Swelter - Short Story Excerpt

He died in the most badass and tragic way. He did a lot of grafitti, you know what I mean? Huge, badass murals all over the place. Normally he’d do them really late at night and he’d come wake you up at six in the morning and you’d have to bike over to wherever he’d worked the whole night before. It was really annoying but you’d forgive him because he’d have this huge, happy smile on his face. And it was worth it. Beautiful colours, weird shapes, funny words all sewn together on some wall in the middle of town. For some reason art is always more beautiful amongst ugliness. Totally fucking wasted in museums.

It was dawn when it happened. It was his stupid fault. He had his earphones in. Fucking idiot. A train came and he never even heard it. If he didn’t have his ears in, he would have moved. Instead, it was done, just like that.




I feel spilt up. Half of me thinks if he had to go, at least he went doing what he loved best. But then one morning in the middle of work after I’d been up all night thinking, I thought about how much it would have hurt to go like that. Sure, it was short, but it must have really hurt. I lost my shit, snot everywhere, and my boss at the deli counter let me leave early even though I never told him what happened.

Maybe he knew. It’s funny how word spreads when a kid dies.

The Summer I Lost My Mind - Essay Excerpt Two

"He only wants one thing."

I knew he was right but I didn't care. I needed something, anything to put space between my past and the present. When you lose yourself, it's not that you forget who you used to be, it's that who you used to be is gone. All I wanted was to forget her; not to be constantly reminded of that girl walking around the corners of my mind.

Just before last call, Michael and I started dancing with a beautiful middle-aged woman at the bar. I recognized her. Like me, she spent every night there. She danced closer to Michael with an elegance I had never seen within those four walls before. 

"Hi," he said.
"Hi," she said back.

She put her hands against his chest, patted his broad shoulders.

"You look just like my son did."
"Oh, yeah?" Michael asked.
"Just like he did before he killed himself."



The sound was sucked out of the room.

"Oh my God, I'm so sorry," we both said immediately, not knowing quite what to do. The pain was etched deeply in her face now that she was letting us see it. Michael put his hand on her shoulder.

"I'm so sorry," he said again.

She kept her hands on Michael and tears grew in her eyes. She didn't want to let him go, somewhere believing that if she held tight onto my brother that her son wasn't fully gone.

"Just like my son. He had curly hair, too."

I remember feeling frightened, and sad, and a bunch of things I didn't know how to put into words. In that moment, I hated the world. I didn't understand how it could be so brutal.



I wouldn't come to regret it until two weeks later when he stopped returning my calls. But that was in keeping with that time in my life. I had never felt farther from myself. The sadness and loneliness I experienced then was unlike anything I had known before. I lived wholly in a surreal time, existing somewhere between now and then. Nothing I did really felt like something I would do. There was some other person controlling my body, my brain, my mouth. I was taking a vacation and I only dealt with how I was behaving in the brief periods where the real me floated back to the surface. And I tried, really hard, to keep that real me at bay.

I don't blame myself. I can be a real buzz kill.

Introduction

Hey everyone,

This is a blog where I'm going to post my fiction (short stories), non-fiction (personal essays), and everything in between. I've been writing pretty constantly for a year and I wanted a place where I could share parts of what is so close to me before it's published. Most things are posted as excerpts, do not appear consecutively, or in their original format.

I'm moving around a lot these days. Right now I'm in Ireland. On a walk through beautiful, violent green fields and trees I realized that everywhere I am, I look for pieces of home.

I hope you enjoy, and thank you for reading!

Saturday - Short Story Excerpt

The following are two excerpts from a short story called "Saturday." They are separated by the picture and do not appear consecutively.




After a few seconds sitting next to him, she placed her hand on his chest, tentatively. She moved her fingers tips back and forth underneath his collar bone. Finally, she rested her palm on his left breast, remembering the many times she had fallen asleep just there. She leaned towards him and placed her lips on his lips, and tried to remember how she kissed him when they were young.

She closed her eyes. In that moment, she felt again like the girl she used to be. But the moments where the past feels like the
present are never long enough.

After only a few seconds, Joe’s breathing became staggered. Meryl quickly raised herself up against his chest.

“What’s wrong?”

She saw a wetness in Joe’s eyes. His face had become so different in the few seconds when she had closed her eyes. She knew he did not remember asking her to kiss him.

He let out a low moan.

“What’s wrong Joe? Why are you crying?”

“It hurts.”

“What hurts? Where hurts?”

But there was no answer. The noises he made just got louder.

A week later that good for nothing doctor told her that it wasn’t the medication.

The cancer was in his brain.



There was so much between them when they were young. The space between them was so charged that it took every part of Meryl to fight what her insides wanted. His power was over her was his skin. He marked her bones.

“Take off your dress.”

Meryl looked up at him. Looking at him made her drunk. She was not used to feeling so out of control. She was in his claws though, held by the desire and the delusion he created. When his body was pressed against hers, she she felt both empty and full. She was floating above, watching; only her pulsing body was present.

“I love you, Meryl.”

When he moved in her everything around her moved too. Images danced across the ceiling, shadows intermingled slowly, kindly, and choreographed. She no longer felt separate from everything around her. Things breathed in her, and shared in the hysteria. She felt her body, her thoughts, her own self all meet and become one. Stars blazed, skies burst, and moons fell.

Nothing was quite the same now.

When they finished, he lay on top of her and didn’t move. He held her so close, that she could feel his breath against her. The heat between them radiated, and Meryl felt as if she was on fire.

All the tired horses in the sun, how'm I supposed to get any thinking done?

Monster - Short Story Excerpt

The following is the beginning of a story called Monster.



I am a monster.
This is how I was born, and I can do no more to change it than an old dog can trade his worn, dirty fur for the clean feathers of a baby bird, solely because he dreams of taking flight. But the difference between myself and most others like me is that I don't wish to be any different. I know who I am, to an exacting degree, pitying not myself for being this way, but those whom are unaware of the truth in me, to whom I will never explain it.
My James.
I have never known true intimacy, and I have no desire to. I can only really breathe when I am alone, and the clear, hard blue sky goes beyond and above me to infinity, mirroring the lonely seas, and I can see as far as it can, which is nowhere and everywhere at once. Sometimes, in these nowhere and everywhere moments, I think of James, the man who loves me, the man who will marry me next month, and I feel cruel. He does not know that I was born wearing the blue uniform of a prisoner inside myself, and that everything else feels like a costume.
Especially that white dress.



I come from Texas. My accent, barbed with the softness only sharp-shooters can imitate, sounds different in my own head, when I am alive in thought, than it does when I speak to him, dead in conversation. I don't understand where the pretense comes from, but I am being dishonest with my voice when I speak, except within the confines of my own skull. My real drawl, is lower, has more gruffness, and a depth that I don't share with anyone, guarded like the jewels at Buckingham Palace.
My hair is golden, especially when the sun's hot rays press themselves upon it. My eyes are blue, very blue, like the hard sky, but haven't the vacancy, the emptiness, that many light eyes are cursed with. No, mine are soulful. Perhaps too soulful for a woman that has been so selfish with herself. James calls me his Angel, but I am not an Angel. I just look like one.
I am beautiful and I know that, and so since I was a small girl I have always attracted men like flies to honey. And I have never wanted or needed them; my aloofness making me even more a prize to be won. I have felt guilty, being pretty like this, when so many girls need this beauty more to get what they so desire; the love of a good man.
My James has loved me, intimately, since the moment he laid eyes on me. I have long wondered if that was because somewhere he knew, though not consciously thought, that I could never love him and attracted to that calamity, threw himself into me wholeheartedly.
It is not easy though. It is not easy being monstrous.



As of late there has been a magnetic conflict, newly born, and that I feel uncomfortable having within me. The pull being that I should keep my true nature a secret, the push being that I should not sentence another human being to a lifetime tied to a mutant. These thoughts have surfaced before. But the pull, my nature, would win over the repellant, collapsable space between, and the two sides would snap together, in connectivity, the contrition buried often for a long while.
But as the big day approaches, I find myself studying James when he is asleep. He looks so helpless. More helpless than I could ever be in the most dire of situations, and this helplessness radiates off him in his sleep; unconsciously. Looking at him, I feel like a monster in a fairy tale; hairy, yellow-eyed, mute, grotesque, blood-thirsty, and despicable. I imagine myself, with my new bone-crushing heaviness, sitting on him until he suffocates. Murdering him, the monster feels no regret, only victorious for having made the kill. When I wake from these spells I am horrified. The guilt I feel weighs so heavy upon me, but I am unable to stop these feelings. Some nights, I feel so guilty that I cannot share a bed with the helplessness and sleep alone on the wood floor beneath him.
I don't know that I can live a life haunted by such guilt; not for who I am but for who I earnestly promise to be.
He is taking me on a getaway this weekend, "some time alone before the wedding," he told me.
I have told myself that there, I will decide if I can be an impostor for the rest of my days.

Tragic Hero - Short Story Excerpt

“So, since...Rosemary? Was it Rosemary?”
“What’s she got to do with this?”
“No, nothing. Just since her, no serious women?”
“No...no, not really.”
“Wow.”
“Why are you always saying ‘wow’, kid? It makes you seem dumber than you are.”
“Oh, sorry. I mean...I find that hard to believe.”
“Why? I’ve never wanted to be committed.”
“Not to anyone? Not ever?”
“No. I get committed, goodbye freedom. Why would I want that?”

She looked away and I went back to eating my dinner. Then when I thought the conversation was over, she got back to talking.

“I was at Starbucks this one time, this reminds me of that. You know how Starbucks has those quote things on the back of their cups? Well, there was this one quote, and it went like....it went something like, ‘the irony - ’ irony... is that right?”
“Could be. I don’t know what you’re talking about yet.”
“Oh...okay, well, I think it’s irony... anyway, ‘the irony of commitment is that it’s ultimately freeing.”
I laughed real hard at that one. “That would be ironic, yes.”
“Don’t laugh, this is good! Just listen, okay?”

I nodded my head. I always did listen to her, more than I did other people. Don’t know why.

“It said like, ‘when you commit to something, it frees you of the doubts in your head’ and that, ‘all the doubts you have in your head are just your own critics that think you aren’t strong enough to be committed, so they shoot you in the foot by not letting you try in the first place. And commitment frees you of that, so it’s freeing...in the end.’ I don’t know, something like that. That always stuck with me. I think it’s true, maybe.”

When she gave me that spiel, she looked real hopeful. But it was this terrifying hope around her eyes. Really, it scared me. I hadn’t seen that kind of hope from anyone in so long that it really rattled me. I had to set her straight.

“You know why you only see shit like that written on Starbucks cups?”
“No, why?”
“Because the only people stupid enough to believe that bullshit are the same idiots who are willing to pay five dollars for a Goddamn coffee.”

She laughed real hard at that. But when she laughed it was a sad laugh. She looked like she’d been woken up from a dream.

“Yeah, yeah. You’re probably right.”
“I am right.”
“Yeah, you are.”
“That settles it.”

She smiled at me, with this sad smile. I wondered then if maybe she wanted to stay dreaming. 

“So you want to get the cheque, kid?” I asked her.
“Sure,” she said. “Sure.”

Die Happy - Personal Essay Excerpt

You’re more comfortable that way, making longer stories short. You want to arrange things, draw conclusions, give them an introduction. You want to take pieces of your life and structure them on pages. You want to take people and make then permanent. You put them in black and white type. Once they’re concrete it’s easier for you to accept.

You don’t share, not easily. You’ll write your most intimate thoughts for a stranger to read, but those closest to you don’t know those that live inside you. You want to emancipate those inside, you want to let them live outside, for other people to see, to move them from your haunted house that no man has dared explore. The nakedness feels more comfortable when it’s one removed.

These words on this page are glowing because the truth in them resonates so deeply in you. You want to die happy. You think that’s the only way to live. That’s the only logic you can assign to life, the only goal you have.

How do you do it?

What Life Was For - Short Story Except

It was their first night in the house alone since Grandpa left. The remains of the man he used to be were scattered around them; a newspaper he could no longer read, a television he could no longer hear, shoes he’d never wear again. She wondered if that was the real cruelty of life; you could feel people leaving.

The tape played. Big, beautiful voices echoed. Piano and brass instruments filled the space around them. Glenn held her so close that she could feel his heartbeat.

And then for the first time in her life, time stood still. They swayed, gentle, for what could have been seconds or days, it didn’t matter. Finally, so small in his arms, with the old man’s music playing and time spinning madly on, she knew what life was for.

Crisis of Faith - Personal Essay Excerpt

But the whole thing wasn't black and white. It wasn't that he was a believer and that I wasn't. I did believe. I believed in a lot of things that didn't make an logical sense.

I believed that people were good, almost always. I believed in angels. I believed that something more than me was guiding my life. I believed in signs. I believed that there was order in the universe and that everything happened for a reason. I believed there were always opportunities to grow. I  believed that life was good. I believed in karma. I believed in love. I believed that the world existed in our skull, between our temples. I believed in people who tried. I believed that nine times out of then things were abstract, not linear. I believed there were saints everywhere you looked. I believed very little was simple. I believed people are ultimately more the same than different.

So then was Glenn's belief in Christ and his disciples really, at it's core, any different than me choosing to believe in things that weren't ultimately tangible? Isn't the definition of faith belief in something for which you have no proof? 

Gun Shy - Short Story Excerpt

Michael dreams of tall buildings.
He dreams of tall trees.
He dreams of tall ladders.
He falls, far, far down.

When he lands, he sees women dressed up like the olden days. They have big skirts and fancy hats. He can’t see their faces because they are veiled in lace. He asks the women to show him their faces but they won’t. He thinks one of the women is Caitlin, or an old relative of Caitlin, but he can’t be certain because she won’t show him her face. The lady walks like Caitlin, but when he taps her on the shoulder, she won’t turn around.

He stops by a river and watches an old man paint a picture of the scenery. The painting looks like a perfect photograph.
Everything looks exactly the same as what’s in front of him. Michael is impressed and in awe, and can’t believe anyone can paint like that. When he goes to compliment the artist, the man won’t turn around.

After a few tries, Michael decides he should leave the river. He walks down a dusty road. He sees people on horses, men in carriages, women in petticoats.

Then he falls again.
He falls far, far down.
His stomach drops, and he lands nowhere he’s even been before.
He doesn’t see numbers.
He just sees tall buildings.
Tall trees.
Tall ladders.

In a moment of lucidity, he tells himself to keep dreaming.

My Own Personal Jesus - Personal Essay Excerpt

I pray to him, bare knees on a wood floor, in my warm bed, sitting a restaurant; anywhere in the world. I pray to him after a difficult day or early in the morning. I pray to  him when I'm heartbroken, happy, lonely, confused. I look up at the ceiling, into a blur of anonymous people, or sometimes, in the mirror at my own reflection and I speak with him. I feel like I'm talking to an old friend, someone I love but never get around to seeing enough. I believe, somewhere, somehow, he can hear me. I often cry when I pray to him because I miss him. Since he died, I have never asked God for anything.

"Please, Patrick, help me," I say out-loud or in my head. It doesn't matter. We don't need sounds to hear each other.

The Long Goodbye - Essay Excerpt

The excerpts, divided by pictures, are from two separate parts of the essay and don't appear consecutively.



"Rejane's pregnant," I said as soon as I saw him. And as he stepped closer to me, gravity changed, and we were in orbit, encircling one another once again. We spent the night together. He told me that he'd missed me so much that summer that he'd woken up in the middle of the night and put his socks and shoes on was going to knock on my door and tell me that he still loved me, but by the time he was halfway to my house, he turned back. I wondered if in that moment, I was somewhere else, in the bed of another, wishing that it was him breathing next to him. So even if we were worlds apart, we had been connected without ever knowing it.

You'll think this is crazy, but I did then and for a long time after, believe that somewhere, in some alternate universe, that Kate, and the boy who loved her, the ones that don't live on earth anymore, not in the flesh anyway, just in their slowly fading memories, are together and will love each other, with a force and profundity most people never know for the rest of their days. But I was young then, so much younger than I am now, and I didn't know then that something could be untrue even if you really believed it. 




I started crying harder.

"Why aren't you sadder?" I asked him.

"I am sad, Kate. I just don't know how to show it."

"When you leave, this is really it. We are really over, and there is no going back."

I wouldn't have believed it then but I was right.  He left that night and the boy I loved never came back. I think in some ways, I am still making peace with it. And by writing this essay, I am still saying goodbye.

In Raymond Chandler’s novel, The Long Goodbye, his famed hardened detective Phillip Marlowe says when his lover leaves, “There was a lump of lead in the pit of my stomach. The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right.

To say goodbye is to die a little.”

That night, I died a little.

Sweetieface - Short Story Excerpt

The excerpts, divided by pictures, are from two different parts of the story and don't appear consecutively.




"Sam! I love this song!"

"Me too."

"Let's dance Sam!"

"I don't dance."

"Oh, come on, it's me, and you're drunk, and nobodies here."

Sam looks around the bar. It's empty. When did everyone leave? 

"Please, Sam? I love this song."

When she's standing there she looks so beautiful. Her hair has fallen, and she looks drunk, and happy, and finally relaxed enough to be herself. Sam is overcome with a furious desire to touch her, to hold her, to be against her. He wishes he could tell her how he feels in this moment. Because of the alcohol, he would, if he knew the words to describe it right. But words don't ever fit how he feels for her. He thinks then that maybe some things are meant only to be felt; forever unspoken and misunderstood, lonesome and unfair.

Then he looks at her again. He can't stop himself.

He grabs her, and pulls her close. She falls into him. Her hands find his shoulders, and he holds her waist. They sway together. They dance, closer than friends dance. No one is looking at them. They move with an intimacy usually saved for when they are alone. Grace rests her head on Sam.

He thinks a new Sam is born when he holds her. The brave Sam. The Sam he wants to be. The man who doesn't exist without her, who doesn't breath in him alone. They continue to sway, now cheek to cheek.

She feel so soft against him.



Sam sits slumped on his chair waiting for Grace. He can't feel his legs beneath him.

He’s going to tell her.

Be brave, Sam.

Forget Lilly, forget everything, forget everyone.

Be brave, Sam.

Tell her. Go on, love her.

Love her forever.

Grace comes back to the table. She sits down. She looks like she’s been crying.

For a few seconds, no one speaks.

Be brave, Sam.

"Grace, I - "

"Sam, I have to go."

"What?"

"Yeah, I'm just really fucked, and Luke just texted me back and apologized and I just have to go see him. I'm going to just take a cab home, I'm just really fucked. I need to go to bed, I'm really fucked. I don't feel well."

"Oh, okay. Sure."

She gets up, and so does he, but the sound is sucked out of the room.

All he can hear is his own voice in his head, saying, “Be brave, Sam.”

"Sam, tonight was really fun," says Grace, but she sounds like she’s under water.

"Yeah, it was really fun," he can feel himself say, but he’s surprised when it comes out of his mouth.

It echoes.

"It was really good to see you, I really missed you," she says.

And Grace leaves Sam just how she found him; alone at a table with half a drink left.

She walks out the door.

Be brave, Sam, he says to himself once more.

He doesn't stop her.

All he can hear is his heart beating; that human noise he sat there making, not daring to move, not even when the room went dark.

The Way We Were - Short Story Excerpt Two

The heat came back this morning. It’s suffocating. I went walking today with the girls, and even laughter felt like a chore. The laughter with them is usually so natural. It comes in floods, and like fireworks erupting it cascades loudly above us, sways and settles around us, eventually falling beneath us and silently disappearing. Today every inhale, every rise, every fall, every exhale was laboured. It made me tired.

Night fell quickly this evening, and looking up I don't see any stars. The sky is so dark that I wonder if it could absorb me.

"Do you have a light?" I ask Old Joe.

I used to be scared shitless of Old Joe. He has the gruffness of a man who has lived his life alone, unconcerned with pleasantries. When I was a kid he used to tell my brother John and I that he was an astronaut. We believed him until I was about eight because of the NASA badge sewn to the hat he's worn everyday for as long as I can remember. I've spent a lot of time with him this summer. We always seem to find each other outside the bar, looking for a cigarette or an escape. Without a doubt, he's my favourite.

He raises his hand, with a gentleness that he saves for when he and I are alone, and lights my cigarette.

"What d-do you want to drink Miss Grace?"

"I'm taking tonight off, Joe. I'm fine but thanks."

"I used to take nights off, too."     

His eyes are a piercing blue and they're framed by wild white eyebrows. No matter how much he's drank or how slurred his speech is, there is always a frightening clarity in his gaze. I think that's what scared me when I was young. When he looks into my eyes he can see too much.

"What'd you do today Joe?"

He clears his throat and rises to put out his smoke. He sways more than usual today. I rise quickly.

"Sit down girl, I'm fine. I don't need no help." I've embarrassed him and I sit back down quicker than I got up. "I came here 'round two this afternoon, so that's what I did today."

"Did I miss anything?" I laugh.

"Days are changeless at this place my girl. Nothing happens. Nothing missed. What'd you d-do?"

"I saw the girls. We went walking."

"Hot day for walking."

"You're telling me, Joe."

"Ta-take a look at Barbara in there."

Barbara is dancing next to Daniel, who I went to high school with. She moves with a sexuality that is only becoming to a woman much younger than she is.

I laugh hard, and he wheezes and laughs also, pleased.  Even though the sun is hiding the laughter is still exhausting, still laboured.

"So wh-what'd you do today Gracey?"

"I just told you Joe."

He looks at me still with clear eyes, but confusion shrouds his blue irises.

"N-no you didn't. What'd you do today Gracey?"

"I went walking with the girls. It was hot."

"A hot day for a walk."

"Yeah, you're telling me, Joe."

I look at my feet, it's not my place to correct him.

"You doing anything fun with yo-yourself this weekend here Miss?"

"My parents are going away, so probably just stick around and enjoy the time at the house alone."

"That's sounds real nice."

"Yeah."

He gets up again, I'm not sure what for. This time he does fall over. I get down next to him and give him my hand.

"Joe are you okay?"

"Yeah, yeah girl I'm fine...I-I-I don't know how that happened there, just lost my feet under me."

He finds his feet again and steadies himself slowly. He is graceful, even in the most graceless situations.

"Did you hurt yourself?"   

"Nah, nah. Don't worry about me Melinda."

"No Joe, I'm Grace. I'm not Melinda"
  
He looks at me, and after a few seconds of silent searching, he looks genuinely surprised to find out that I am Grace, and not Melinda.

"Grace! Grace. I-I-don't know why I said Melinda. I get mixed up some days, forgive me."

If he's bringing her up, it's time for him to go home.

"Joe, do you think you want me to walk you home maybe?"

"No! N-n-no! I don't want to go home, Gracey. I'm fine. I got my wits about me I am just getting on and when people get on th-they f-forget things."

"Okay, okay, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that."

"You just remind me a'her is s'all. She was your age last time I seen her. They're all so pretty when they're your age."

From what I have been able to piece together Melinda was Joe's daughter. I don't know what happened to her, I just know she's not here anymore.

"I bet she was beautiful."

"She was beautiful, just like y-you're beautiful."

"That's really nice of you to say, Joe."

"It's n-not nice, it's true, girl."

The fluorescent light from inside is so bright that it spills out of the bar. It throws a soft light out front, where Joe and I are sitting. In this moment, I can see all the lines around his eyes, all the life he's lived.

A peculiar stillness finds us, and it transforms his face. I don't recognize him anymore. He looks away from me and there's a long moment before he finds words.

"Th-they say people don't recover from things like that. Th-that ain't all true, you recover in some ways, you keep on recoverin'. You just don't ever get fixed. I'm n-not ever gonna get fixed."

He takes a swig of his beer.

"I'm really sorry. I'm really sorry that...I just, I don't know...I don't know how you still put one foot in front of another after something like that."

"What-what choice do I got Grace? No choice."

My voice and my face behave, or will themselves to behave like this a normal conversation.

"I'm still sorry."

"Yeah, well. You can't wrap your arms around a memory. So I don't try."

The sight of Joe's face, the grief and the sadness etched in it, hurts to look at. I put my hand on his shoulder, and I look away.

There are no words.

In the silence that sits between us, with my hand glued to his big shoulder, it all becomes suddenly real.

I think I should go home.

Forever - Personal Essay Excerpt

That summer my Mom looked at me in the middle of the day and said, “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I just couldn’t go back to things the way they were. I wish I could.”

The sadness in her was incredible. I knew it had been hard for her, that leaving my father took a giant amount of strength, but she’s done a lot and a lot that’s difficult. I should have realized this was the hardest, the worst of all. But I hadn’t.

Later that week, my father and I were sitting on the porch talking. He wanted to throw me a party to celebrate my wedding and give me a grand to put towards it.

“No, Dad, you don’t need to do that. I think Glenn and I will maybe, one day have a real wedding. I mean, I never saw myself getting married without my family there.”

“Yeah, neither did we,” he said.

I stayed quiet. I guess I had pictured my wedding, I just hadn’t realized until then.

“You were always so romantic,” he said. “I sang you a song about Hank Williams who had to leave an Indian woman, and you cried until I made up a new ending and told you he came back to get her. You would watch those Disney movies over and over again and you always cried when they married Prince Charming.”

I hadn’t remembered. Thinking about the little me, her romantic hopes, made me realize that I did believe in fairytales once. Sure, the marriage ceremony itself didn’t matter, maybe not even then, but I did believe, with some child-part of me, in love eternal. My Dad had always remembered. The way he dealt with it was wrong, but now it seemed he was only trying to do the right thing, trying to force me to live up to what he thought I wanted, thought I deserved.

My mom was only trying to do the same.

Once, they had loved each other, and they both had wanted so desperately for it to be eternal. Things just didn’t turn out that way. They, like everyone else, had spent their decades together trying to do the right thing. They tried to be good, they tried to be right, they tried, as best they knew how, to make it work. They tried.

And that’s the saddest thing of all.





I tell people that they’re happier now. But they’re not. This is just where the chips fell. Looking back and looking forward, there were one million reasons this all happened but one feels truest; these things just do.

That sort of sums up my feelings about life. Things, good and bad, happen randomly, for no real reason other than that they just do. And so things change. People get married and marriages break up because that’s the course your life feels like taking.

The room felt warm that Glenn and I were married in. My face hurt from smiling. My eyes were starry because Gina’s camera kept flashing. When he was saying his vows I thought of my parents. I wondered if they were spending this moment separated, but together, with thoughts of me, thoughts of them, thoughts of forever. If they’d spend the rest of their lives separated but together, if every moment would be split in two, coloured with remorse for what could have been, for what eventually was.

Then that feeling and the heaviness floats away. As I move towards the sweet, redeeming light, I think, I love him.

I love him.

Months later, when I go to visit him in Belfast, I forget my wedding rings.

The Way We Were - Short Story Excerpt

This excerpt is from the middle of "The Way We Were" but can be read independently.




It's five o'clock in the afternoon but that really doesn't matter. Once I'm out of the shed, I feel like I can breathe again. I know the relief is fleeting. If I don't get to the corner as quickly as I can I will lose my breath, the rug will be pulled from under me and I'll free fall, deep and fast.

I am the youngest thing here this evening by decades, but that doesn't matter. I can breathe deeply and soon with abandon. I sit next to blonde Rita, who is always happy to see me, and tell myself that I should wait ten minutes before ordering. I will wait ten minutes before ordering.

Four days out of five, the regulars are the AA crowd; just trying to get sober. I see them some nights outside of local churches, smoking yellowed cigarettes together when their meetings end. I give them a quick wave and they just nod back. I don't want to talk to them so close to God. They know that they don't want to talk to me either. I would just remind them that they are still practising alcoholics.
   
This summer that O'Malley's has become a place of worship for me, too. There is no prayer though, only confession.

My relationship with these people was a kind of ultimate closeness coupled with an infinite distance. And it's that distance that allows us to be so close. They know things about me my best friend would never know, because there's no mask I have to wear here.

But we don't spend time together sober. There are no shared interests or people, there is no history between us. What would we talk about? I've come to realize that there's little difference between a young drunk and an old drunk.
As a young drunk, I'm so honest around them because I'm not constantly afraid I'm going to disappoint them. As old drunks, they are so honest around me because I'm one of the few people they haven't disappointed.

Sober, we don't really know each other, we just know things about each other. Drunk, we're best friends, because we know each other's secrets.

They're at those real churches though, four days out of five. Walking away from them I always marvel at the kind of courage it must take to go back to those meetings hung over. I wonder what kind of faith they must have in themselves to really believe that they can quit, one last time and for good. I don't think I could ever face my demons so naked four days out of five.

"How was your day Gracey?" Rita asks me.

"It was good Rita. It was good."

I smile at her, and she smiles back at me. She has a kindness in her eyes.

Rita is the type of woman who is so decent that she has always been good to people. Too good and to the wrong people, and I believe it destroyed her ultimately. I don't know how it would feel to have your defining characteristic as a person be what ruined you. It's a complicated kindness, I guess. I'm not able to be so good to people and maybe that's just fine.

"What do you want tonight Grace?" Tom yells at me from behind the bar.

"My usual." I holler back.

"It's been eight minutes." my keeper says.

"Make that a double."

I sit back in my chair. It'll be a few hours before my friends get here but that's fine. I like being here, alone, with these people.

There is no one watching.


"How's your summer been so far?" Dylan asks me.

"It's great." I smile at him. He's sitting close to me. His hand is on my leg, and it's moving up my thigh, which is strange because we don't talk in real life. His hand feels warm. I don't want him to move it.

"Ar-are you still at school?" I ask him.

I know the answer to that question, he isn't still at school. But it's late, and the room is spinning, and I'm not able to remember conversations I've already had. I try to force myself to think about times I've talked to Dylan before but I can't. My thoughts are shallow right now, and if I try to wade backwards through them I'll just hit a glass wall that hides the past, and bounce off of it, pushing me back into the forefront of my mind. All I'm able to think about is right now, this minute, this second.

The music is loud. I can feel that restlessness in my legs, and I want to move.

"I love this song Dylan, you should dance with me."

"I don't dance Grace."

"Oh really?"   

I can tell I'm still smiling at him, and I shift my body closer to his, filling what little space was left between us.

"Do you want another drink?" he asks me.

"I can't."

His body feels hard pressed next to mine. Seconds slip past us and I don't know what is supposed to happen next. He doesn't know either.

"Do you want to get out of here?" I whisper.




In my room looks bigger than he was just moments ago at the bar.

Things are very quiet between us. I don't know why they are so quiet and so quickly. Maybe there are no words that I should say and maybe there are no words he should say either.

The silence between us is ripe.

Soon there is no pretense anymore, and we aren't polite. He kisses me, and I kiss him back, harder. I want this. I really want this.   

He pushes me into a corner, and the surrounding darkness follows. I can't see in front of me, I can just feel him against me. He touches me, without premeditation. Without permission. Without thought.

"You never used to be this beautiful." he tells me.

I don't know what to say back.

"If you really should be doing this, you'd probably know what to say back" my keeper tells me. 

I pretend I didn't hear her, but I still don't have anything to say back.

Time is fragmented and lapses very quickly. I'm bare and he's bare and suddenly there is nothing actual between us.

It hurts at first, but I like the fullness inside me.

When we're finished, he holds me. In the darkness, he doesn't feel different than the one I was used to. His arms are wrapped around my waist just the same, we are sleeping close together just the same, our breathing is in sync; it's almost all just the same. I fall asleep believing it's the one I'm used to next to me. I'm too drunk to remind myself to notice the differences that separate the two.

I wake up hung over, alone, and next to the familiar ghost.    

Hero - Essay Excerpt

The excerpts, divided by pictures, are from two different parts of an essay and don't appear consecutively.



There has always been something otherworldly about him. And so, I believe from the moment he was conscious of other people he has felt like an outsider.  He could not speak until he was three - which worried my parents, but when he did start talking he spoke in paragraphs. From then on he has had a special closeness to words, often acting as his protector, his escape from other people.
 
As Michael grew older, he would need the escape and protection that words provided him, living in his imagination, crowded by beautiful words.




The focus, and the ability to know the truth of your talents, to determination to withstand the rejection without being defeated is something I envy. So many times, I have watched Michael, jealously wanting to be as confident as he is in his vision of himself. I admire him, not only for his talent, but for the clarity, so greatly. I curse myself, and tell myself that I should be more like he is. 

I don't know if I'll ever be like Michael is, though. I have not had to withstand the trials he did. I've never been pushed to the brink and come out the other end. I don't know if I'd have the super-human strength. But that's why he is my hero. We are so different, his bravery and courage is so unlike my own that I know I'll never possess it. A hero, in my opinion, is meant to have some parts of themselves that are unreachable to you. Michael, in my eyes, is only part mortal. He’s mythical.

So, I'll go to him for advice. I'll look up to him. He'll be my shoulder to cry on. He'll cheer me on. For the rest of our lives, he'll  be the dark horse that won the race, while I remain the mortal, always trying to catch up.

Falling Action - Short Story Excerpt

The excerpts, divided by pictures, are from three different parts of the story and don't appear consecutively.




Things kept going as swimmingly as they did the first night. Kate stirred somethin so fuckin powerful in me that after I'd met her I found it near impossible to think o anything else. Which wasn't how I planned it, like, but once I had it, I sure as fuck didn't wanna change it.

Before I met Kate, I had a crap job and a crap life. After, I still had a crap job but it didn't matter anymore, because now I had a great life. An unbelievably great life! Soon we spent every minute together, and she was the first person I'd met that I never got sick of.

I thought long and hard about what made Kate so well different after havin met her folks. I think it was that she was a soul from the future, transported into the wrong time, which was lucky for me, but extremely unlucky for her. She had a certain consciousness to her that not many people here had. She could see all the bullshit and all the insanity. Most people just stood idly by for it, blinded by having seen no other way, and the others, like me, were responsible for it. You could really divide the lot of us into two worlds, like. But Kate, nah, like I said she was from the other world. Tha older world, tha smarter world, tha world that felt a sickening pity for it all. She was above us. She was above me, and why she loved me how she did I can'y tell you. World's biggest mystery.

Far more mysterious than Niagara fuckin' Falls, believe me.



"We are different."

Then she turned her head away from me, and out the window. Mad, like. I didn't know wha ta say. I was worried. Worried because now that she knew it was dangerous for her, and worried she'd leave me.

"The saddest thing is that you think you're fighting for a cause. We all think we're fighting for a cause, and trust me, Sean, I believe in it. I believe in us, and I hate that this place isn't ours, I hate what they're doing to us, but that's the hypocrisy, isn't it? I feel the cause like I feel the blood pumping through me veins, and I can see how insane it all is. You're just a foot soldier in a war that nobodies ever going to win."

"Yer wrong."

You know that thinking part? It was well back at this point. The thinking part that I had aborted was kicking and screaming it's way around my brain again.

"Kate, this is how it is. I can't stand by and do nothin' while our people are dying, while they're killing my brother. He died and he didn't do nothin, so fuck all this. Because there's the way it should be, and there's the way it is. And this being the way it is, I got no other choice."

"I know," she said. "I know." Then she lent her head back against the seat of the car, still crying, and like she was trying to get a clear view at God.

I remember feeling so utterly gutted at this point. I felt so fucked. Like Romeo and Juliet or other star cross'd lovers that were just fucked from the get go but it wasn't really their faults.

"So yer leaving me then?" I asked her, almost afraid to even fill the air around me with that thought.

"Sometimes...sometimes at night when yer sleeping I tell myself to get up and leave and never come back."

"Ya do?"

"Aye... but then I feel like my body is glued to yer sheets. I can't leave ya, Sean. I can't. I just want it to be different."

So did I, but it wasn't, like. So we both had scars on out heart that would never heal.

"Sean, I am going to stay faithful to ye until the day I die," she told me.

"Me longer darlin. This place and beyond."

We sat in that car, in silence, until the sun set and until the moon went to cresent. Then we started to kiss.

Now I'm dead, but I'm still dyin' to kiss her.



We had five months after that.

A lot changed. I gave her a ring, we were goin to be tryin' for babies, all that.

Ya know, I could fill every page in this book with happy memories of us, what happened when we got engaged, fuck, how she looked in the morning time when she'd just woken up, but I'll spare us that. It's just too fuckin' sad.

But if yer curious like, everything in those next five months unfolded naturally and perfectly. We fell more and more in love with each passing hour, each passing second, really. Every night before I went ta sleep she'd kiss me and tell me that she'd be faithful ta me for the rest fo her life. And in tha time we were together, the pain o my brother, the weight of the war, the sadness that was Northern Ireland, it faded a little each day. She was like an angel that came into my life and brought a whole lotta light with her, illuminating everythin' that mattered. She was my soul mate, we were two of a kind, and I know beyon a shadow of a doubt that we woulda been happy for the rest of our days. An I know that she loved the shit out of me, almost as much as I loved her.

But the more she loved the shit out of me, the more she worried, the more she made me promise to be honest with her. I still wasn't always honest, though.

So the last time I kissed her goodbye, she thought I was meetin' Couch at the pub. I still think it was best tha way.

I'd been asked ta do something real small, to just beat up some thug that was botherin' someone's wee brother, and I didn't think nothin' of it. I said yeah of course, and figured I'd be back before night time fell.

Didn' happen like that.

The irony is, that this wasn't even my own doin. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I was walkin' up Victoria Street on my way, and the air smelled of the sea and faintly rusting shipyards of Belfast Lough. It was half four but it was already dark. Night always falls early on winter's nights in Belfast and morning dawns slowly. The city was bathed in this yellow sulphur light, and I remember thinkin' tha I was cold and wishin' I was snug somewhere with Kate, my gorgeous Kate.

And those were my last living thoughts.

It all ended quickly. The sidewalk around me shook with enormous force, and a wave of searing air rushed over me. It lifted me from my feet, and for a second too long I could see it all around me; building comin' down, people catchin' fire, blood, people screamin', horrible screamin' everywhere. I'm not sure how I landed, I lost all sense of up and down. But soon I was coffin'd in debris like, and it crushed me, heavy. I opened my mouth to speak, to yell for Kate, but I only found more debris chokin' me.

And then my mouth filled with blood. And then it was over.

Ya wanna know the funny part? It was my side tha planted the bomb.

Twin Soul - Essay Excerpt

There were so many nights that summer when Caitlin and I would be in the same place, but not be together. She would be focused on him, I would be focused on some catch of the week. But we would both be perpetuating the madness further and further, and we knew that, so we didn't need to talk. If we stumbled across each other in the bathroom we'd just share a look and collapse laughing. Or we'd cast a look across a dark bar, distraught, and the other would nod her head, showing her wordless support. There was no need to ask how the other was, we always knew, instinctively. And we were always there for the other, not as a sound board, but as a mirror.

I've always found the concept of real twins being so connected that they could feel the other's physical pain fascinating. My twin is not similar in the physical so I didn't know until she told me that she broke her arm. But that summer, her feelings lay over my heart like a blanket, and I could feel what she felt with each and every rapid beat.

With my twin, only emotions are identical.

The Summer I Lost My Mind - Essay Excerpt

"You have a specific smell."

"What? A bad one?" I asked.

"No, it's not bad."

"What does it smell like?"

"Just you. Your smell. I could be anywhere in the world, anytime, and I would know it's your smell. I'll never forget it. It just smells like you."

And then it hit me. Maybe all the men were just temporary, acting as in-betweeners, filling space. But we would mean something to each other. Our encounters would not be wholly casual, devoid of human feeling. We would leave a lasting impression on each other, however tiny. For better or for worse, we would remain somehow embedded in each other's consciousness; in a smell, in a movement, in a look. Nothing ever meant nothing to anyone.

The next morning, we walked all around the city, and then after he bought me two McDonald's soft-serves, he left me on a street corner in the middle of Toronto. We kissed, and the finality of it all surprised me.

I walked back to my condo. It was far, it took me over two hours. I remember thinking the whole way home, but I wasn't sure about what. Random thoughts just floated in and out of my head, strange voices I owned argued about if I'd done the right or wrong thing. 

I was restless. I decided I couldn't just go home. I walked into my best male friend Ben's place of work, which was a cafe around the corner. 

"Guess who doesn't learn from their mistakes?" 

Ben looked up.  It was a question worth asking. I was still drunk and apparently, I looked like an insane homeless person.

"You, dummy."

And then we both keeled over, laughing like hyenas.

I haven't seen or spoke to Scott since.




Later that night was Alice's birthday. 

It was swelteringly hot. I spent the remainder of the day showering Scott off my skin, and trying to sleep my hangover away.  Neither worked.

As I got on the streetcar to Alice's I remember feeling different than I ever had before. I wondered if changes happened slowly but then one day stop, having become complete. I thought that maybe that day was the day where there was no going back. As I walked up her steps, I was pretty sure the change had been absolute; that I had lost my mind for good.

I remember the party being fun. But everything was fun all the time, so it felt uneventful. Fun had become the background for the anxious ticker-tape that was always going in my mind. I decided that routine, no matter how unusual it was, always felt routine. I couldn’t escape monotony.

When you kill time it dies hard.