, and I knew I was going to marry her. I was dating someone else at the time, but she was a Columbian and I do not think it works between people of different countries.”

“Where is your fiancé from?” The woman asks.

“Oh, she is Dominican, like me. You must someday go to my country. It is very beautiful. Do you like rum?” He asks.

“Of course. I once had this spiced rum kept by my South African roommate. I could slug that stuff like nothing else. It was so sweet and delicious.”

“I will give you a bottle then,” the man decides, “For you must try some rum from my country.”

“No! I couldn’t!” She protests.

“No! I insist! You have never had rum until you have had Brugal.”

“Brugal?” She asks, knitting her brows with intrigue and leaning closer.

“Yes. You will see.”

“Well. I consent perhaps to a drink. But not a bottle!” The woman replies determinedly. The man just smiles with satisfaction, silent.

“You don’t think this man of yours sees other women?” He asks, cutting into the womans’ heart and intravenously tapping the doubt within.

She shakes her head, refusing to expose herself thus. “I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t know for sure, but he’s kind of a hypochondriac. I think he would tell me if he was just hooking up. Or at least I hope he would.” Anxious to change the subject, she throws her cigarette to the pavement and stubs it with her toe. He extends an arm again to gesture for her to re-enter the cool basement full of shuddering machines, and follows her inside.

When they sit back on opposite sides of the card table, she turns to him speculatively. “I used to be a very bad man,” he offers, honestly. “That is my fiancé’s biggest fear. But she should know that I am not a bad man. I am very good.”

“Yes, that is the problem with this boy I’m in love with. He is a very good man and I find they are hard to find.”

“No,” counters the dark man selfishly, gazing at her with puppy cow eyes, “The problem with your man is that you are in love with him.” At this the woman looks up, shocked, but her companion continues. “I learned my lesson one day when I still played ball and went out, back when I had friends.”

“You have no friends?” The woman asks, concernedly. “That can’t be true.”

“Yes,” The man answers, tiredly. “I did not like the lifestyles of these so-called friends. I could let them do what they do, but I did not want that to be a part of my own life, if you understand.” She nods, imagining this juicy-fleshed man choosing purity and solitude over the temptation of piles of cocaine and rooms full of strippers. “One day,” he continues, “I had a Puerto Rican girl come up to me and ask if I would like her to help me. She asks if, you know, she can, excuse me, kiss it,” He says, gesturing with a flippant wrist flick at his crotch. The woman glances at the barely perceptible bulge in his snug jeans. “And so I’m like, Ok.”

The woman catches herself in her stare mid-wonder if she played a part in his currently visible size and forces her gaze up to his eyes. The man continues impudently, “So she, you know, kisses it.” He stops then, noticing her ruddy cheeks. “I’m sorry, I should not tell this.”

The woman laughs, twisting her wrist in circles to indicate that he might as well finish his story, so he continues. “But then she goes out and tells everyone I forced her to, and so it seems I am at a fault.”

“Are you serious!? What kind of person would lie like that?” The woman asks in disbelief.

“It is very serious. They make money that way. It was very stupid of me, and I got in much trouble.”

“But your fiancé must be very beautiful to be with you. How can she be jealous?”

“I do not know. We went through some tough times, she and I, back in the first few years we dated. It sounds like you and this man of yours. I would see her for only an hour as we ran into each other, but I never saw her apartment for two years at one point.”

“Two years?” The woman asks, dubious.

“At one point,” the man answers. “Yes. Your man, he has come here?”

“To the apartment? I guess. Yeah. A couple of times,” she replies. Then there is a brief silence in which she fiddles with her hair before offering, “There must be a great deal of trust between you two at that point.”

“She would not like to meet you,” He says, smiling cryptically. “You have a nice, soft-looking body, and you’re muy simpatica. You know simpatica?”

“Nice?” The woman answers. “Yes, I supposed I am said to be almost too nice. A false positive, my friends say.”

“False positive?” The man asks, perplexed. “What is this?”

But the woman just laughs. “Never mind,” she answers, secretively.

The man shrugs and stands up to check on his dryer. He swings the door open firmly and she watches him for several minutes as he folds his clothes meticulously, each towel emerging bright and amazingly un-creased, not bleached stained like her own. He pulls the terry-cloth to his body, smoothing it flat against his abs and pectorals, looking up occasionally to smile at her as he folds one color after the other into meticulous piles. The woman tries to distract herself with her spinning dryer, proud for a moment of all the colors making up her wardrobe as they tumble up and around, entwining each other in a dizzying spiral.

“Entonces, entiendes espanol?” He asks, over his shoulder.

“Si, entiendo. Pero hablo muy lento. Muy despacio.”

Excited, his speech picks up in speed. “En donde aprendistelo?”

“Que?” She asks, and he repeats himself. Aprendiste, aprender, learn! Learn! No, no English. You will never learn that way, she corrects herself. “Oh, umm, aprende-a-i? Aprendi por, durante el liceo- lo siento, al colegio. Pero, nunca iba a una pais en que hay gente que hablen espanol. Excepto aqui, con los dominicanos y cubanos de Nueva York, y ese barrio.”

“Pero, hablas muy bien.” He responds, complimenting her broken, halting attempts at communication, utterly endeared by her accent and effort.

“No. Pero, gracias. Mi mayor problema es que mezclo mi espanol con mi italiano.”

“Hablas italiano?” He asks her, even more enthusiastic.

Reticently she answers, “Oh no. Hablo muy mal. Solo me ensenaron por dos anos por la Universidad.”

“En que Universidad?”

“En Columbia.” She answers, shyly.

“And pardon me, but how old?” The dark man inquires.

“How old are you?” She counters.

“Guess. How old do I look? Cuantos anos tengo?” He grins.

The woman take this opportunity to study him, eying him up and down with a formidable stare. “Creo que tienes… Umm…”

He blushes and feigns hiding beneath his crisp shirts. “I am very shy.” He says, continuing to hide behind his arm.

“But I need a good look at you.” She says, straining her neck mischievously. The dark man shakes his head, soft lips curving into a smile. Her mouth twists into a budding rose, utterly stumped. “Ok, twenty five?”

The man shakes his head. She continues, gauging and hypothesizing. “Your skin is very nice, so you look much younger than perhaps you are. Twenty nine?”

“Keep guessing.” He instructs from behind his hand.

“Twenty three? Twenty seven? Twenty one?”

He can’t help but laugh, amused. “Twenty eight,”he finally supplies.

The woman laughs too. “I was close!” She says triumphantly, “But of course it’s the only age I failed to guess. “

He parries. “And you?”

“Twenty-two.”

“When?”

“July.”

“What? July what?” He presses.

“Eleventh.” She answers. “Why? You?”

“I am an eleven too.”

“Really?” She finds herself exclaiming. “Eleven is my lucky number!”

“Of course!” He says, happily. Suddenly, the woman’s laundry stops its spinning and she leaps up energetically to check her clothing’s status. Filling a cream-colored pillowcase with lingerie, she slams the dryer shut to allow the jeans and towels sufficient time to dry, slipping quarters once more in the slot and twisting the old handle with a crank. She starts toward the elevator, needing to go upstairs and hang the lingerie that is too delicate for the dryer.

“You must come up and get the bottle from me,” the man insists as he gathers his towels in his arms and joins her standing with his bag of clothes. She protests, feeling that just beneath this generous façade something else lay in wait. Yet one look at his face let her know he would not take no for an answer when it came to giving gifts, and his smile was quite disarming and goofy. “I insist.” He reiterates. “You must have some rum from my country. You must try it.”

Once more extending his arm toward the elevator door, he ushers her inside as the metal slides its way welcomingly into its place between walls. She obliges him, taking the step down into the dark green cube with its chipped, stained-wood trim, and allows him to press the apartment floor number two: his floor number.

At two the elevator stops, and she steps out and pauses, pillowcase clutched in hand, not sure which apartment is his. “So, there are twelve of your family over now?” She asks, nervously. What will they think of me? I am just being a neighbor, we are adults here.

“Oh no. They are in Woodbreedge. You know Woodbreedge Mall? They are shopping. They are an hour away.”

“Oh.” She says, following him down the hall.

“It’s just one bedroom,” he says, looking over his shoulder at her apologetically.

“With twelve people?” She asks, incredulously.

“You will see.” She watches his back, straight hair bobbing with every step. “Last one,” he explains, gesticulating down the hall.

“Double B?” she says. “I didn’t even know these existed in this building.”

“Yes.” He says. “Come in.”

She follows him inside hesitantly, walking into a close duplicate of her own apartment three floors up. Just then a dangerous picture floats into both minds of the pair; a picture of the two of them like a dream. A young girl, simpaticamente sitting straight backed on his couch in her robe and slip, her hair wildly mussed, but loose and upon her shoulder blades, tendrils swirling around her neck as he stands behind her, shirtless with a pot of coffee in hand, gazing down with a smile.

Feeling a shiver of something too familiar and comfortable about his apartment, she smoothes her shirt over her stomach and says, “I can only stay a moment. What a nice table you have!” Sitting down abruptly at his kitchen table, she crosses a calf under her thigh.

He hurries, pleased that she is comfortable, to accommodate her, wracking the contents of his shelves. “El Mundo. Sit, yes, please do sit. You know El Mundo, no?”

She nods, “I love that place.”

“Yes, you see all the mattresses. My family. And this is Brugal.” He says, emerging from behind his fridge door with a small dark bottle. The glass oscures the content, and the bottle is slung within a hammock of yellow thread. In his other hand are two round glass sifters.

She finds herself wondering if such nice glasses are wedding gifts, just as he finds himself wondering if she knows the glasses and the rum are wedding gifts. Neither say a word, but when he hands her a glass, she raises it, saying, “Good health and happiness to you and your future wife.”

“Oh don’t say that.” He mutters, then gasps and laughs, correcting her. “Simple ‘Salud,’ ok?”

“Salud,” she answers, momentarily distraught by his disregard for his future wife. The sweet clink of their glasses tinkles like the success story of a typewriter reaching the end of a line. They both swallow with pleasure, feeling the alcohol sliding warmly down dry throats. “Oh!” The woman suddenly exclaims, reaching behind her for her pillowcase. “My laundry!”

“A shot, then.” The man demands, raising his glass once more.

She laughs, “I suppose. Thank you, you are too generous.” They drink again, finishing their glasses with camaraderie.

“Now, you must take some with you. May I come up with your bottle?” The man says, putting an unopened, larger opaque bottle in a plastic bag. “I would not want you to be overwhelmed when all twelve of my family returns.”

“Oh, no!” She protests, but he puts a finger to his lips and tilts his glass. She laughs again, and can’t help but think how sweet it is for him to be so adamant about his gift. “I must run. But I will knock on my way up,” she promises once the warm liquor has made its way over their respective esophagi once more. Pink in the face, she raises a hand to her flushing chest and laughs. “My friends. They all call me a two-beer-queer. I must be careful around you.” And with that she rushes from his apartment.

* * *

By the time the pair has finished another glass, the woman’s roommates have wandered off to bed. They are both quite drunk. In the woman’s eyes, the man suddenly morphs into a young boy, hiding his face shyly while constantly furtively glancing in her direction. She, too, feels somehow younger, perched atop her countertop and swinging her legs, laughing long and low. The man pulls his pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and draws one out for her. She leans over and lights it from the gas stove, then hops down and joins him at the window sill, dangling her fingers over the several story abyss that lies below her flipping ash grip. The menthol makes them lick their lips. They are too close now to look at one another, so they smoke in silence.

“Why did you tell them I was getting married this Saturday?” The man asks of her earlier introduction of him to her roommates.

“Why wouldn’t I?” She returns, shrugging innocently. As much as she liked this man, she would not deign to such a devious path as would her desire lead her. He goes silent again as their cigarettes burn to filter.
The woman stands, signaling a shift to the living room visible down the long hallway past the piles of dusty shoes and rusty bicycles. “Shall we go into the living room? I am afraid we speak too loudly in this shaft.” The two tall windows facing the street pour late night batchata across their sense like syrup, and they head toward the chaos of the street.

He follows her blindly before realizing he has forgotten his drink in the kitchen and, apologizing, backtracks to retrieve it. She sets to folding the rest of her laundry, picking up the natural activity with surprising ease. Laundry makes sense, whereas nothing else does, she thinks, trying to ignore the strange intimacy of such a domestic act. The woman presses a hand to her chest when the man is out of sight, pressing upon her ribcage as if to suffocate her heart. The man reenters with the tiny Japanese teacup she has supplied for his rum engulfed by his large palm, laughing uproariously at her half-hazard folding. She rolls her eyes playfully at his implied critique of her imperfection, continuing to toss them full of creases down onto the couch in uneven piles.

“You must not do it like that.” He advises, picking up one of her shirts and inspecting it.

“Oh? And how must I do it then?” She asks him wryly, cocking her head to one side.

“Like this,” he says, his strong hands delicately handling the cotton, dexterously creasing and precisely folding into neat rectangles. “This is very pretty,” he adds, absently.

“How did you do that?” She asks, roused by the fact that a man more domestically capable than herself exists.

“You must not forget,” he answers, “That I left home at seventeen and had to do everything for myself.”

“But that’s what I did!” The woman exclaims, caught off guard by such coincidence. “My mother got sick at sixteen and I took care of myself.” The dark man smiles, continuing to fold her clothes while she studies him.

Seeing her struggle, he puts down her shirts and grasps the far end of a large flowered sheet. They fold it together, their skin barely brushing as they bring the corners together. Each jolts backward guiltily, and the woman gathers the sheet in her arms. “One moment,” she says.

“Let me help you,” The man says in demur, jumping from his seat. She is gone before he has finished his first word. Suddenly dizzy, he sits upon the couch, overwhelmed by the woman’s brisk confidence, and fights to pull himself together.
Although it is mere seconds she has been gone, when the woman returns to the living room, she finds the man an utter mess, head in hands and sidling behind the cushions. Perplexed, she offers, “More rum?”

He nods.

“What’s wrong?” She asks.

He shakes his head. “I am very nervous.”

“I know. You are shy. That is Ok. I am shy too. We just met, but you seem very nice.”

“You make me very nervous.” The man confesses, popping his head like a turtle up from behind the cushions to peer into her eyes.

“Me? Make you nervous? How can that be?”

“It is your eyes.” He says, staring harder. “They are very beautiful. And your lips. When you move them I cannot help but want to kiss them,” he confesses, guilty behind his hands.

“Oh no.” She says, very surprised and flattered simultaneously. Both begin to breath very heavily, unsure what to do now.

“A shot?” The man asks, helpfully. He raises his glass, testingly.

“Oh my.” She answers. “Why not. It may be a bad idea.”

“Shh. It is not a bad idea,” he laughs. “I will not be so anxious if we drink this. You must and I must sleep soon. You must work. I will go.”

The woman nods determinedly, attempting a cold and stern expression. “Yes. Alright.” She is flushed with alcohol, and dizzy. “Salud!” She says, raising her glass with a loud clink.

“Salud.” He says, squinting his eyes shut. She drains hers with a veiled glance at his dark lashes as he drinks his with eye-closed blackness.

When he has finished gulping, she jumps up. “Ok, thanks. You didn’t need to bring over the wine and coffee, but thank you. You are very generous. If you ever need anything, you know where to come.”

“And you do too, I hope.” He says. “Cigarette?”

She nods. “No more rum?” She suggests.

He shakes his head. “I cannot.”

She nods again, finding herself once more beside him on her kitchen windowsill. A bad idea, she thinks, all too aware of her breasts’ proximity to him as she twists around to ash her cigarette out of the window. They share the cigarette. After he takes his drag, he holds it between his fingers for her to sip. She leans into his palm, sipping the smoke, careful not to let her lips touch his skin for fear of the electricity that would course at touch.

“So, we’re friends?” She asks, lightly.

The man shakes his head. “My wife cannot know. She is very jealous.”

Shaking her head in disappointed protest, the woman tries to contend. “But I will be her friend,” she says, knowing all the while that they have crossed the invisible line, and it is too late for them.

“No.” The man says, smiling at her. “You are too beautiful. She would know. She would know how I feel.”

The woman shakes her head. “Do not make me ashamed for something I have not done.”

“If I had not met you now, I would not be getting married this Saturday.”

“Don’t say that!” The woman exclaims, overwrought.

“Do you believe in fate?” The man demands.

“Coincidence.” The woman responds, defensively.

“Well I think it was fate that you and I met in the laundry room today. I never expected you to walk in, and there were you, your beautiful eyes and your beautiful smile.” The woman bites her lip worriedly, but the man continues to scan her face kindly. “What is wrong?”

Shaking her head, she refuses to responds, her desire choking her.

“What do you feel?” He tries again. “What do you want?”

“I cannot answer you,” she says, “For saying it makes it so, and it cannot be.”

“Please,” he begs, extending an arm. As he does so, her lips hover close to his finger, brushing against his skin as she turns
away. Both freeze, her face suddenly very close to his, her skin very sweet smelling to his nose. His hand is frozen against her mouth, and they hold their breaths. Then more, quickly than the instant of contact, she turns back toward him, her lips brushing once more over his finger as she faces him with resolution.

“No,” she says, quietly.

“Close your eyes.” He suggests, still motionless.

“No, I can’t.” She answers, her breath warm upon his palm.

“I will not kiss you on the mouth,”he promises, and she closes her eyes, unable to bear looking at him any longer. Sinking into dizzying darkness, she feels herself swirled like honey into hot tea, his lips pressing like petals onto her cheekbones, her forehead, her neck and down from smouldering shoulder to shoulder, then back to her forehead again as she arches her spine uncontrollably. He sinks into her flesh, whispering, “I cannot kiss you on the lips,” as they spin through space together, smile-sighs echoing into the shaft.

“Enough.” The woman moans, her fingers aching for his strong arms. “I cannot. I cannot because I would never want it to happen to me.” Her lips are parted and no longer dry, and she is as pink as he.

“I. Oh. I’m sorry.” Gently, he smiles. “Oh you are just so beautiful. You make me so nervous.” As if to demonstrate, his leg taps upon the kitchen floor. Both leap to their feet.

“Thank you again.” The woman says, already grieving their forbidden pleasure.

“She must not know we are friends,” the man reiterates, placing a sturdying hand on her shoulder and pressing his soft lips on her corrugated countenance.

“Goodbye, then,” the woman answers.

“I will dream of you,” he says, looking once more at the way she is touching her lips and crossing herself absent-mindedly before pulling her front door shut and trotting down the stairs.

Bicycle Upside Down

2007-05-01T18:01:00.000-07:00

There is nothing like a bicycle to transport you around on a twilit autumn city night teeming with brutish fists of cigarette embers and shadowed silhouettes. There is nothing like a bicycle to transport you through wispy weeping willows that snake against your cheeks like a beaded curtain as you whip through Central Park in the spring. There is nothing like a bicycle to transport you out of reach of the cannon barreled fire hydrants’ violent spray, unleashed by sweaty kids upon their grown-up counterparts with a force that threatens to crack cab windows and topple two-wheelers. There is nothing like a bicycle to transport you down deserted winter pathways you would otherwise never have the courage to traverse on foot, riding so fast your skin cracks and your hands freeze in half-closed fists.

I have never been one to spend money on bicycles. Every single bike I’ve ever owned has come straight from my garage. I do truly hope that, even though I’ve had several stolen, even though I’ve abandoned some while moving, and have generally shown my two-wheelers no respect whatsoever, every bike I ever own comes from that old rickety garage next to the defunct chicken coop. When I was growing up, my father would tell me stories about repairing bicycles back in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. I’d lean over his shoulder where he’d be crouching and reattaching my chain, and listen to his methodical explanations of its mechanical intricacies. Mostly I’d stand there and keep him company, giving “moral support” as my mother liked to call it, while he tinkered and inflated, deconstructed and reassembled. “Let me just readjust that saddle!” He’d exclaim, until my bicycle was a rusty and perfect apparatus on which I could cash my ticket to freedom.

“So, Mr. Lame-O. Why didn’t you go to Woodstock?” I’d ask him, prodding teasingly. By that time I’d stolen all of his old records and knew he loved Joni Mitchell and Jimi Hendrix as much as I did. I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t have attended the greatest event of the century.

“Oh, I was too young.” He’d shrug, twisting his allen wrench in circles.
“I’m only 14! You were 13! So, what!?” I’d protest, indignantly. Then, dreamily, “I would have hitchhiked if that was what it took. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

The idea of wild, uninhibited crowds of people all grooving and being free still fascinates me for its delicious novelty, but my father stuck up for his decision. “Woodstock was my big break,” He’d answer with pride. “See, back then, when I started at Mike’s Repair Shop, I was just the back-up guy. They’d demonstrate all the more intricate stuff, but wouldn’t let me touch any of it. I was only 13. But I was ready for the big stuff! I just wasn’t really needed. They had two older guys-” His voice would take a note of disdain, “-High school guys who could do all the more interesting stuff.” Then he’d put down the wrench and wipe a grease-covered finger across his forehead as if he were icing a cake. Building up the suspense, he’d say, “Then, all of a sudden, at the end of that summer, all the other guys, the 17 and 18 year olds, they were buying tickets for this Woodstock thing. And I thought, what is this thing, you know? What could be worth leaving the bike shop for a week to do? So when they left, they put me in charge. I couldn’t have been more thrilled! I fixed bikes like mad for that week, and by the end of it there wasn’t a problem bicycle you could throw in front of me that I couldn’t fix. It was the best summer of my life.”

And I’ve seen it. If it’s a sleek two-thousand-dollar Mercedes bicycle, he’ll fix it. If it means a pink, banana-seat stingray, he’ll fix it. If it means my silver Raleigh, which has rusted to a grayish gold color, the one we stumbled upon while frequenting the dump, (you know, the one with no back wheel and the handlebars installed backwards) he’ll fix it. That’s the kind of man he is.

Since I never have to buy bikes, I asked a friend who swears by buying bikes from bums what it’s like. Apparently some bums get really nice bikes and sell them to strangers for cheap. At first, my friend told me, he felt a bit of guilt. What do this fool need the money for… crack? He’d ask himself, as we all do. But after a while, that is to say, after having several bikes stolen back from him by other bums, this friend of mine had changed his tune. “It’s bum-bike karma! I’m putting money back into the system!” He’d exclaim, as if by buying from bums he had created a whole new sub-economy.
“Kind of like paying peoples’ rent by buying drugs from them?” I’d asked, innocently. Needless to say, he wouldn’t answer me.

Lucky for me, even the bums make fun of my bicycle. They point and laugh from where they lean against brick walls, trying to look tough against the tableau of graffiti. They prod each other with sharp elbows, calling out from the peak of the hill, “Hey! You want me to carry that thing for you?” as I huff and puff with excruciating slowness. Oh, they laugh and they laugh, right up until I start cruising. That’s when I hit the brakes and get my revenge with the horrible, horrible screeching noise emanating from brake-calipers protesting their love-making with the rim, a noise that forces those bums to stuff their ears with nail-bitten fingers. I figure if they mock it, then it’s safe, even in the sketchiest of neighborhoods.

And let me tell you, having a busted-looking bicycle that runs smooth as butter is essential in the city. I recommend a heavy frame with lots of extraneous metal hanging from that frame, complete with two giant splash guards (the bicycle equivalent of dubs) and a heavy chainstay, along with a couple spoke protectors. The more metal surface area to show that rust, the less likely your bicycle will be stolen. Simple physics.

Although don’t use this suggestion as cause to tempt fate and not lock up your two-wheeler. Even I would steal an unchained bike.

When factoring energy expended against distance traveled one discovers that a person riding a bicycle is the most efficient animal on earth. Some people would use this tidbit of knowledge as grounds to refute my suggestion of installing a heavier frame, as if to say that by decreasing weight you will increase efficiency. To them I say, “Touché, ok? Use metal-coated fiberglass then if that’s your thing. But you’re gonna want that rust.”

Certainly at times, while surmounting insurmountable hills on my three-speed bike that is now a one-speed since a petty roommate of mine decided to steal the gear-shifter right off the frame as revenge for allegedly stealing his toilet paper, I do wish for a lighter frame. However, I wouldn’t be wishing if I were shifting. I maintain that heavier is better. What goes up, must come down, and since I happen to be a relatively petite girl, I appreciate any extra weight added to my bike. Trust me, as a speed-fiend, it makes the ride down the hill all the sweeter.

Please remember that, as amazing as bicycles are, they cannot do what would be better for you to do for yourself. Bicycles cannot stop themselves, and will not stop even if you put a foot between the spokes. I learned this one the hard way, and was saved a great deal of anguish (and in the process saving foot-fetishists the same anguish) since I’d was wearing two-inch platform flip-flops that took the brunt of the crushing blow of spoke and fork. Also please remember that bicycles will not stop themselves even if you jump off of them. Although I do recommend jumping if you are en route to a collision with a wayward taxi on the West-Side Highway along Hudson River Park. Just make sure to jump onto the taxi’s hood and not in front of its bumper.

Best of luck! And when you run over all the glass bottles strewn through the streets and need a hand, you now know who to call: My dad.

Whoolahay's psychological torture part I (sans italics)

2007-04-22T12:40:00.000-07:00

The police made me go to school this morning. It was against my will and better judgment. They wouldn’t let me leave my living room until I’d pulled my shaky sobs together, tethering them long enough to stomp angrily past the bitch, no longer a Stranger, for I know how evil you are. Those two flaccid cops making shadows on the wall in the living room that bears the brunt of sunlight that traverses from the fireplace to my mother’s bedroom over the course of the day, uniforms wiping our white walls with a slap and leaving a wake of darkness.

Plunging into the morning with my usual bitterness, I’m awakened by the slamming of the front door as Whoolahay shuffles through the mudroom with a bang. I hate her above all the other health aides, the Strangers. She is the oldest, the rudest, and the most interested in our personal business. Professionally infiltrating our household, one in which my mother and I are entrenched in a battle of generations for Alpha Female, she’s emerging as someone more interested in intervening into our personal matters than taking care of my mother’s mental and physical well-being.

Rolling sideways to peer through blurry, sleep-stuck eyes, I see the alarm clock. 6:05 am. Five minutes before the alarm was set to go off. Feeling uninhibited and annoyed, I let out my usual growl. The growl morphs into an unthinking roar, a roar that generates from the point where bulimics press their fingers, exiting through my clenched teeth. The roar turns into a scream, shrill enough to wake someone if they hadn’t been already woken by Whoolahay’s door slamming.

The sun is pouring through a slit above my homemade curtains, mismatched textures of blue and white covering each window. The light stretches its arms across my shaggy carpet, grey from my refusal to clean it since I clean the rest of the house, and just misses my eyeballs from where I lie eye-level with the windows’ slitted lids on my lofted mattress.

It's a clear day, cold enough for snow, but without condensation. Throwing myself violently only my back, I listen past my exposed toes through the drywall doors. Silence now. What was that bitch doing? Nothing. I sigh relief. Maybe I imagined it. Wait, what was I dreaming about… Something about that house and an arm… My breaths become deeper, less frequent as I retreat into the nothing of sleep once more. Quiet and solitude, no responsibility or fear to contend with, only relaxation and the abatement of stress, nothing but the silence of a rushing mind dampered by exhaustion. I feel the moment of release as clearly as I become lost in it, feel the tucking of my prefrontal as it relinquishes its constant domination and critique of my senses, feel the sigh of its own cerebral muscles as they too relax and let subconscious mechanisms take the reigns.

“I’M KATIE COURIC AND THIS IS THE----- AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH WE HAVE BREAKING NEWS! COMING UP NEXT: THE EXCLUSIVE TAPES OF THIS 911 PHONE CALL FROM A BURNING APARTMENT--------
YOU CAN DO IT ALL WITH----------
FIND OUT HOW YOU CAN LOOK AND FEEL FORTY-FIVE AGAIN WITH THESE NEW WAISTLINE TRIMMERS-------
AND TODAY ON THE NEWS: A TRAGIC DEATH OF A SEVEN YEAR OLD AND HIS DOG. COMING UP NEXT…… Bew, bew bew, bew bew bew bew!!!!”

Full volume trills from the T.V. blast in from the living room, violently piercing my skull and dreams. I had been up watching Space Ghost around midnight with the sound imperceptible so as not to wake my mother or the other health aide last night, so I happen to know Whoolahay has turned up the volume deliberately. I picture her clutching the remote between her chubby fingers, waddling to position each foot at hip width to fall backward onto my mother’s recliner with the least amount of effort.

The racket has woken my mother too, for I hear her calling, “Whoolahay!! Whoolahay!!” This is a test for Whoolahay. I sit bold upright, waiting for her to respond, to do her job, as I’m counting to five. One…….. Two……. Three…….. Four………. Five. No response. No abatement: she fails. What does she think she’s paid to do, watch our TV?

I do what I always do when interrupted by inconsiderate Strangers not doing their jobs. I yell. “TURN THAT SHIT DOWN!!!!! CAN’T YOU TELL THAT AT SIX A.M. THERE ARE PEOPLE SCREAMING---- I MEAN, SLEEPING!!?? CAN’T YOU HEAR MY MOTHER CALLING YOU??!!!!” Granted, it’s extremely inconsiderate, arguably hypocritical, for me to begin the day yelling at the top of my lungs. Yet I cannot stand anyone disregarding my mother. I won’t stand for it. Even if I pop a vein in the process. What if it was an emergency and I wasn’t here to scream???

Notch by notch the TV volume is lowered to a more moderate level, but my mother continues to cry weakly from the other side of my bedroom wall, “Whoolahay!! Whoolahay!”

Its motor whirring, the automated recliner slowly raises Whoolahay from her giant ass’ adhesion to the chair. This special recliner is designed for old people, or people like my mother with muscular atrophy who cannot go from a sitting to standing position on their own. The chair is not designed for people like Whoolahay. It’s not designed for someone being paid to take care of people like my mother but who are too lazy to use the muscles they are privileged enough to have. “Ok!” I hear her gasp in exasperation, “I’m coming!” She acts as if we’ve interrupted her rest!

“THANKS.” I holler sarcastically. Admittedly, my sense of vexation is ever-heightened because my mother is my mother and I feel a profound sense of protection for her. However, I do not believe that when you are five minutes late and are being paid twenty-two dollars an hour with the sole responsibility of looking after a person, that you have any right to be annoyed when that person asks you to do something for them. Besides, knowing my mother, she has been lying in bed motionlessly, waiting at least an hour to make her request.

Just then my alarm goes off, blasting WAAF 107.3 with the tail-end comforting burn of Nine Inch Nails. I throw the covers over my head and writhe about for a second or two with madness as Whoolahay’s loud voice counters that of Opie and Anthony, finally submitting myself to crawl out of bed when the next song comes on at 6:13 am. Resting my butt tiredly on each rung as I climb down my stepladder, I’m motivated only by the urgent knowledge that my second alarm, a grating buzzing noise, is due to rile the air within 30 seconds. I make it with seconds to spare, bopping the alarm peg with my palm and extinguishing the radio, only to have the sound replaced with the TV that once again blares from the living room.

Rubbing my eyes sleepily, I drag at the skin of my face and grab fistfuls of hair to remind myself I have perceptual capabilities despite my sleepy numbness. Clumsily pulling on yesterday’s underwear one leg at a time under the baggy T-shirt sprawled with fluorescent engineering conference propaganda I’m wearing, I pad barefoot down the ivory-grey carpet to the bathroom.

“Hiiii….” I mumble to my mother as I pass her room on the left, stretching out a hand behind me to wave.

“Good morning, honey.” She says, and I look back in time to catch a smile that is amazingly bright for this time of the morning. She always was a morning person.

I turn the corner with my head bowed, refusing to look up at Whoolahay where she sits in the recliner facing the hall to my bedroom door. Into the bathroom I trot, intercepting Bibby on the way to pat her head and scratch between her blinky eyes as she rubs her shoulder blades on my calves, then slam the plywood door behind me. Blearily, I turn on the water, then wander into the adjacent kitchen for a bowl of Cheerios with sliced bananas and milk to kill time while I wait for the water to heat up. I gulp the breakfast with my knees pulled up to my bare body on the closed toilet lid, feeling the cold bowl on my shins and listening to the birds of the backyard as the room is enveloped in a thickening cloud of steam. I need to sway beneath the stream of blinding, pummeling droplets. Maybe collapse to the tub floor with my head between my knees. I need to calm down and start the day right.

As I’m rinsing my empty bowl in the sink, I suddenly remember the impediment: the plastic shower seat with its aluminum frame that sticks to the porcelin with suction cup feet is still poised, half in the tub and half on the floor. The chair is for my mother to sit on while being washed and takes up the entire tub space. I hate the goddamned chair, so I turn off the water so as not to get unnecessarily doused and stand with my feet on either side of the toilet bowl to get the best leverage for maneuvering.

“HHuuuuuuuhhhgUUggghhh! HHugghughhuuuuuuhhhhh!!!! Huuh- huuh- uggghghgh.” Nothing. It won’t budge. Oh great, now that it’s wet I’m never going to pry it up. I feel weak with sleep, my muscles rubbery and sour, refusing to obey my command. Still cranky, I take my anger out on the chair. “HHGGGGGGHHHHHHHHUUUUUHHHAAAGGH!” The suction is too much for me. Even when I manage to pry one chair leg up with a satisfying pop, the moment I get the next leg up I am foiled by the first freed leg’s compulsion by gravity to unite with the porcelain once more. I give up, knowing the clock is ticking. I need the daily shower for this unruly hair of mine, and I’ve got to leave for school soon.

What I love most about the shower is the scuttle of blood rising from my sleeping insides to the surfaces of my epidermis. The blood in the coldest areas of my body gets boiled to numbness by the hot water slapping the outside, and my senses become overwhelmed by the sudden temperature change in sensation. The water rushes over me as I unthinkingly rub shower gel into the pores and rinse, apply conditioner and rinse, washing and waiting until I am utterly saturated and my skin has shrunk on itself in pruney desert sand-patterns.

But today I can’t enjoy it. I’m so cramped by the chair; that fucking chair whose seat juts the shower curtain and give me less than a foot of space in which to stand. The aluminum rubs cold shriek streaks across my calves if I’m not paying close enough attention to quell my swaying tendencies. When I reach above me to twist the shower nozzle as far downward as possible, the spray just barely hits the top of my head, pouring with extravagant abundance upon the same overly clean plastic chair that is impeding my comfort. The water runs down my nose and neck and takes to the trenches of my body, forsaking nipples for ribs and buttocks for crack. I violently kick the chair, almost slipping on the wet tile and stubbing my toe with eye-opening pain.

When I extinguish the water I sense I am already off-schedule and cutting it close. I have not yet gotten used to living with a longer commute, now that we don’t live in my hometown. I swipe my teeth with the toothbrush and then wrap up in a towel, quickly running back to my room with dirty clothes in hand. I feel Whoolahay’s dark eyes following me into my bedroom, and I slam the door to get out of sight.

Quickly I dress. 6:50 am and the only thing on is my socks, fucking chair, I think, rubbing my toe. I grab my bag and get ready to make a run for it, knowing all that’s left to do is feed the dog. Throwing open the door I jump into my mother’s room to give her a quick rundown, spitting it all out in one breath. “Bye momma! I left the check on the mantle for Sheenala and--” anticipating her next question as she opens her mouth to ask it I continue, “--I’ve got enough for gas and lunch. Rehearsal’s supposed to get out at 5 and then I’m studying for physics at the library with friends.”

It’s a lie, of course. Rehearsal’s been cancelled and I plan to spend the entire evening napping at my boyfriend’s. But details like that are irrelevant and will only waste more of my time as she argues with me not to go, I find myself justifying. Although she suspects I don’t spend as much of my time at the library as I claim, since my grades say her concerns are unfounded, I’m free to do as I will with a car and cellphone. The way I’d like it to stay. I’m old enough to make my own decisions about how to spend my time. I’m responsible enough to do irresponsible things responsibly. “Then I’ll be home in time to feed the dog, but I’ll make sure to pick up a couple new cans, and also that laundry soap, and oh yeah the dish detergent and a new mop before coming home. Anything you need before I go? Pasta? A new magazine?” I smile broadly but tap my heel impatiently, knowing it’s close to 7 already and that I should leave for the 15 minute drive in exactly negative three minutes.

My mother speaks slowly, haltingly, as it has become difficult for her to find her words among the increasingly unfamiliar movements of her mouth. “Please, ummm, tell Whoolahay to bring the umm, water to… to flush me out in, umm, 10 minutes.”

“Mmm, hmm?” I try to conquer my tapping foot, trying not to show my impatience like the Strangers. Whoolahay’s eyes are at my back, boring into it with judgment, and I straighten up as if to add height to my frame.

She pauses and then continues, even more maddeningly slow. “I don’t want the tube to clog.” She finishes, hindered by the physical burden of speech. I love my mom, but she talks so slowly at times I cannot hide my impatience. I stand poised in her doorway on the brink of tardiness and insanity.

“Ok.” I interrupt. “Anything else?”

“Ummm.” She looks up at the ceiling, thinking in her careful and deliberate way, then glances toward her feet as if to check with her reflection in the dresser mirror facing her elevated hospital bed, questioning her glass doppelganger for anything forgotten. “Don’t… umm….forget to feed--”

“Feed Bibby? Ok, so no magazine?”

She grins, pleased by my afterthought. “Umm, yes.”

“Which one?” I ask. She pauses again, considering the blank ceiling as if a blank canvas. “Which do you have for this month?” She shrugs sheepishly and sticks out her lower lip in thought. “Good Housekeeping?” She shakes her head. “Ladies’ Home Journal?” She shakes her head again and shrugs her shoulders, embarrassed in the face of my impatience. I take a deep breath. “No, no. Really, take your time,” I offer calmly. “What about that interior design mag you like so much? Or Architectural Design? Or Cosmo for some sexy clothing ideas and how to please your man?” I joke. We crack up, her laughter erupting through closed lips and crinkling swirl lines beside her eyes.

But then my impatience returns with a vengeance. “But, for real. What do you think?” Back when we went to restaurants, my mom and I were always the least decisive of our family, so I know when she shrugs again that I could be here all day waiting for a decision she doesn’t want to make. “How about the interior design mag? I’ll find you something new and fun. Sound good?” She nods, still laughing delightedly.

“Ok, bye! Have a nice day! I love you!”

“Oh, umm, and don’t forget… to pick up, umm, dinner for… later.”

“I know, I know. Eat protein. Got it. You’re always right!” I start to whip around to make the dog’s food but catch her grin, feel the weight of her forgiveness for my impatience.

“I, umm, love you honey.”

She has barely finished her sentence before I blurt out, “Love you too mom,” and try to rush out of the room. I hear her say something else, and immediately turn back on my heel and rush back into the room. “Huh? What did you say?”

“Oh!” She exclaims, surprised I’ve come back. “Nothing.”

“No, really. I’m here. What did you want to tell me?”

“Oh. Umm, I just said I, umm, love you.”

I smile, feeling like a callous idiot. “I love you too, mom.”

“Have, umm, a nice day, honey.” Her thick, dark hair falls across the pillow like an outstretched arm. Her cheeks stand out pink against blue skin and white cloth, as do her crinkled and shimmering eyes, green like mine.

“Thanks momma!” I rush across the carpet to her bed and plant a kiss on her forehead, embracing her thin body with my arms, careful not to squeeze too hard. I look at her once more, decide to plant another kiss upon her cheek, then rush out with relief, calling, “Love you!!!”

7:05 am. I’m already five minutes late, and the dog food needs at least five more before I’m actually in my car. Then there’s the 15 to 20 minute drive to school (depending on traffic and pedestrians), two to run from the parking lot to class, which means I’m guaranteed to be at least 10 minutes late. I picture myself jetting in with a red face and sweaty hairline, books in arm and tripping on my platforms, yelled at by a teacher for running through the halls. I hate being late.

“Fuck, Fuck, Fuck!!!!” I sing, suddenly struck with annoyance at the requisite constraint that time imposes. If I could, I would wait to run out of the room. I would hear every word she wants to say. Yet, I think, tripping over Bibby to see with horror that there is still food left in her bowl from last night-- which means two more minutes of prying crusted meat pulp dripped between dry pellets hardened into a chunky, rancid mess-- I’m sure she understands I have to run. And anyway I always know what she’s about to say… Not that finishing her sentences counts as conversation, but still.

I’m crouched on the kitchen floor, gripping the metal dog bowl, stinky like poo, between a thumb and forefinger with disgust. Through cracks in the sliding glass doors leading to the backyard sidles the cold, laying a clammy hand to alert me of her presence and raise the hairs upon my forearm. My body, positioned in front of the doorway to the kitchen, is apparently in Whoolahay’s way.

Maybe she can save me, I think, naively, Maybe she’ll help me out. After all, Mom told me that, if worse comes to worst, I can ask one of the aides to help out if it’s really an emergency. I’m so late at this point that I deem it as such. I mean, she’s done it before, so it’s worth asking…

“Hey, Whoola. Can you do me a really big, humungous favor and make the dog food, ‘cause I’m like already ten minutes late and I really need to get to school on time for this presentation.” I blurt out quickly. Ommanipadmeooommmm. Turning on the charm for her with my tone, practically begging her with my words, I’m doing what I can to inspire pity and good-will in her evil heart. I’m in over my head and could use a hand.

Plus, I think bitterly while smiling sweetly, considering how much actual work you do that we shit out our money for, I figure the least you can do is this tiny favor. My mother and I sacrifice basic necessities just so that my mother can have the peace of mind the state denies her of having proper care. So we put you and all the rest of the health aide Strangers in a lap of luxury to waste time, talk on the phone, and do nothing, not even your job. The least you can do is lend a hand. Help us out. Us for whom every day hurts, every single day hurts because it’s not what it used to be.

“Please, please please please please!!??” I whine, poised in the doorway with dog food in hand, having thoroughly degraded myself with my pleading. She stares at me blankly through heavy lids, so I continue where I left off, hoping to sway her as her bowling pin body towers over me. I wish you actually were a bowling pin so I could hit you with a strike, I laugh to myself, all the while smiling at her sweetly. “I mean, I can wash out the bowl if that helps, but it would save me so much time, you know?”

By the time I’ve finished the sentence I’ve already given up, trailing off in my speech to spin on my heel and tear off a slice of paper towel from the roll over the sink, antsy and on edge under the pressure of her stare. Crossing the room again in a flurry of steps, I dig my hand into the pellet muck and peel the gelatinous mass from the walls of the bowl. The bowl is a cold cavern that engulfs my wrist, designed to be skinny and deep so that Bibby’s long Springer Spaniel ears don’t sink into her muddy meals. It becomes a boxing glove when I hear her reply.

“You gonna talk to me like that?” She asks.

“Like what?” I ask.

“How ‘bout you say, ‘Good morning Whoolahay!’ in a nice voice? Then I’ll think about it.” Her dry statement is stunning in its sarcasm, enraging and humiliating me.

Since when is asking nicely not enough?? I feel disgust at the power games she wants to play with me. More than anything, I am pissed off that someone who knows absolutely nothing about common courtesy is lecturing me about how to treat other people. All I want is a simple favor and instead you have to waste my time by being mean. Looking up from my revolting task, I find myself staring at her in disbelief. I’m deadpan honest with confusion. “Excuse me? I’m sorry, what did you say?” My eyebrows are pressed tightly together in concerted confusion, practically creating a unibrow. “I didn’t hear you.”

Her giant frame fills the doorjamb, blocking light that pours in from the backyard. Glaring with vehemence, she is challenging me. “I said, ‘Good morning Whoolahay,’ is what you should have said if you’d wanted the favor.”

She actually repeated it! I can’t believe her!!! I can’t believe that she thinks she can be so rude as to tell me how to talk to her! Wow. Wow. I do not have time for this. I scrape the grainy pellets against the side of the shiny metal bowl with a swipe, feeling the slime seeping through the paper towel. Not looking at her. “Well! Good morning Whoolahay. I’m sorry if you feel offended by the fact that I don’t have a lot of time right now for formal greetings--”

She cuts me off: “That’s better. That’s how you talk to me. Now maybe you’ll learn. Oh, I’ll make you learn.” She scratches her elbow, saying it like a threat, but I ignore the lump it brings to my throat. Overlooking her rudeness, I am already resigned to my task. “You don’t know how to talk to your elders,” She continues to accuse, “And you have no idea how to give people respect.”

“What!?” I exclaim, determined not to let such a broad statement go unaddressed. “I just asked you a simple favor! You could either say yes, or no! That’s all I was asking you for. A simple favor. One word or the other.” Clock is ticking…

“You don’t even know who you are. You think you can just be rude to me!”

“No I don’t! But I’m clearly in a rush. You’d think you could observe and acknowledge that, considering how obvious I’m making it.”

“You think I’m here to help you?”

“No! You’re here to help my mother and part of helping my mother is making sure her household runs well. Part of it is making sure the dog gets fed and her kids get to school on time.”

“You think I’m here to help you? Well?” Hand on hip, she allows every word I say to pass through her like an apparition. “I’m not.”

Can’t you see I’m helping my mother by doing this? She’s my priority, not you, ya cow. But no! It’s more important to you to take advantage of the fact that I do it all the time, but I only do it because it needs to get done, and I don’t trust anyone else with the well-being of my dog because I know you guys would happily let her starve! I think all of this caustically, spitting bile at her with my thoughts yet keeping my mouth shut. Shit, I’m so sick of her spouting. Whoola, just shut up! I’m just going to do this so shut up, shut up, shut up!

“You think you--” she starts to continue.

“Ok!” I cut her off, ”I get it. You’ve made your freaking point, Ok? Are you happy? So you’re not going to help me. That’s all you need to say. Now I can stop wasting my time asking you nicely to be a nice person and help me out like you would if you were one. It’s fine! I should have known! You don’t need to do anything for me. In fact, I’d rather you not. I’d rather do it myself. Really. You doing a nice thing is obviously more difficult than making life harder for me so why don’t you just leave me be to do what I have to do?” The water is scalding my hands, and I yelp, “I just asked you nicely and you decide to make it into this huge freaking deal about ta-talking ‘nicer’ to you, so just, just FORGET ABOUT IT!” Once the stubborn grit and metal bowl are finally disassociated, I shake out the water brutally, adding, “I don’t need your help. I’ll do it myself and I’ll be late. Thanks for the lecture.”

Although the best thing to do is to ignore her, I still find it hard to resist her traps: invoking rudeness in me by being rude to me. Just because ‘Good morning’ is not the first thing out of my mouth… Ugh. Cut me a fucking break! Crossing from the sink over to the cabinet next to the fridge where the dog food lies, I listen to her waddle back and forth in the living room, mumbling to herself something about “little girls” and “disrespect.”

Adopting a fetal pose to scoop the dog pellets out of their plastic tub, I balance on my heels with my elbows at rest on my horizontal thighs, my back curled over the task. Bibby, my favorite confidant, sits on her haunches by my side, hopeful for her breakfast. She nuzzles my leg with her snout and opens her mouth in a goofy smile, pleased with my progress toward nourishment. I want to sit down on the linoleum tiles and cry to her, exhausted already with the day. Defeated by the clock and the Strangers once more.

But instead of buckling under the insults and judgments thrown at me from the living room, I start to build up my defenses, relying on my fight-or-flight responses to charge me with adrenaline, bust sweat from my pores, and jump-start my heart rate. I’m getting angrier and angrier listening to every phrase uttered from those purple lips of hers, and begin layering on irascible armor like an onion until I too am uttering to my own God my discontents.

“Fucking bitch.” I mutter, angrily shoving a measuring cup into the plastic tub of pellets. “What a cunt.” Bibby whimpers sympathetically, encouraging me. It feels good to vent my frustration in the form of ugly language when language itself is the point of contention between the old woman and me. In my own home… “Fucking bitch. Fuck this shit. I can’t believe this.” I scoop the dog pellets, spilling some in the process and transferring my insults to the pellets, knowing the clean up will cost me more time. I sigh, breathily muttering, “What a bitch!”

“WHAT did you just call me?” Words getting louder as she comes closer to get in my face, Whoolahay bursts through the kitchen door.

“I didn’t say anything.” I lie, “And if I did, it certainly wasn’t to you.”

“Do I have to ask you again? I said, WHAT DID YOU CALL ME?” Abrasively loud, her voice fills the room. Bibby’s hackles rise.

“I didn’t call you anything!” I exclaim in my defense, telling the truth. “I just spilled some shit, OK? Anyway, if there is a bitch in the room, it must be my dog.”

Whoolahay stands above me, so close I can smell the stale funk between thighs that spend days on end pressed together. She obviously didn’t like my pun. I almost nock her belly with my arm in my flurried fling of the fridge door, looking to see if there are any half-open cans of sloppy wet Alpo. No half opened cans. I open the cabinet once more and whip by her, everything blurry in my hurry to avoid this confrontation.

She is stock still and motionless, but as I’m crossing back to the can opener on the counter she spits out, “Yes you did! Go ahead. Say it again. Say it again to me. Go ahead, say it to me!” Her lips curl into a sneer. “You were fucking swearing at me! Of all the nerve you have with your mother in the other room and you’re swearing at me, you little spoiled bitch!”

“HUH!” I let out a puff of disdainful air to punctuate the irony of her hypocrisy and lean against the crook of the kitchen counter in order to reach the automated can opener. “I didn’t say anything to you. I was obviously talking to my Bibby here. Wasn’t I, Bibby!?” I sapify my voice with saccharine.

“You’re lying! How dare you lie to me?” Why shouldn’t I lie to you, you callous, self-righteous… “You think you can get away with that?” Yep. It’s my house.

The can makes a slow rotation, suspended mid air by a magnet as if swinging from a silent noose, purring as sharp teeth pierce its impermeable metallic seal. “Oh yes I did!” I exclaim in the baby voice I use on my puppy, ignoring Whoolahay. “Oh yes, you’re a little bitch, aren’t you? You’re just a pretty little--- UGHH!!!!”

Her belly presses against my back as she shoves me hard into the counter’s edge, body checking me into the corner. Catching me off guard she wraps her fingers around my shirt, lifting me off of the ground. My sight goes black with surprise as I suddenly realize I’m being choked, her fat hands pulling at the scruff of my neck like an animal, bunching up my nape to shake me, startle me, choke me. Missing my skin, she grips the neck of my turtleneck, bunches it between her fingers and pulls with all of her surprising strength.

I’m choking! I’m choking! I’m choking I’m choking I’m choking I’m choking! I’m choking!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The can of Alpo spins and spins, an iconic Border Collie’s face grinning back at me with its jack-o-latern canines before disappearing again and again. Panic wells up inside me, a flood of horror carrying my intestines into my throat as I struggle to catch my breath and drop the tablespoon with a clang against the steel bowl. The spoon gives a crunch against the pellets as I feel my eyes bug out of my skull; as I realize it’s time for split second action. Holy FUCK! Holy fucking crazy fucking bitch, what the fuck, need a weapon, no weapons, no Jerry Springer, keep your calm and GET YOUR BREATH!

I have learned well from tussling with boys from age 14, and I do the only thing I know how: I “bow” her, jabbing an elbow into her stomach as my wrestling friends taught me, keeping my arm close to my side with the bicep vertical for increased stability. With that solid, unexpected jolt I counter her attack, cutting her off mid-sentence as she’s screaming menacingly in my ear, “I’ll teach you to fucking disrespe----- Ugh!” and with a thwap I’ve jarred her with the point of my elbow, sinking it deep into her flesh until it makes contact with her solar plexus, rumbling her gut and knocking the wind out of her long enough for her to loosen her grip. With a gasp I’m free and have a pot in my hands.

"STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME, YOU CRAZY BITCH!!!! STAY THE FUCK AWAY!!!!!" My dog by now has leaped out of harm's way, previously under the flat-footed stranger. I am no longer sure of what Whoolahay is capable. I know, at least, she's capable of choking me without relenting, and I know I am not at all interested in escalating the violence.

"WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?!!" I scream, rubbing my neck.

Bibby starts to bark, and Pat, clutching her gut, takes a step toward me. "I'll fucking kill you, you fucking bitch!"

"Get the fuck away from me!!"

She mocks me in a whiny voice: " Get the fuck away from me… You cracker bitch! BITCH! Now I'm calling you a bitch!"

I start to back up into my living room, still clutching a saucepan in my hands, my knuckles white with strain. "Get the fuck away from me!" My bare feet sink into the threads, plush ivory poking between each appendage. The rug is like Velcro locking me to my spot.

"I'll fucking beat you up, you fucking bitch! You fucking Boombaclot! I'll fucking crush your face in the pavement for that! I'll make you bleed on this fucking rug, you bitch! I'll kill you in your fucking sleep! You can't do anything, BIIIITCH!" She drags the "ih" out, and my head starts to clear.

"Get out of here." I say. The calm in my voice makes her start. With impact I measure my words, saying, "Get the fuck out of my house. GET. OUT. OF. HERE."

I can hear my mother from her bedroom in the pause, hyperventilating and screaming our names to get our attention and stop us. She has no idea what is going on, can only hear us cursing, and her voice is but a weak echo of moderation in this tidal wave of violence. " Stop! Stop!" It comes as a crest to the silence. "Whoolahay!" Breath, "Emily!!" breath, "Whoolahay!" breath, "STOP!!!"

"Go see Mommy!" I tell Bibby, who's cowering at my feet. It's a command she understand, and she runs through the living room and down the hall, circumventing the trauma site and leaping onto my mother's bed to lick her face and reassure her out of her high pitched panic screams.

Whoolahay looks at me through lowered eyelids, her mouth twisting into iron cruelty. "You want me to leave, hmm?"

"You heard me." I stand up straighter, trying to pull my slight 5'2" frame to its full expanse.

"Oh, yeah? Well fine. I'll fucking leave her there. I'll leave her there to lie in her own filth all fucking day. You want me to go away? Hmm? Huh? Answer me, bitch!"

"You're fucking sick," I snarl, "You're SICK! YOU'RE FUCKING SICK!!!!!" I keep screaming it, over and over as if trapped in a nightmare, lost in the cycle of my own vat of quicksand, sinking, sinking. But she continues.

"I'll leave her here all day," She whispers to me out of earshot of my mother, "And you'll go to school and sit in class and walk to your car and she'll be lying there all day long in her own filth and no one will be here to help her. Is that what you want?" The way she says it- filth- betrays what I've suspected all along; she has no respect or compassion in her heart for me or my mother or my family or our situation. She is using us for our money and our shelter and our TV. I am made aware of my intestines' location in my throat as they suddenly drop to my toes. This woman is sick. She is fucking crazy. She's sick. She's sick. She's sick. She's fucking crazy. She's sick. Sick… sick…. sick….

Seeing me go cold, watching the blood drain from my cheeks, her smile twists crueler as she repeats for emphasis, "I'll leave her. I'll fucking walk out right now. Then what will you do?" Her eyebrow raises ever so slightly, a challenge. "Huh? She'll have to lie there all day, and you'll be in precious school and I'll make sure she can't call you. I'll make sure she can't move." She takes another step toward me, slowly so as not to startle me. I realize she's moving in for the kill and there is no one here to help me, no one to intervene and protect me from her yellow shark tooth grin, flesh and blood hanging menacingly between the cracks.

I feel cold. GET HELP! My inner voice seems to scream. "You are a sick bitch," I say, and the saying with intention gives me some energy and confidence. Snarl of cold, cold, cold inside, so empty. My insides are wrung out. "Don't you fucking dare!" I say, so quiet, so dead I am barely audible. I know she hears me.

"Oh? Oh, I dare." She says, taking another step and raising her hands. “I'll show you how to treat your elders. I'll fucking beat the life out of you, you fucking bitch!"

I could take her, I think. I've wrestled with 6 foot, 17 year old boys who are stronger, if not bigger, than she, and I've done it enough to weasel myself out of it and do some serious damage… But I don't want to. Plus, I'm armed. I look down at my saucepan with dismay, and place it on the floor beside me. I want her out of my house. I need to get her away from my Mom. How to get her out of here? GET HELP! HELP! HELP!! Then it comes to me. “I’m calling 911 if you come any closer!”

“I’ll fucking kick your fucking pussy-footed cracker ass!” She screams.

Oh? Gotta bring the race thing into this? I see how it’s gonna be. I feel like a tree, unyielding to her threats, unmoved in emptiness. Yet I’m backing up at every step she takes toward me, feeling threatened somewhere, but trying desperately to hide it behind layers of my onion armor and keep it all at bay. Eyes are frozen open in revulsion, I picture her smashing my head upon the pavement and stepping delicately over the remains, strutting her way out of the house, and leaving my dog to lick up my brains and blood and my mother to starve and scream hysterically.

Whoolahay takes another step, and I flip on my heel and pick up the phone. “I’m going to call 911!” I blurt out, the panic overwhelming. Although such a violent end is only fitting for my impudence, I must act to protect my mother from such a fate. I will not allow such threats to go undocumented.

I am brought back to 14 again, those dark days of cutting class with the crass and broken “leftovers;” we teenagers plodding on reluctantly in the wake of our blonde angel’s departure from earth, jealous of his annihilation and his respite from life’s pains. Those cold spring days, so soon to be three years and I have not forgotten you though all the others have, spent smoking on the bridge between the parking lot and the gym, smelling tar and sludge from stagnant water un-flowing, taking drags of Marlboro Reds to assist Death in his picking of my scabs.

Death is trying always to find an orifice open to life force infiltration, and I was glad to help out passively, uncaring as I was for a world that would pull my angel’s vegetable plug. I myself had wanted to die, taking long and deliberate pulls at those voice-ruining cancer sticks, making smoking my indirect way of following suit and feeding that urge to leave this world and all of its troubles. I wasn’t afraid to die, but I must survive, I think, for her.

I dial the number, feeling the pulse of the dial and the click as Whoolahay screams, “Go ahead, Bitch! Send the cops! I haven’t done anything wrong! But I’ll fucking kill you! Don’t you forget it! Don’t you fucking forget it! I will bash your face in, you fucking Boombaclot!”

“Hello? HELLO??!!”

“Hello.” Answers the quintessential blank voice, “911 Emergency line. What is your emergency?” The operator’s voice seems warm and concerned and immediately I wilt to my knees, clutching the receiver to my clavicle. I am between two recliners with my fists clenched and tears rushing down my cheeks, flying sideways onto my shirt, my shoulders, my legs, my arms, my neck and chin, and ears and nose. “Help me!” I mumble. “Help me!” I shriek, desperate, suddenly inarticulate with panic.

“Ma’am. Please stay calm. We can help you.”

“Help! Please help! She’s threatening me! She wants to kill me! Please send police and get her out of my house!”

“Go ahead!” Yells Whoola, tilting her voluminous screams toward the receiver in my hand. “SEND THE COPS! YOU HEAR THAT? SEND THEM!! What are they going to do, protect you?!” Laughing bitterly, she leans against the corner of the kitchen and the hallway, clenching and unclenching her fists.

I wish I’d fucking killed her. With the pot. Just don’t come any closer, I think warningly.

“Ma’am. Where are you located? Tell me where you’re located and I’ll send the police.”

“Yes, please send them. I’m at 63 Weathersmeadow--”

“YEAH SEND ‘EM! Send them and I’ll leave your mother! She’ll lie there all day and rot and waste away.”

I hear my mother crying in the other room, the same way she’d sobbed in fear for my father the night we’d found out about his faulty Vagal Nerve; the night he’d vomited so much he’d passed out, fallen off the bed and hit his skull, only to wake up, dazed and covered in his insides. That night, too, I’d found my calm and snatched the phone, had given the EMT’s directions to our house. I’d dressed in sweats and sneaks and locked the dog in her cage so the EMT’s could get in the front door with the stretcher and carry him down the stairs. We’d saved his life that night. I’d ridden with him in the ambulance, the front seat so close to the glass with the sirens and lights giving me a mental seizure as I twisted around in my seat to watch helplessly as his face turned blue.

I am the calm one in crisis, I tell myself, trying to pull myself together to talk on the phone. Everyone said so when they watched me walk out of the door with a condemned man on a stretcher. But I could lose my cool, and lose it to such an extent that I feel as if my head will explode with pressure. No one else saw me get kicked out of ER after screaming at the doctors when his heart stopped. No one else saw me screaming when they had rushed in with the electric palms to jumpstart his heart. I hadn’t told anyone about that. Didn’t want to scare them.

Now it was clear to me what I had to do. Recalling these events, I’m eager to uphold my reputation and dignity. “Weathersmeadow Road, number 63.” I say. Suddenly I am centered again, crust building from my salty tears and holding open my eyes.

“Fucking come, PIGS! I’m here waiting! You cunts!”

“Do you hear that?” I whisper.

“I’m listening,” says the operator. “Just stay calm. You’re safe now. Just stay on the phone with me until they come, ok?”

“Ok.” I am shaking again, afraid to close my eyes, just in case Whoolahay tries anything, the vision of my skull on the pavement replaying over and over again, unable to stop squeezing out the tears. My dog has fleed to her cage now that she has calmed my mother, and I keep my hands close to my face as if to fend off impending blows.

“SEND THOSE FUCKING PIGS! SEND THEM! I CAN’T WAIT TO GREET THEM AT YOUR FUCKING DOOR. YOU DESERVE THIS, BITCH! YOU DESERVE TO LEARN HOW TO TREAT PEOPLE! YOUR MOTHER SHOULD BE ASHAMED--”

“Are they on their way?”

“—OF YOU!! AND HOW DO YOU REPAY HER? IN RUDENESS. FOR ALL SHE SUFFERS YOU THINK YOU COULD SHOW HER A LITTLE RESPECT, YOU UNGRATEFUL BITCH!”

“They’re coming. They should-”

“You’d better keep my mother-”

“Be coming soon”

“Out of this!” I sob, anger overcome by shame and helplessness. Ashamed of my lack of self-control, I am awry with weakness to her poison.

“You think we all don’t know how you treat her? We all talk about it all the time. You think we’re be-”

“I know you’re not blind. But it’s NONE-”

“You think we don’t all know you-”

“-OF YOUR BUSINESS!!”

“-For the snotty little-”

“You nosy old woman!”

“BITCH you are? You are a bitch. You like that word? Huh? Bitch? You like how it sounds? You must know a lot about it. Bitch. You must know a lot about being one, huh?

“SHUT UP! SHUT UP!!” I scream, just as a car rolls into the driveway, blocking my car into its spot. I want to live I want to live I want to live!! Why is this happening to me? How could this woman be in charge of my mother’s care and why do I have to deal with her craziness? Why can’t I just go to schoola nd sing in chorus and finish my physics in the cafeteria like everyone else? Why is this happening to me? Why does she hate me?

Two policemen walk up the walk with hands on their hilts and get to the outer door. Both are middle-aged white cops, one skinny with short brown hair and of a towering height, the other stouter and solid on his feet, heavy set in that determined sort of way. The doorbell rings, and Bibby goes crazy, throwing her body against the locked metal bars of her cage.

“Ok, they’re here. I have to go.”

“Fuck these cops!” Whoolahay exclaims, slamming her palm across the top of Bibby’s cage with a clatter, causing Bibby to recoil in terror.

“Ok hun. Take care.”

“What the hell are you doing? Don’t fuck with my dog like that!” I challenge, slamming the earpiece into the cradle of our old ivory cream and gold rotary phone. I have not even gotten to my feet before Pat has banged my dog’s cage door shut again out of spite, in spite of Bibby’s snapping jaws.

The cops stride in the unlocked door unannounced, tracking brown mud cross hatches of boot crevices across the kernelled rug. The mud shatters underfoot and grinds into the cloth loops, and I am seized with regret at once. I will have to clean this up, I think. For though they look at me with pity and sympathy, I see they feel nothing but annoyance for something so banal as attempted assault.

If I was in my hometown, where the cops pull you over for a busted tail light, or attempt to search your car if you are parked and eating Wendy’s by College Pond below the priests’ retirement center hidden in the woods among the conservation trails and seismological center, then I’d be safe. These cops don’t give a shit. They don’t know me, don’t know left from right, and they haven’t watched me grow up nor given me lectures on fire safety nor a tour of the police station.

“You call?” Shorty asks, pointing at me point-blank.

Huddled pathetically on the floor with my back to the fireplace I nod my head mutely. Tears start to come against my will.

“She’s faking.” Whoolahay says, slyly.

“No, I’m not!” I exclaim, quickly wiping them away, determined not to feel sorry for myself.

“Sure she is. Look sirs, I’m the home health aide. Her mother has a neurodegenerative disease, and I am paid to take care of her.”

The towering cop struts into my mother’s room, and I can picture her mortified expression at being caught so vulnerably in her nightdress with a strange man or two in her house. She stops shrieking.

“I’m NOT faking! She tried to strangle me!” Choking again with visions of death filling my senses, I take a gasping breath, trying hard to be as cool and cold as Whoolahay has become in the face of authority and uniform.

As I regain my composure, she takes over tweaking, screaming aloud, “She’s lying! She’s fucking lying, the bitch!”

“I’m sorry. Whooooo doesn’t like swearing?” I counter, bitterly, intent on pointing out her hypocrisy now that I seem to have the cops on my side. “Whooo doesn’t respect? How dare you threaten my helpless mom!!? How dare you try to choke me?”

Shorty steps back from Whoolahay as she inflates in size like Ursula in The Little Mermaid, stepping toward me threateningly.

“Now calm down! Calm down!” Screams Shorty, stretching out an arm to placate. Tower comes back in the room, and Whoolahay steps toward the wall, backing down.

“We’re going to need you both to calm down.” He says in a high voice, acting a little stressed and scared. I can’t believe it. Whoolahay is threatening enough to scare these cops!

“Officer.” I choke, “This woman thinks I called her a bitch. But I didn’t.”

She riles backward and scowls, “Which you did, you lying cunt of a bitch.”

“EXCUSE me ma’am, but I’d appreciate it if you CALMED DOWN.”

“That FUCKING lying BITCH! Just listen to her lie!”

“CALM DOWN Ma’m!”

“But I didn’t and then she—it was OK to-” I choke again, then catch myself, “Grab the back of my turtleneck until I couldn’t breathe!”

“Lies! Bitch! You don’t forget what I told you, CUNT! I meant it! I meant every word, BITCH!”

“STOP IT!” Tower screams. My mother has begun to cry again. “Calm her down,” Tower orders, and Shorty follows his command. “Now, he says, addressing me, “You said this woman works for your mother?”

“Yes! And she tried to strangle me but I stopped her to catch my breath.”

“Is that true?

“Yes!” He looks at Whoolahay, who states the opposite, indignantly.

“Is it true you work for this girl’s mother?”

“Yes, I work for this shit cunt BITCH’S mother. So YES.”

“STOP!” Tower shouts and Whoolahay reluctantly leans against the wall.

“And what are you going to do about this liar?” She asks, as if I am the one needing to be locked up for violence and criminal insanity.

“Nothing. We can’t do anything.”

“What?!” Pulling myself to my feet, I add, “What do you mean you can’t do anything?”

“We can’t do anything. She’s an employee of your Mom, so it’s up to your parents to order her to leave. Where is your father?”

“I don’t know.” I say, turning red. “Acton.”

“So is it your mother? In charge of this home?”

“Yes.”

“Hey, Shorty! Ask her mother if she wants her employee to leave.” I picture my Mom, valiantly nodding her head, ejecting this terrible stranger from our haven so we can live in safety.

“Uhh. Ok” They cop leaves the room and the three of us hover in purgatory, waiting as Whoolahay and I face off, each certain of my mother’s reply. Silence hangs in the air as we strain to hear her response, and my muscles relax as I begin to plan what I’ll have to do next, Call Zooey and organize for someone else to cover the shift..

“Naw… She’s saying something.”

“What? What’s she saying?”

“She needs her. She needs her to stay.”

My legs start to shake, knee knocking brittlely until I’m sure they will break. Tower looks at me, my white pallor green and sick with powerlessness and defenselessness. Tower looks at me, then at Pat’s smug grin. “You sure?” He asks.

“I TOLD you she was lying.” Whoolahay’s eyes squint with satisfaction.

A pause, then, “Yep.”

I don’t feel anything now. I can’t look the cop in the eye. My body shakes with violence and disbelief, imperceptibly. I have lost the battle, am losing the war, but am determined to withhold my dignity. I am without a case of ice to numb my rage and fear so I must just breathe.

“Sorry honey. Time for school. We can’t help you, you understand?” Tower asks, shrugging.

“No, I don’t!” I state through gritted teeth. “She attacked me in my own home.” My hands are shaking like they do when I audition, and my lips, dry and sticking to my teeth in a fierce snarl, are dryer than a cat’s tongue. “This is my home!” I look at Whoolahay, standing in the hall. Tower adds to the line in the hallway, looking shamefaced while creating a self-righteous barrier between me and my mother, forcing my only exit to be the front door.

“We can’t do anything. Go to school.”

Photography doesn't lie about reality more than a little bit.

2007-04-13T09:32:00.000-07:00