Wednesday, June 30, 2010

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.


Wednesday, June 16, 2010

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.

Monday, June 14, 2010


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.”