Character is spontaneous, rather than coherent.

I've always believed we're a lot less definite than we think. We're like mercury; well never be held, we'll never take shape.

I sit down to write and I see nothing. No words, no ideas, no feelings, no nothing. The quiet is new and it scares me. Or maybe its old and that's why it scares me. Lately, I spend my days dissecting someone else's text, frustrated and tired. I come home and look at everything I've written and I hate it.

The stage manager is the only other girl. She has pretty brown eyes and moves like a bird.

"My friend who's a sculptor, a new artist, called me and said 'I'm looking at this piece I did and I hate it. I can't stop looking at it and I can't stop hating it. I need to go get drunk,' and I took him aside and I told him, 'Listen to me. Self-loathing is a huge part of being an artist. Every artist hates most of what they do. It's part of the whole thing. That's why so many of them drink too much, or abuse things, to escape the self-loathing.' He didn't listen to me."

She laughed. I nodded.

"You make art one time out of ten. Take a hard look back at all that you invent. My brother told me that."

Character is not what a man says, but the sum of his actions. If those actions come quick, without warning, surprising even ourselves, where does that leave us? How do we know anything?

I'm just trying to figure out what changed.

Maybe everything has its moment.

Sister Winter

"At Christmas, all roads lead home."

"There is, in lovers, a certain infatuation of egotism; they will have a witness of their happiness, cost that witness what it may."

The dreams started after everything fell apart. Not before. I know that’s true, because they didn’t feel like dreams. They felt real. Too real to just wake up and forget about, unfolding in what looked like little pictures. Little pictures that I had painted. Pictures of things I had seen before.

The time when I was awake began to feel less and less real. The days passed too slowly. I would lay in my bed while it was bright out and wait for sleep to come, so we could be together again. In my vintage dreams, she was more alive than people who stood in front of me. I was only happy in sleep. That haunted me. Maybe they were more like nightmares.

Silent nightmares.

Home is where the hot wind blows, where most girls are married by twenty-two, and where one person in thirty-eight lives in a trailer. Most people don’t have high school diplomas. There has been no rain since April.

Sometimes, when I've dried out, she does get back in. She likes to remind me that I didn't see myself ending up back here.

"I tried to run away" I tell her.

I did. I tried hard to drift far away from this heat and the past. I swear, I would have made it if it wasn't for those dreams. I would have made it, if I just didn't look back. I would have made it, if it wasn't for her.

...

I wasn't drunk the night I ended things, but I can't remember how I did it.

I know I said stupid things like I hoped that we could be friends. She said he didn’t think that would happen, that she couldn’t just be my friend. I know she asked me to reconsider, and I said I’d done a lot of considering. She said that she knew things were bad and that I wasn’t happy with her like I used to be, but that she wanted to try harder.

I said I didn’t think it was a problem that trying could fix.

I think eventually I said that we were just too different and that we had to go be different, apart.

She thought our differences were what made us special.

We talked late into the darkness. Eventually there wasn’t anything more to say. We both lay in the bed, not touching, not sleeping, not speaking. I heard my heart beating. I could hear her heart beating. We didn’t move from the bed until long after the sun rose.

I don’t remember saying goodbye.

I haven’t seen her since.

The rain always reminds me of that night.

Like Father Part Five

I have a fever. He's sitting with me in my bedroom. I try to remember the last time we were both in here together.

"What's wrong with you, kid?"

"I can't decide."

"Women are always like that."

I turn towards him.

"What do you think the main differences are between men and women?"

"A poet put it best. For women love is everything, for men, it's a thing apart."

I nod.

"What does that mean?"

"That men are cold. Women are tender."

That makes me sad.

"Do you think that's true?"

"Just look at the beast in the field. Lions, once the woman has her cubs, she stops paying attention to the man all together, and only fends for her babies. Male lions will eat their cubs, if they have to. They'll do whatever it takes to survive. Then, if the male lions eat the cubs, within three days the female lion will be getting it on with them again. What does that tell you?"

"I hope that's not true."

"It is. For centuries, men have had an advantage. They've had brute force on their side. So women have had to develop other skills to get along. Do you know what that is?"

He points to his head.

"My mother was quicker witted than any woman I've ever met. I learnt what women are like at her knee. Women will say things to you that you would deck a man in the street for. And they know it, that's why they say it. All women, your mother, every woman I've ever met, has tried to cut me in two with her words. I learned to be sharper than them with my tongue."

I think of myself. "Do you really believe all women are like that?"

He looks like he wishes he hadn't said that.

"Most. It's always a power struggle," he shrugs.

"That's true. There is always a push-pull."

"Exactly right. Why do people say it should be fifty-fifty, when everyone is just trying to win in the end?"

My Own Personal Jesus - Personal Essay Excerpt Two

I remember him how everyone is remembered once they’re dead; in stories you tell at a dinner party.

When Michael was seven, Patrick set up his first email address. It was used for their correspondance alone.

"Hey Mikey,
I say we get a six-pack of beer from the liquor store and then plunk ourselves down on the beach and whistle at pretty girls. What do you think, buddy?
Patrick"

Michael and I idolized him. He was the only grown-up we knew that was good at playing. Looking back, I realize he always did better with kids. Some part of him was unfinished, filled with boundless energy, restrained around people his own age.

As a child, there is no one that makes you feel so special as an adult who treats you like a friend.

Black Sheep - Belfast

Frank sat in the kitchen. His stomach was filled with lead.

She should have been back hours ago.

He turned the radio on, as quietly as he could. Every time the man’s voice grew louder, hiding up in his nose, Frank heard a bomb go off.

Every time he blinked, Frank saw a bomb go off. Every time his heart beat, he knew a bomb went off.

He saw her arms strewn blocks apart. He saw her chest, cracked wide open. He saw her leg, split in two.

He couldn’t stand the common, nasal, mean accent anymore. He clicked the radio off.

He thought of turning a light on, of finding some comfort in bright, but knew he couldn’t. Any change in light, in the sound of footsteps, in voices that carried, was asking to die. He slowly moved downward, and lay on the floor. He imagined a man six miles away, hearing a wrinkle in time and coming to kill him. He shivered.

The last time he was warm was in Canada.

He thought of his mother’s dining room table.

Then the lock moved.

His heart beat so loudly that he was sure he was dead.

It was Mariah.

He watched her take off her coat, not talking.

Underneath, she wore nothing but a tight dress that hung close to her body. Her eyelashes looked like spider’s wings and her eyes were wet. She reached her arms, sinewy bone, above her head. They moved like two ballerinas.

“I thought you were dead,” he spat.

“Things took longer than expected.”

“Did it work?”

She nodded, vacant. The violence surrounded her like nuclear waste, incandesant and powerful, seeping into the sky.

“I thought you were dead.”

She moved towards the mirror above the sink and lit a match. She was wearing a blonde wig, and her face was powdered impossibly white. The wig curled around her face. In the hazy dark, she became Jean Harlow. Kim Novak. Grace Kelly.

She pulled the wig off like Indians scalped intruders; vicious, furious.

Her red hair fell down her back like blood.

He watched her in the mirror. She brought a cloth to her face and moved it across her cheek bones in small circles.

“But can you think of a better way to die?” she asked.

“Run,” whispered the voice in his head, “Run as fast and far as your feet can take you.”

He moved towards her. Tears ran down her face.

“I want to drag my teeth across your chest to taste your beating heart."

He let her.

That night, she made love to him with a gun to his head.