Category: Fiction

Jorge Luis Borges

“Your mother was unkind to me,” I thought as we boarded the rollercosaster. It was Independence Day after all. I thought about the ways in which she had always cast dispersions on me and my family – a side of the tracks which she peceived in me, and which she did not desire for her daughter, although we lived blocks apart and on the same side of the tracks. There was an imaginary track in your mothers mind in which cotton and coal and automobile parts moved up and down the seaboard, and on the other side of it – the side that knew nothing of these tracks – lived those people.
It was strange that she was my mother’s best friend in high school and that they had not spoken in 30 years. My mother attended your father’s funeral when he was mangled in the mechanical looms at Burlington Industries, and your mother did not acknowledge her. Driving home, mom saw an albino deer cross the road and she was sure that it was the spirit of your father escaping to freedom.
I don’t know what happens in these dreams. My upper teeth, gums and teeth, half rotting, become detachable. Easy answer is that I need a trip to the dentist. Hard answer is that I feel that I am losing a part of me.
I guess I have felt that for awhile. Like a phantom limb thing for the last 10 years or so. Like I need to become whole with the person that I used to be, and that I was comfortable with. I was going to change the world, I remember. I was going to be someone, and mom always thought the same.
I can’t figure out what in the world making these little web sites has changed, or the occasional brochure for real estate, black angus steaks, a week in Las Vegas. I’ve settled, but I know in the back of my mind that more was what I wanted.
This is those most personal type of journals. Not as entertaining as the rest. Not as scary either. No one dies. Nothing is ambivalent. There is a noticeable lack of the Borgesian twist. My moonface wanes as the sunlight approaches. I want sleep as do you now. A week of bad vibes and discussion. We will make it better in the thing to come.
But my teeth seem to be falling out my head as I fall to sleep and this seems to exhibit a certain paranoia akin, but completely different from, the sinking pool of weeks before. If it’s not one thing it’s another, I suppose.
But what you do not realize is that my mother loved your mother when they were kids. She worshipped her to an extent. They were inseparable for a matter of 8 years coming through school. I guess there’s the rub. There’s nothing that she could have done but marry that guy and live in that place and be that person that was something that your mother lost the capability to love so long ago. Hell, she didn’t even love you in the way in which you wanted to be loved.
I wish that I could make sense of all of it and I suppose that is what I am trying to do, but perhaps a few more hours of sleep are needed – a few more years between me and that. Perhaps, you and I can make it all better if we try.

Falls Lake at sundown.

Once upon a time, mama saw the giant with big green eyes and asked at the behest of her husband to at least spare the children. It was only later that the true drama happened and I walked into a snails’ nest of heckuvalotuv trouble.
Michael and I dug the grave on the occasion of his thirteenth birthday, under the treefort 836 yds. in the woods behind my parent’s house and roughly 416 yds. behind his. Roughly 8 ft. by 4 ft., we spent all late afternoon opening the ground and building the mound beside. I paused on the hour to vomit and Michael would berate me in the best way he knew how, with his limited language, speech impediment and drawl. I did the best I could to understand exactly what he was saying. At times, I even mistook his unkind words for the kindlier variety.
It was that afternoon while BMXing down by Falls Lake that we came across her. Fresh out of the water and on the rocks lying there, we hid in the fallen trees for over an hour before ever making an approach.
Mom called us at lunch and her voice rang through the valley and down to the lake, but since we were known to tarry outside of earshot regularly she did not worry at our absence that afternoon at the lunch table, Saranwrapped, the sandwiches were put in the frigidaire for our imminent arrival.
Cookie, Michael’s mom and my mom’s best friend, had relinquished custody of us boys,for the afternoon to my mother. We swam early and played our jump or swim, marco polo, sharks and minnows- the best we could with just the two of us after my brother left.
Later on the bikes we struck out down the path by the Allen house where Ricky was layed up with cancer at 35. (That man once helped us roof our garage, as he was a roofer – his whole family was – before he opened the vintage Ford truck parts store. He could drive the nail in one swipe, accosting it while it was still in the air and driving it right through the tarpaper and plywood.) Down to the lake we rode, bunnyhopping the new craters created by the three weeks of rain. Michael had taken his step-dad Scotty’s 12 gauge and a half box of buck shot, three beer cans from the curb garbage, and two full ones stuffed into the cargo pockets of his surplus army fatigues.
Down to the lake we rode with cargo in tow, me in front, Michael in back. Arriving, we decided the 5 minute trip enough to merit consuming the beers, which we did in short order, throwing the empty cans, as well as the empties we brought with us into the lake. Michael loaded the shotgun with shells and we took turns shooting at the cans as they slowly drifted out toward the channel. Finally, by pure stroke of luck, I made the first hit and for the first time in my life I heard and understood (differently than I would later come to understand the term) “fallen soldier” – except Michael added “Yankee” in between the two words.
After the shells were expended, or the cans had drifted too far out for feasible aim and accuracy, Michael strapped the gun back around his shoulders and we headed down the makeshift path toward the north point where we liked to skip the rocks made smooth by the channel moving through. That is where we saw her first. First in the water and then coming onto the shore and lying down. we hid behind the dead trees that were exposed from the summer drought. She didn’t know we were there. She thought she was alone. Naked, laying on the channel stone.
Michael had the idea to make a scare and I agreed. We could surely outrun on bikes. We could make it back to Dude Ranch Road before she could even fully arise and make a chase. He started and I hid my eyes and readied for the great escape – Huffy handlebars in hand. I watched as he approached, barefoot like a samurai, not making a sound. Once upon her I could not stand it anymore and I took off in a random direction. Knowing the woods like I did, I would make it back home and to fried bologna sandwiches in no time. Three hundred yards away I heard the impact , and then the bang, and I was stopped immediately. I turned to look back and Michael stood with the shotgun in one arm and his other in the air. I thought we were out of shells.
Shrieking he called me a ‘pussy” and told me if I had any balls I would come back and help him take the body back with us. Of course, this is the moment in which I should have run – far from that place and back to sandwiches and pool and mom and garage and basketball goal and Huck Finn – but of course that is not the way it went down. I went back and we place the body across the two bikes and between the two of us and we pushed it out of the woods and to the treefort. I went home and got two shovels and a pickaxe from the leanto behind the garage. We dug until 6:30 and Michael went his way and I went mine.
I went to the pool and straight in with my cutoff courduroy Levis. I wanted to wash it all away. I knew her. I had secretly spied her on my own before. I had delicate fancies during prepubescence about her. I wanted to wash it all from my hands, and the blood drippings from my shorts. I wanted to deny all evil. Destroy all monsters. Make my mother proud. It would all come to be sooner or later anyway – and the opposite.
That was the summer before Michael was incarcerated at the Dillon school. The summer before Cookie died after hitting the split rail fence at 55 MPH, the wood coming through the engine block, firewall and her heart. The summer before I fell in love the first time. The summer before I first hailed a cab. The summer before my first guitar and the last summer of piano lessons. The summer in which Michael and I stopped being friends, his family moving away after the death of his mother. The summer I learned my first lesson.
If I could make it all different now, if it really did happen, I surely would. Michael is okay now the last I heard through the grapevine. I am not sure that I am. Though the dream won’t stop, I am working on it. If the cure comes soon, maybe we can all live happily ever after.

This is not her.

I went this way when you went that. You see it’s all the same to me, or so I want to believe. None of my friends will believe this shit I assure you, but I find myself once again in a professional limbo. They love me, I swear, or I wouldn’t say it in the first place.
The decision never gets easier. I walk around constantly in wet socks. I have been making footprints through your house. Your mind cannot begin to imagine. I have 15 feet of loving and a half-tied nitwit who wants nothing more than to sit in the corner of your bedroom as you drift off to sleep. I’m good for something, just not good enough for that. You think it’s a favor, and maybe in the “big scheme” it will be. Only time will tell. You’ve never wanted for anything, or so it seems. A family from Grosse Pointe, or one of the Pointes, automobile money to be sure. You drive a foreign car, a roadster of the cheapest sort, just to thumb your nose at them. They still love you. God and country can keep you together, and your house will smell of the sweetest potpourris sold at the most boring of shops.
I made my way upstream at half past midnight and looked in your window and you were asleep. Such peaceful sleep for so young, and at this hour when wolves silhouette themselves against the moon. A heart beats solo in the corner. I am making the crinoline under your skirt and it itches your sunburned legs like nothing since mosquitos in summer on a rainy night in Key West.
Speaking of Key West. I will be staying there for the summer on a friend’s couch. It’s a pullout and I will have to take my own pillow. I will lie naked, my body spilling out in the different directions – Atlantic, Pacific, Ursa Minor… He says that jobs are plentiful and the air is hot. My arthritic legs will weather well here. I know I never make any sense. You’ve said that more than once and so I will say it here just so everyone knows your thoughts.
Sooner or later there will be one million dollars in a safety deposit box and we will do the subterranean rescue. Jeremy and I are buying the Atlanta Braves you know. You thought it was all a hoax, but we’ve got the “silent partners” and the Series is ours.
I love the last time you spoke to me in whispers as we were naked on the floor and talking in secret tongues – both of us on our knees, yet you still sitting in my lap. All of that has changed now.
I do headstands on pillows made of Turkish wool, and you howl at male ballet dancers with cod pieces. They are cod pieces you know, and you are not so deep yourself.
I fixed your well that November when it froze over and you were happy to have the water again. I rewired your studio like it was your heart… you always loved that dad was an electrician – he can remove your shorts. I did a cartwheel when I first met you.
Tomorrow I am shaving it all off. The hairs, the nails, the hairs on my hobbit toes. I will be free. There will be truth for a while. I missed you most while you were up North. In that place. One of two that have ever elected socialist mayors. Strange in that way if you really think about it all.
All things become one, but I feel like nothing. Jeremy will write something soon to bring levity to this whole forum. But for now, I cannot figure out, in my heart of hearts, for who this love letter is intended.

Not A Cobra, A Dream.

“All that you can’t leave behind, that’s what fucks with you boy,” she said as I walked out of the open door of the dressing room at Filene’s. Made me feel like a thousand bucks even though the suit was less than half that.
I said, “I know, but to punctuate is just too hard, and you are not available, or so that’s what I hear, or wouldn’t make yourself so, because you understand my psychological dilemna so thoroughly.”
I took the suit, and another and we left that place, and then to the tailor, and measurement where I realized that just as the universe is expanding, I too am expanding… take a walk, shun the sedentary lifestyle.
We went back to her place for a beer or two, and she had a quarter bottle of whisky, and some grain alcohol her daddy had procured for her a couple of years back, and a vintage bottle of Carlo Rossi, and the shit really hit the fan.
I cannot flirt you must first realize, unless I do it here, and that is no kind of way for the whole thing to go down. I can write of you before or after I fall asleep, I can make strange faces toward the moon too. My body can become a somnambulist at the turn of a phrase, and this latter thing is what concerns me the most.
Me walking ’round sleeping and you in a henhouse, nuthouse, riotact, slave cell, and me walking through the night with vacancy in heart, bed and mind.
I don’t know what the sexiest song that I have ever heard is, but every song I have ever heard that I really liked made me feel sexy in some way. Forgot to mention Afghan Whigs, and you were right about Nina Simone, I’ve got her in my disc player which apparently granted considerable mileage at the end of a night.
But you are right, all that I can’t seem to leave behind haunts me, I can see the future just as brightly as all getout, but the subdued hues of the past seem to strike chords that cannot be interrupted. I walk through Oakland Cemetery tonight with a half stallion, a half prince, a whole heart and a half head – to your house, where I hope the cobra does not bow it’s neck, does not make a hiss, does not come from the basket. I have fife in hand, and multitudes in heart.
Please forgive me, all I said could never be true.

La Virgen de Guadalupe

I was back home for summer break and all around the pool all day, everyday, were the kids from the neighborhood, the nieces and nephews, grandchildren to my parents. The summer was awash in hazy blue chlorine-ness. Having made my first paycheck at the radio station night gig, and having made a pact with Richie that we would get tatoos once we had the money and had passed final exams, we were off on the third week of break around midnight to the parlor where I got the multi-colored Virgen de Guadalupe stamped on my right shoulder – just like the ones you see on the sides of those tall, glass devotional candles. Back at home Mom was not so excited about this, especially about fact that it poked out of the bottom of the average short-sleeve shirt. She still helped me apply the salve and at least on one occasion she noted, “Well, at least it is pretty.”

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A whalebone revisted.

Because it was raining tonight, and St. Patrick’s day, that crazy Briton, and the fact that I had no water at my house as the H2O department made a periodic sweep of the non-payers, I tried to call you tonight at 12:30. The snails have returned to the porch and whales are out swimming off-shore again. Blubber to bluberty blub, I might find my way to the pub and a half pint later make the swoon eyes toward the door. But know darling, my aim is true now, nothing but heartfelt sentiment, a little Hamlet, a little argonaut, and you to finish out a secret potion I have kept for a time now. Please be aware of my indiscretions as they are not me at all, I write them off like taxes from an unknown ancestor. You make your way across the street and the whole of the cosmos comes together, at least here in this little place. I have seen you dancing, seen you strumming, 5-string banjos and pedal steel guitars to make light of the situation. Tomorrow I will be back to work. This has to end somehow. I smell it in the air, on this night, a harpoon waiting at starboard, a new whalebone sinking into the setting sun.

Spring Break: Daytona Beach

So here is how it begins. We are travelling down the path cleared by the dozers three weeks before. The sun through the treeline speckles the hood of the vehicle as if this is film noir. I awake from this dream and you are there on the hood riding and screaming at the top of your lungs. This is R&R, or so they call it. Safe territory. I look back for a moment to see if Willie and Kyle are still following. You scream more wildly as I run off the path, and then recover. They are there and you and I, and it seems like 4 boys on spring break in Daytona Beach.
I think briefly of Liz and the kids back in Kansas. Of the way she hangs the sheets out to dry on the line out back in the summer. I know nothing of what you are thinking as you let out that yawp again. I think you may think little of things outside of this moment, or any other. That may be the best policy considering the circumstances.
Back in November, when I met you, you seemed as strange to me as a cloud. Like being in a cloud when you are coming down in an airplane and all of the sudden the whole world opens up to you just before landing. It always scared me shitless, but I think you like the cloud. You revel in it. And the site of land below curls your toes, makes you think of home, childhood, your mother… perhaps.
And then there is this sound. We all hear it and I break the truck just before Kyle plows into us from behind. It’s coming from up above. From across the sky came a screaming, and you, little ol’ you, burst into spirals. Me thrown 300 feet back. And I looked to the sky and there were one million fireflies, and you, alternatingly red, green, blue and then, at last, gold.

Time measured in dotted and solid yellow lines as we cross the Lone Star State.

Debris blows all around the highway tonight as assorted beer cans from assorted truck stops clank and roll under the seats of the 1970 Ford Sport Custom, 3 on the tree. We cruise through west Texas at the speed of sound, it seems, as the AM radio just loses the last remnants of a classic country station. Willie sings “grew up dreaming…” and then the fade to white noise.
White heat rises from a desert and we have an extra 5 gallon bucket full of gas which once held yard herbicide in the tail, and a large funnel, for we have heard that these trips can require such desparate measures. Beer gotten at various truck stops along the way leads me to doubt the commitment to the given clientele, or doubt the 18 wheelers, lorries, that move along the road beside us heading to points further in the southwest. Some even as far as the coast, packed with Texas crude oil and petroleum of varying grades.
Tonight we are running. Running from something ‘larger than us’, otherwise we should stay and fight, but we realize the feds or locals are gonna catch up with us quickly unless we get the jump on them, and that meant a departure from Georgia in the middle of the night.

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Greens for money.

It was the greens that made me want to kill her.
Well, the lack of really. She was from some suburb of
Chicago, something with a W in it, Winetco, or
Wilmont, something with a W. Like coming from Chicago
excused her from knowing about these things.

“You never heard of it?”

“Nope.”

That’s all she said the first time I asked her. Nope.
Just a simple nope while she kept on mashing the
potatoes.

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