Forever West | Alexander T. Damle

            The sun sets over the highway and forms abstract patterns as the shadows get all protracted by the mountains, cacti caught in something stark, a fox darts across three lanes of traffic and vanishes into some low brush. To one side of the road the ocean roars and it cries in desolation and it is alone. Out on it somewhere a boat is tossed by waves and over the side a young sailor vomits, first time on the sea, lost for love so lost at sea so lost always lost. And back on the highway the man coasts along at 65, his headlights come on automatically and the radio drums out some top 40s hit. He taps on the wheel out of time with the music, expectantly for something, and he thinks about a funny thing he heard at work today, but he can’t remember what it was, only that it was funny. The sun is pink and purple and it reminds him of the guts of a dog that got hit by a car in front of his house when he was a kid. He saw it get hit, and he watched its owner come out and cradle it gently as it bled out, not caring for the blood that got all over him, just cradling his dying dog, whispering something, tears in his eyes. The man moves into the left lane to pass a truck.

            The trucker smokes a cigarette that he holds out his window, his arm tanned from driving this way for too long. He yawns slightly, then sets his left hand on the wheel to hold it steady as he turns up the volume on the radio. It doesn’t matter what’s playing, he turns up the volume anyway. Has to go a hundred more miles tonight and the sun is setting. It’s orange and the sea is orange, blood orange, all blood orange, and it reflects off the roof of the Beamer that just passed him, gets in his eyes, and he squints even though he is wearing sunglasses. He sees a sign for a gas station at the next exit and decides to get off, though he still has half a tank, wants to stretch his legs. The sun wavers and flickers in the sky simulacra record spinning tick tick tick of the clock plastic pink flamingo on a fake green plastic lawn in front of a trailer home, woman smokes a cigarillo and wears sunglasses too big for her face, her dress has flowers on it and her face is deeply lined and she swears about the heat, and behind her a different ocean beats its breakers desperately against sand and rock, clawing away, cutting and slicing and sucking gastric bypass and the doctor says something to the nurse about drinks tonight. His hand slips.

            The motorcyclist watches the truck swerve slightly, then right itself, and decides not to pass. Then he watches the truck get off at the exit so he speeds up again. Sundry store neon indian plastic diaphragm American supper time sadness summertime sadness pop music peach ice cream pretty girl bare legs summertime sadness summertime sadness remember how she used to laugh how she used to make him laugh doesn’t remember why they broke up doesn’t matter sipping a beer with his best friend before he shipped out desert sun dust came back didn’t come back but still here now here then back again summertime. Rev up gear pop snap crackle pop hoping for a dream, trying to remember, wishes he was young again, remake every mistake he’s ever made, wishes he’d kissed her that night, wishes he hadn’t kissed her that day, night then day, light flows over the horizon and it’s sometimes green, reflecting the sea, emerald, a far off land, a more distant shore abandoned for promise of this shore become brighter, who knows anymore, doesn’t know anything, girl’s hand in his walking down the hill and he remembers he didn’t kiss her either and he remembers the punchline to a joke he heard once, but he doesn’t remember the joke. Wonder wander wish a better tomorrow for a better today for a never tomorrow for an always today for a dream of a dream of a dream of death. Does he not bleed for his better nature? Then he gets off the highway too, and he pulls into the parking lot of a little old diner and he takes off his helmet and carries it as he walks inside, and the waitress smiles as she seats him. He orders a chocolate shake and a cheeseburger and a slice of blueberry pie and he eats his burger then she brings him his pie, and when he tastes it he remembers a day when he was small.

            When the sun sets, do you look to the west, and when you look to the west do you see your dreams dying? Because in the west the sun never sets because your dreams lie always further west. So you look to the west and you look to the west and you look to the west and you forget to look down and over the edge of the cliff you plunge, canyon walls struck distant passage of water through time down you go, down you go, and the river that surges below cuts ever deeper the canyon so how can you ever stop falling? And yet stop you must and you must stop so you stop and yet the river keeps flowing. And still you look to the west.

            The waitress takes off her apron and says goodbye to the cook on her way out the door, then she gets in the driver’s seat of her beat up old Honda and drives home. She watches TV while she eats dinner and through a window she sees a neighbor washing dishes. The neighbor looks like her father. He used to drink bourbon. The neighbor used to drink wine. The waitress used to drink vodka. They all used to drink and now they all don’t drink together. The waitress stares at her TV and it’s a commercial featuring an actor who is dead now selling a product that doesn’t matter now and she wishes she just had a little more money. If she had money she could get out of here (here?) and go there (there?) and she could get away from the sea.

As a girl the sea was salt and wind and glistening blue reflecting luminescent the clouds horizon line the sea become as one as all, as a girl the sea was a boy just when boys became more than the sea would become, but then the boy went away and there were more boys and then as more boys went away the sea became a burden. So now if only she had money she could get away (and go where? Cities scare her and the desert isolates her, forests startle and hide and the plains clutch and grasp but then they aren’t the sea, and perhaps...) owls crow out their night cry as on TV the commercial ends and now that same actor again looks out at her and now he’s someone else. As a girl she fell in love with the actor - but then he was alive, and now the waitress thinks she still might be in love with him, because he’s dead and because the girl inside her (buried, dormant) once loved him.

Falling

In love

Is easy.

Being

In love

Is hard.

Cages and voices are cages are voices are prisons are prisms are mirrors are genuflection are deflections are protestations are remembrances are fragmentations are dreams are the sea are a smell are a voice are a gentle laugh are the taste of salt (lips and sea) are the end of the beginning but it all must end.

            The director calls a cut and the actor steps back from the camera’s gaze, the stage light’s glow, the live audience’s stare, and grabs a drink of water, and he watches her slender legs disappear behind the set and he calls out to her as she disappears but she doesn’t hear him, and yet still the audience and the lights and the camera, and yet still they try to see through him but he can’t hardly see them (for the footlights in his eyes) and she is gone, and he is left with only the memory of that slender leg.

            In three years he will be committed and they will tell him she was but a whisper of smoke on his chemical imbalance but he will tell them she had to be real because if she wasn’t real then none of it ever will be real, but they then assured him she definitely was not real.

            In five years he will put a shotgun between his lips and pull the trigger, and his brains will paint a picture on the wall behind where his head once was, and it will be a picture of the girl who was naught but smoke.

            You once misheard the lyrics to a song, and despite listening to the song a hundred times, you could only ever hear the misheard lyrics, they came to you in a dream.

            A singer once sings a song and one set of words pierce her lips.

            And yet another pierce her mind.

            And on her mind too is the leg of a pretty girl she knows she’ll never have.

            And the man who records her voice day in and day out

            Will fall asleep remembering, loving, her face only.

            Even as his hearing goes and he knows soon the day will come when he has no reason to ever again even look on her face.

            And even then her voice as recorded with his failing ears will call out to people the world over, and they will all fall in love at once and sometimes they’ll fall in love with the voice and sometimes they’ll fall in love with the face across from them as they hear the voice, and sometimes they’ll fall in love with falling in love but what is assured is that some day they will all fall in love because falling in love is what we do and yet some day too we will fall out of love.

            The singer drives along a highway on a cliff by the sea. She watches a BMW pass a truck. Then she sees the truck swerve. Then she watches the truck exit the highway, and at the next exit she watches a man on a motorcycle exit too. Then the sun reflects through her windshield just so and she loses briefly control of the wheel.

All Saints | Alexander T. Damle

            I pull up outside the diner with the shitty coffee and good pie and pretty redhead waitress with the too-short skirt and wry smile and slightly smeared lipstick, let the engine idle, text my partner. I see him through the window and watch him wince as he drinks his coffee, and I think briefly about what it is that possibly possesses him to keep coming to this place. He doesn’t drive, so I always have to pick him up. I see him take out his phone, look at it, put some bills on the table, smile at the redhead waitress with the too-short skirt and wry smile and slightly smeared lipstick, watch him give a two fingered salute that looks a little military with his stocky frame and buzz-cut head to the cook working in the back, who returns the salute, and I watch him push the door open, walk up to my Camaro, open the door, and get in. He gives me the same little salute he gave the cook and asks me where we’re going tonight. I tell him-

“Pueblo”, and he says-

“If I’d had known we were going to be burning the midnight oil, I’d have gotten another coffee to go, while away the hours on the road.” He tries to talk like he’s a gangster in a Raymond Chandler novel sometimes, words just hissed out between lips kept almost shut. His name is Thomas, but he insists I call him Igor. Something about Shelley.

“The coffee here’s shit anyway. We’ll stop at 7 Eleven”. This is not a story about coffee.

            We mostly work Colorado, particularly the strip of cities between Denver and Pueblo, though we’ll go as far south as Albuquerque if we’re given a little notice. Once or twice we’ve been flown elsewhere, Omaha, Tallahassee, someone else got sick and we needed to fill in before the opportunity vanished. All in all it's not a bad racket, usually don’t work more than three nights a week, pay is good, work is easy. Can’t complain. Occupational hazards, of course, but same as any job. I keep a Beretta in a concealed holster on my hip just to be safe. Most guys, a gun that big would be dead obvious worn that way, but I’m a big guy.

            It’s a long drive and the roads are quiet. I speed and we listen to some old jazz song on the radio. It’s a clear night and Igor looks at the stars and doses off occasionally, only to be woken when we hit bumps in the old highway. He’s a light sleeper. I met him when I was working as a cabbie, he ran the dispatch. Before I was a cabbie, I was a surgeon back in Bosnia, but I made more as an American cabbie than I did as a Bosnian surgeon. This is not a story about immigrants in America.

            We get into Pueblo and I look at the clock - it’s 12 am. We were told to show up at one. I ask Igor if he wants to get something to eat, and we stop at a McDonald’s. Igor orders a Big Mac and I get a salad. I’m trying to eat better - doctor said my cholesterol is too high and it might put me at risk for a heart attack when I get older if I don’t address it now. I finish my salad and tell Igor to sit tight, I need to go find an ATM. I walk out of the McDonald's and my phone tells me there is a Wells Fargo just a block down, so I head that way and then I print out the money and put it in the padded envelope I have tucked into my brown leather jacket that I bought from All Saints. I go back to the McDonalds and get Igor because it’s almost one. We get in my car and drive the last few blocks to the hospital.

            I park in a doctor’s space near the entrance. Igor grabs my duffel bag and a medical cooler we filled with ice on the way from the trunk, and the two of us walk to the doors of the emergency wing. They slide open with a slight hiss, and I watch a brown leaf get blown in. Getting on to Autumn now, I suppose. I notice Igor isn’t wearing a jacket. We walk up to the reception, and the admitting nurse looks at us with a slight frown. I don’t recognize her, and I usually am good at remembering faces. I say-

“Hey, how are you?” And she just says-

“Surviving.” Then I slide her the envelope, and she opens it slightly and looks hesitantly up at me.

“Count it if you want, I don’t mind.” She looks back down at the envelope and then back up at me and says-

“That’s fine, I trust you. Room 237.” I think to myself that this is the hotel room from that old Kubrick film and smile slightly. This is not a story about postmodern discourse. Igor looks at me weird.

            We get in an elevator, one of those big elevators you only see in hospitals because they are designed to accommodate stretchers, and muzac starts playing. It sounds like a bubblegum pop re-arrangement of “Mac the Knife.” I smile again to myself. Igor doesn’t seem to get this reference either - he’s always prefered books to movies and music. I don’t think he even saw Titanic. I love movies, mostly romance movies. My favorite is Casablanca, though I do hold a soft spot in my heart for Ghost. I’ve always been a little sentimental. I say-

“I think this is meant to be ‘Mac the Knife.’”

“Oh.” I start to say-

“You know, the song about... oh forget it.” The doors open and they rattle slightly as they do so. Down the hallway a light flickers. I think this is very funny, and Igor seems to get this joke at least. He has, I think, read his share of bad Stephen King novels. We walk down the hallway, and Igor’s cowboy boots click on the tile. I wear sneakers, and they make only a slight squeak. I mutter

“Those boots. You’re going to bother a patient one of these days.”

“Eh. Occupational hazard.” His use of this phrase seems funny to me and I can’t put my finger on why. This is not a story about odd coincidences of language.

            We get to room 237. I hold the door open for Igor, and he walks in. The man in the bed is Latino, perhaps late 20s, early 30s. His face is heavily lined and he smells like ammonia. I look at his charts absent mindedly. He’s listed as “John Doe.” They usually try for John Doe’s, although that’s not always possible. They also usually try for racial minorities, usually young men without families, usually those in the hospital as victims, who are also perpetrators of violent crimes, those who will go unmissed by so-called polite society. This is not a story about socio-economic inequality.

            “What are we here for tonight?” Igor asks me. I take my phone out of my pocket and look at it. I tell him-

            “Heart.”

            “God damn.” I ask-

            “What?” Then he tells me-

            “Novak Djokovic has a match in Belgrade this morning. I wanted to be home in time to see it.” I follow this with the obvious question-

            “Why didn’t you just record it?” He sounds dismissive as he says-

            “You really aren’t athletically inclined, are you?”

            “How do you mean?” Then he explains with an explanation that only makes sense to him-

            “Results are going to blow up on Twitter as soon as it's over. I don’t want it spoiled for me.”

            “Then don’t check Twitter.”

            “What the hell else am I supposed to do on the drive home?” Once again, I suggest the obvious

            “You could drive for a change.”

            “Yeah yeah.”

            This important topic discussed to a draw, I turn myself to the task at hand. I put on a surgical gown as Igor opens my bag and takes out a plastic wrapped syringe, a scalpel, retractors, bandages, sutures, and a few other tools. Then he unplugs the heart monitor and hands me the syringe. I check the packaging and glance again at the man’s charts.

            “We might want to go a little lighter on the sedative Igor... this guy isn’t very big. We don’t want to send him into cardiac arrest... that might defeat the point.”

            “Sorry.” He hands me a different syringe out of the bag and I pass him the original. I check this one and again his charts and decide it will do. I put on a pair of surgical gloves and a face mask, then I pull out the man’s IV and carefully insert the syringe into the hole it leaves behind. I press in on the lever and watch the greenish liquid drain from the chamber.

Example of an occupational hazard - I have to manually check his pulse to make sure he’s far enough out, but not totally dead, because the heart monitor is unplugged. Tricky. But then again, during the war I had to work under far more odious circumstances. This is not a story about European ethnic conflict in the 1990s.

            “Scalpel.”

            “Scalpel.”

            I make the first incision and watch flesh rended from flesh, blood boil up as if called forth from some dark chasm deep within the earth, the flesh sagging now under its own weight, taking on a texture that is unique to cut flesh, seeming somehow fundamentally undermined. I work my way down the chest and then I seem to hit something I shouldn’t have, as a jet of red issues forth and splashes into my mask. It is warm against my lips and chin and I taste it slightly, salty, on my lips, where it soaks through. Igor says

            “Fuck, careful.” And I reply ironically

            “Occupational hazard.”

            “Yeah yeah.” Then I finish my cut and hand the scalpel to Igor.

            “Retractors.” Cutting slicing slipping sliding, flesh and blood and mucus and pus and veins and arteries and bone. Shliickshlopplopplopschlopshcliick and blood and guts and blood and blood and blood and it seethes and roils and moves about in strange waveforms, transistors discombobulating and remade, sliding about flesh, jelly squid tentacle reminds me of sex and flesh on flesh on flesh on steel through flesh and blood and rust and veins and cut and cut and cut and cut and retractors and pulling and popping and collapsing inwards and blood rushes about trying to get where it's supposed to go but where it's supposed to go isn’t there anymore so it just kind of rushes about and it pours onto the floor and all over my surgical gown and the shapes it makes remind me a little bit of some painter whose name I can’t remember right now, and also of that movie I watched last weekend, blood looks like it’s not sure now what it’s supposed to do as I lift and pull and then I hold in my hands a human heart and it is truly an incredible thing and Igor holds up the cooler and I put it in the ice and Igor closes the cooler. The man is dead now and he was alive but he is dead now and will always be dead and with his heart went his life and the heart shall give life but the heart is not alive and he is just flesh and the heart is just flesh and I am just flesh and Igor is just flesh and the nurse is just flesh and the waitress is just flesh and the man is just flesh and he was just flesh an hour ago and he will be just flesh an hour from now and he is just flesh now but he is dead now and will be dead an hour from now but was not dead an hour ago. This is not a story about death.

            I take the sutures and the needle and I close, can’t leave a patient with an open wound, leaves too much suspicion, and as I’m closing, pulling metal through flesh and rending back together flesh, Igor finds a mop bucket and wheels it in and cleans up the blood on the floor. Where the heart has been taken from the flesh sags inwards and looking at it makes me a little sick - it just looks somehow wrong. Then Igor hands me a trash bag and I put my surgical gown and mask and gloves in it, and then he picks up the cooler and my duffell bag and we walk out of the room, get in the elevator, and walk past the nurse, who waves at us, and put the cooler and the duffell in the trunk of my car and throw the garbage bag in a dumpster and drive towards the airport. This is not a story about proper post-op procedures.

            We save lives doing this job. We take lives doing this job. This is true of many jobs. This job pays well. However this job also has hours that don’t suit some people. Once I had a gang banger’s girlfriend pull a 9mm on me when I walked into his hospital room. That’s why I carry the Beretta. Igor had to slit her throat with a scalpel. It was a type of scalpel designed for extremely precise tasks, and the blade was permanently ruined, which was a shame, as I had ordered the scalpel specially from Malaysia. It took me months to find another one. The worst part of it was the gang banger’s girlfriend died before anything could be taken from her. We could have gotten paid double if we had procured, for instance, a kidney, which can be preserved for far longer than a heart, and thus could have waited the time necessary to find a suitable paying recipient.

            This job is messy, but so are many jobs. I cannot count how many times I had to clean vomit from the back seat when I drove a taxi.

            Once I had to go to a children’s ward and take the heart of a boy who can’t have been more than two years old. He had been hit by a car while he was playing in the street, and was in a coma from which he may or may not have awoken, if I had let him keep his heart. He was white and suburban, but it is hard to find a heart for a two year old, especially one that meets all the peculiar requirements of organ transplant.

            The advantage, as far as I can tell, of taking the organs of hospital patients, rather than those otherwise at large in society, is that, by accessing electronic hospital records, the exact genetic information of individuals all over the world, as well as their precise geographic location, can be quickly searched in order to find donors suitable to the wealthy clients paying for our services. This is not a story about information security.

            Much of this is guesswork on my part - I only see my portion of the supply chain - but I’m smart enough that I consider my guesswork reasonably reliable. Some might consider this job morally repugnant, but many of those people are lawyers or businessmen or politicians or doctors who get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to save lives, so in my personal opinion, they don’t really have grounds to criticize my behaviour. Of course, that implies a discussion of the peculiarities of the capitalist system that delves far too technically into micro and macro economics for me to concern myself with. Like I said, I like watching romance movies in my spare time - I may be smart, but I’m not some kind of intellectual. I leave the politics and ethics of this job to the people paying me to do it, most of whom, I imagine, are rich enough to leave behind all but the most basic vestiges of morality. This is not a story about Marxist theory.

Igor looks tired as we pull into a parking lot near the airport that is shared by a Hampton Inn (technically a Hilton production, but a little more mid-market) and a Ruby Tuesdays. I text the number I’m supposed to text, and after a few minutes an Escalade pulls into the parking lot. A man gets out. He wears a suit. The shoulders are wide and it has pinstripes and I think he looks like he fell straight out of the 1980s, his hair slicked back like Gordon Gecko, but I see the Glock 20 he wears casually in a shoulder holster (is the grip the same colour as his pocket square? Jesus Christ these people) and I think better of making a joke. This is not a story about men’s fashion.

Igor and I get out. I walk over to the man, and Igor gets the cooler out of the trunk. I say to the main in the suit-

“Hey.” And he responds-

“Hey.” I look back at the car, and Igor is closing the trunk. I try to make small talk-

“Looks like it’s going to be a hot one today.” But he seems uninterested-

“Yup.” Then the man in the suit checks his watch as Igor walks towards us. Then the man in the suit takes the cooler. “Thanks.”

He puts the cooler in the passenger seat of the Escalade and drives away. I look at the Ruby Tuesdays and think about breakfast, but decide it probably isn’t open yet, the sun just climbing purple and pink over the horizon. Igor and I get back in the Camaro and head home to Denver. I drop him off in front of his apartment and I tell him to enjoy his tennis match - we made it back in time, despite his concerns.

We get another job that night, but it’s just downtown at Rose Hospital. Igor says he was born at Rose. We pay the nurse and we go to the room. It’s a black woman, gunshot victim. We take her liver. Blood goes everywhere and I mess up when I’m closing and the flesh of the wound is all torn, broken, but this probably won’t matter. We finish early and drop off the liver with another guy in another suit (this one looks stolen from Frank Sinatra - what is it with these people?)

Igor and I decide to grab a coffee - diner of my choice - and on TV is M*A*S*H, the movie, not the TV show. I watch the doctors pull and twist on the flesh, the blood boiling and surging, the cutting and snipping and sewing. It doesn’t look quite right, but it’s better than a lot of these medical shows and movies. This is not a story about modern medicine as depicted in the media.

This is not a story about clinical depression.

This is not a story about the 2008 financial crisis.

This is not a story about cultural decay.

Pop quiz - what is this a story about? 

Fastback | Alexander T. Damle

            I ride hard across the desert, blue sky, sands stretch away side to side, crackle rumble snap engine beneath me roils quietly. I wear all black and man doesn’t know what to call me when I pass, and on my hip I wear a gun and it is black and the motorcycle beneath me, sleek lines, is black and I am the figure in black and in mythos biblical and fantastic you know what to call me, but on seeing me you still forget my name. I ride and you don’t know I’m coming but soon you will and then I will become juggernaut, as changing of blue skies to slate grey as storm descends, as birth of fawn and budding of wildflower in springtime. And I am pursued across empty earth endless by forces who I do not understand, and that which I do not understand, you can never even hope to know, and so on I go.

            The man turns on his signal and merges into the left hand lane, rests the crook of his elbow out the open window, feels the desert winds blowing by as he presses in with his right foot, feels his 67’ Mustang Fastback edge up past 90, passing trucks in the far right lane, the middle practically empty, this time of night. City sets behind him and in front of him sets not much, the city illuminated bright a conflagration against some kind of emptiness, air here on the highway almost clean but for scent of motor oil. He abandons the city fast as he can, pursued (or so he feels) by forces whose names he does not know but whose faces and voices and eyes stick in his head, though he wishes to remove them forever, rip out brain matter with spoon and sup on it (he wonders if this is to what that old phrase “eat your heart out” refers).

            He remembers the meal he just ate and the drinks he just drank. He remembers that a bit of chicken bone got caught in his teeth and when he pulled it from his lips, all he could do was stare at it, so he stared at it, and the woman across from him stared at him, her eyes flickering slightly in the low light, blue-gold flecks, but he was more interested in the chicken bone than her eyes, and after a few moments staring at the bone she cast her eyes down, and he frowned and she asked him what troubled his heart such, and he said it didn’t matter, then she touched his hand and her hand was warm and soft against his, and then shortly they returned to normal conversation, but he can’t remember one word of what they said.

            They said their goodnights under the street lights, standing before his Mustang, and he kept catching her face reflecting in the hood, couldn’t look into her eyes tonight for some reason, but the reflection of them entranced him. Remembers something or another Pamuk once wrote about reflections being more beautiful than their reality. Thinks it’s bullshit, but can’t keep his eyes off the hood of the car. Sees speedometer edge past 100, slows down slightly. And then she touched him on the shoulder and that touch always had a power over him. He remembers back to when they started dating months ago and he got worried he was falling in love with her. Then she disappeared for a few weeks, and when she came back, all apologies, he found he barely could put in the thought to take her out for drinks every so often. When she touched his shoulder, he looked up at her, and she leaned in and they kissed and it was nice. Taste lingers on his lips and tongue, but it doesn’t matter.

            He sees the rear lights of a car in his lane a couple miles down the highway, can see forever any light out here, most of all the stars, but he sees now only the lights of the car ahead of him, so he shifts over to the middle lane gently with turn signal and brakes and slides in, before pushing hard on the accelerator again and rocketing past the car, and for some reason he looks over at the driver as he passes. The face he sees he can’t reconcile as a face, and is instead but a mask, and he sees the same mask when he looks in his rearview mirror, as he prepares to shift back into the left lane when the other car is behind him, then he shifts into the left lane.

            He resents her, the woman, he knows he does, as much as he cares for her, as much as he finds her beautiful and charming and funny, he resents her, not for her, but for the way she seems to find him somehow special, and that’s just not something he can abide. He’s not a character in a motion picture.

            When he was a kid he once had tea at his grandmother’s house and he accidentally dropped one of her old tea cups, and when it hit the hardwood floor it shattered and pieces shot everywhere and he was terrified, but his grandmother assured him it didn’t matter and told him it was old and there were always more tea cups, and accidents happen.

            She thinks he’s something worth her having and he knows he’s not really, no one really is, and when they first started dating, he thought she was the most incredible thing in the world, beautiful and strong and perfect, and in her he saw someone he could be true around. Then he realized every interaction with her, every word he spoke to her, held in it a lie inherent, and then he realized that around her he wasn’t him. He began to notice the way he changed his cadences, forced a smile to his face, tempered his moods and his eccentricities, tailored his politics, all to please her. He wishes she would leave him because he can’t muster the will to admit he doesn’t want her, because he cares about her too much to recognize what he knows.

He turns on the radio as he approaches his exit, twenty miles still to go, these unlit other than by his headlights, then home at end of unmarked road, and the radio (signal weakened by distance, though no mountains for an eternity), crackles out something about blood. 

           

            I slow down the bike and I get off of it, stand my full height, notice shadow left across parking lot by sun just beginning its descent towards night, leave helmet on (colour stated), check gun’s position on my hip (Desert Eagle .50, black as wings of a Raven), and stroll through doors, easy, calm. The clerk sees me and her eyes go out of the light and she sees the gun and the gun doesn’t matter, not around here, lots of guns, but it’s the figure and she can’t tell what I am but she knows she’s seen me before and she knows this is the last time she will see me. I remove the gun from its holster, cup it in my two hands, and, without much thought, pull the trigger, and watch her brains run like worms running from approaching rain across the liquor bottles behind her. I turn and see a man running out of the back of the shop, and I pivot my body, cut him down with two quick shots to the chest, and the blood lays itself out across the tile floor and his body crashes downwards, like in a cartoon when the legs keep running though the cliff’s edge has already been passed, and his skull crunches as his head lands in his own blood. I walk out of the store, re-holstering the gun. The sun shines directly through the face shield of the helmet into my eyes, and I know I stand in the sun and yet the forces are always at my back, so I remount my bike, and down the road I continue.

            He wakes up and looks out the window at the desert, the clouds scorched purple and red coming home late from a bar fight, Saguaro shadows cast long over the desert onto which his house was dropped at seeming random, early morning sun falling over Mexican poppies, they surrounding prickly pear, newly bloomed for spring. He catches sight briefly, before it passes into shadow, of a coyote dragging its prey, bleeding still and just done kicking, and for a second he thinks it's a kid, before he sees that it’s just a rabbit.

            Then he does his morning fixings, showers, pulls on a shirt and jeans, makes a bowl of oatmeal, eats it. He doesn’t remember it because he’s done it so often. It’s not that he favors the flavor of the thing, it’s just easy, comfortable, reassuring that some bottom on his life can’t drop out from under him. What bottom though? Life is good and life is easy so they tell him, as he swigs down a Prozac with his black coffee and watches his vision swim slightly, reminds him of a lake somewhere in the Northern Rockies, set beside his grandfather, dead now, caught a fish that day, went back to their cabin, cooked it. He doesn’t remember killing the fish and he wishes he did, but he doesn’t know why.

            After breakfast he puts on a pair of sunglasses to go for a walk around his property and have a think about the woman and what to do about the woman and what to do about him. He thinks of maybe just packing his bags and leaving, not tell anyone, not the woman, not the waiter down at the diner in town he always flirts with, James, he thinks, or maybe Jim, or Frank, or... something, not his bartender, not... well, those are really the only three people he could tell, but he’d leave and not tell them. Go somewhere always greener, in high summer, in late autumn, in dead winter, as green as the desert in lucid climax of spring, somewhere with ancient temples tucked into verdant mountain valleys, with men in long robes who’d tell him how to live his life, or maybe down straight south, see Chile, always wanted to see Chile, or maybe just wander forever. He has the money. Didn’t expect it, the inheritance, but when he got it, all he could think to do was go away somewhere quiet, leave city madness behind, across a forgotten sea, so he fell headlong into the desert, and now he’s here.

            Sand kicks up about his boots, blows in amongst the wildflowers, just beginning to show their colours. Across a rock pockmarked by wind and time lies a bull snake, sunning itself in the early morning heat, and the man stands watching it, languorous and ignoble, living to live and dying whenever. The man thinks of what he left and why he left and he thinks of how desperately alone he always feels, and no, it’s not like that, not like that online dating loneliness, not that stand in corners of parties alone loneliness, no, it’s something deeper, something that cuts closer the nearer he finds himself to others. He remembers the taste of something sweet and slightly salty on the woman’s tongue, and that thought just makes him feel most alone of all.

He’s thought about it, thought about this being alone, and he thinks maybe when he was younger he expected that if only he reached out to other people, he’d find a race warm and kind and receptive, and even when he was a little older, and at his angriest (dirty Nirvana t-shirt, long hair, Lana Del Rey blasting through headphones), he kind of figured people were just all assholes, and he was just better than them. The problem, he realized, once he began reaching out to people, is that everyone is as lonely and scared and tired and depressed and fundamentally decent as he is, they’re just all so much better at hiding it, and so that loneliness is all he can ever feel, even when he holds the body of another to his and feels their heartbeat and the way each breath causes their entire body to quiver a little, even when a beautiful woman traces abstract symbols on his bare thigh, as if trying to calculate out the meaning of it all, in that intimate post-coital moment, even when she tells him he’s the only thing that matters to her anymore, even, especially, always, lonely, empty, alone.

            Then the bull snake stirs from its slumber, and slithers off the rock, through the sand, right in front of the man’s path, and he doesn’t step back, but simply stares. Not venomous, but mean as hell. He watches the snake trail off through the sand under the hot sun, and he wonders if it knows someday it is going to die, whether it has ever felt love or passion or care or anything at all, then he wonders if he has either, and considers that perhaps all he’s ever felt is a deep unease, a sense of a world crashing down about his shoulders.

            Then he sees the snake strike out for a rabbit (dropping like flies this morning), grab onto it with its teeth, then slowly wrap its coils around the thing’s body, holds on tight, and he thinks of putting his arms around a woman, wonders if the feeling is at all similar, as the mouse’s frantic yammering and flutterings slow, as the coils tighten and blood flow ceases, cutting off the brain and heart and then, eventually, with one final twitch, the soul, and then the man walks on, because watching a snake eat is far less fascinating than watching a snake hunt.

            I push my motorcycle up through the gears, speedometer well past 130 now, as the world slides off into incoherence all around me, twitching my body ever so slightly, ever so rarely for those still travelling these roads, trucks lonely going from nowhere to nowhere, occasional family roadtrip, kids trapped inside a falling elevator, straight to hell. And then after a while or a bit or forever or never I stop my bike and walk into a diner and I keep my helmet on, and the woman in front asks me where I’d like to sit, so I tell her a booth by the window and she leads me to my seat and I order a slice of pie and a coffee and she looks at me a little strange, so I take my helmet off and she sees my face and reads my eyes (one of those always says she can know everything about someone from their eyes) but she can’t read anything from my eyes and it doesn’t matter anyway. She brings me my pie and my coffee and I drink my coffee with four sugars and cream and eat my pie with a little scoop of vanilla ice cream, and both taste good and both are refreshing. Then the woman comes up to me and gives me the bill and I pay her and I leave. Then I ride further down the highway. I stop at a gas station and park my bike by a pump and I fill the tank, then I walk inside, pull out the gun, shoot the clerk twice, blowing out his knees, leaving him to bleed out (.50 round should mean that won’t take too long), then I look at a few other patrons scattered around the store and shoot each of them carefully in the chest, then clean a bit of blood and brain matter from my helmet with the help of a bottle of water that I take from a cooler next to the door. Then I get back on the road and keep riding.

            The man drives through the desert and, without warning, he finds himself in town, the only town left out here, windswept and rotting, cars rusted, windows boarded over, people, what few there are, backs hunched, eyes cast down. First time he came here with this car, everyone stared, Christ come home from the desert, but now he’s passed into their reference frame as all the rest, just another old man (old woman old car old dog old country) whiling away the futile final moments before inevitable death. He parks the Fastback on the street in front of a diner that couldn’t look more like a cliche if Norman Rockwell had himself designed its every inch. The man wanders inside and smiles at the waiter who he is going to flirt with and who is going to watch the man as he leaves and consider asking the man if he wants to grab a drink later, but instead, being of this town, he will probably instead just go home and jerk off like he does every night (passing time until...). The man sits down at his usual table by the window and looks outside.

            A tumbleweed floats listlessly down the main street, and all the man can do is laugh, as a traffic light blinks red to indicate it is out. It’s been out for months. The man keeps looking out the window, half expecting a starved dog to drag its bloated corpse surrounded by a maelstrom of flies, flecking off specks of dried blood, through the street, completing the tumble weed image, but no dog appears.

            Waiter comes up next to him and looks at him, and the man turns to the waiter and tells the waiter the usual, then drifts his eyes back out the window, not in the mood for conversation. The man wonders if it will rain today and this is the only thought he can find to occupy his mind as he stares out the window.

            A cloud passes in front of the sun, and shadows fall across the diner. The waiter brings the man huevos rancheros, green chili, a budweiser. The usual. The man thanks him. Back outside there is nothing and the town is silent, though it is just past noon on a Sunday. Church closed. Always a bad sign, the church closing, the man thinks. It’s not about belief in God, that doesn’t trouble him. In fact, he doesn’t particularly care either way. What concerns him is something far more deeply gone indicated by the closing of a church.

Something seems always to be coming, some spectre over the endless horizon, but nothing ever appears. So he’s here still, another Sunday passed in this diner, another Saturday dinner up in the city with the woman. She asked him to come back to her apartment, but he said no, said he ought to be getting home.

            He wonders why she still puts up with him, his distance, his incoherence, his disinterest. But then remembers she’s as alone as he is. He wishes he was the bull snake. He wishes he was the rabbit ensnared in the bull snake's coils.

            And then from some distance comes a great rumbling, and the man looks up and the waiter looks out and from in back out comes the cook. No great rumblings left, not like this. They know it's not thunder but they don’t know how they know it’s not thunder and they don’t know what it is.

            The man thinks, as the noise rises, of a car crash he once came along in a rainstorm on the highway leading from the city. He stopped as a dozen cars whipped by, not a matter of greater humanity, simply closer observation. A car had smashed into the concrete barrier on the road’s edge, and the driver had been pitched onto the car’s hood, surrounded by blood, covered all in blood. And in the back seat there was a child, its knees pressed up into its chest where the car crumpled in. The man looked at the child, and in its eyes he saw something that he’s never forgotten but he doesn’t know what it was. He told the kid it was going to be okay, but then he noticed the kid’s shirt was sopped with blood. He couldn’t see the wound, but the kid was shaking, and the man kept trying to reassure the kid but the kid didn’t say anything, he just shook and kept giving the man that look. The man called for an ambulance, but he knew somehow it would be too late, and he tried to flag down other cars, but most of them just ignored him. And then he went back to the kid and the kid just looked at him, and the man didn’t know what to do. Eventually another car stopped and the woman who got out said she was a doctor. The man sat like the kid had been sitting, only he was holding his knees to his chest rather than the car, and he didn’t half look at the woman, and the kid was dead.

            Then the rumbling reveals itself and down the street of the town I ride, and the man looks out at my figure all in black, and I remind him of the look in the kid’s eyes. And then events repeat themselves, and I dismount my bike, and I walk up to the door of the diner, and a little bell rings as I walk in. The waiter forces a smile and welcomes me. The man just stares. Then I take the gun from my hip and I, without pause, shoot the waiter in the chest, and he falls down almost clumsily, and kind of looks at his chest, and the blood rushing from it, and he dies. Then I shoot the cook who has started to run for the back, and I shoot him in the back, and he kind of flies forward with the extra momentum, and his body falls against the door to the kitchen, and it opens with the weight. Then I turn to the man, and he’s standing there pointing a 1911 at me, and I stare back, and I move my weapon to him, but he shoots me. The force of the bullet spins me around a little bit, and my left shoulder feels heavy, so I turn back in one motion and shoot him three times with the gun held in my right hand. He gets blood everywhere. I walk out the door and get back on my bike and ride away. 

No Stars Here | Alexander T. Damle

“Thin line between heaven and here.” - Bubbles

            Junkie strung out wanders between shadows down cast flat windows looking below light shone through empty night quiet night holy night and through the windows the kid sits eyes locked held in cornea stretched out neon dream fever death internet repeat empty arms inflated veins addict click click. Click hammer back addict brain pan de-mapped (quoting bible of addict writing, DFW south side Boston). Light cast glowing not just junkie but kid too screen light not night light entranced addict. Inside behind cornea there is passageway and its ceiling is gone and full instead of stars but down it is infinite and so many doors all locked so just forwards and down it at its end (white wallpaper grey carpet stainless) is a door marked “Janitorial Supplies” and the man his fingers half melted cleaning bleach hair gone grey though just 37 stress exhaustion pushes the broom down hallway of high school, empty corridors (night, night, goodnight) cleaning up shit fucking high schoolers wishes he was still them, different choices, going to go home and be alone and eat his microwave dinner (mac and cheese noodles stuck together, cheese congealed, Diet Coke, AA ten years now gone clean but still) addict to his own pain now, tearing up the walls, dry wall dry eyes screaming to God forgotten, and then back each day to the high school grind, passes kid in all black sitting back to the wall. And the kid sits on a tablet and it ran out of power in third period but he needs something in front of him can’t look out be out can’t talk or look or see or be seen and the blank screen before his eyes reflects his eyes, sepulchre, wishes to be an addict because he wants to know how it feels to love and to need and mostly to care for something be it even the addicted to object and he stares hard at the screen stares

            through

the screen black and reflective reflexive wishes he could vanish into the screen and then he sees bare legs walk above the screen and hears voice slightly smoked and it lilts and he thinks if only if only but the legs have a body and the body has a mind and a face and eyes that see and fall too into screens. And the mind is the body though the body is all that’s seen the mind ignored and she wishes she could see and she sees the boy in black and though the two think neither would dare enter the other’s world, in the other’s world is all that could exist. This not lust, lust too caring, too much emotion of the addict, but instead another world out of finding walls in own bare and all black and reflective and all blank screens and the mind attached to the body attached to the legs speaks the pretty words thought expected of it and giggles slightly and laughs gaily and the mind feels the body walking along next to it must surely lack a mind for the vapid words issued forth from body’s lips, no true thought, to simply exist, without reflection or pain, but the mind thinks at least though she is empty and all within is reflective, at least she has the gift of something within, even if it does lead all to simply Dostoevsky, adj. but even the body next to the mind has itself a mind, though its internal struggle different, thought process much the same.

            And the tragedy of it all is if only the mind was attached to the lips and the lips to the body and the truth to the thought to the soul to the posture to the short skirt to the combat boots to the black trenchcoat to the lip gloss to the football jersey to the torn jeans to the patched up jacket stunk of old nicotine and urine and the bathrobe if only if only all could see equal and level and each the mind separated not from lips and if only if only.

            Once upon a time in a kingdom far away across a distant sea a young man and a young woman met each other's eyes across a table and beers and warm summer night every night summer palm trees tropics,

            Demerol dreams summer nights cold nights no summer here just slate grey skies and inside room colder heater out junkie. Addict. Own pain self pain self hurt hospital release form notes left scattered around house for police, family, friends, have to find them all, toys in a cereal box, first day home from hospital house as empty as before made attempt to leave, razor left on floor, fucking cops in this town grey walls scratch out your eyes rip out your throat tear out your veins shoot up drop drink TV on 24/7 click click (hammer back) socially approved out but not the razor, this met with interment for life is precious life thrown away most of all. Live!

            Live from New York it’s! It’s! It’s... it’s... its... it... I... not another re-run. Click (Click click click click click click click click bam... click)

            Live from Mogadishu its real life! Death life flickering half-channel analog receiver life death grey white black snippet snicket of moving picture ending picture sounds from outer space and you hear a voice whisper through the static and through the haze “wake up” but you’re already awake aren’t you?

            Eyes crack open through that nasty stuff your eyes have to crack open through sleep too long is it dark out already or still or are you woken up at all because outside there are no stars but there are no stars here, too bright, too many clouds, buildings too tall, stars too far, hand scrambling spider for phone click on screen notifications dopamine bump parents landlord power company parents parents grandma parents landlord facebook! But no wait just another birthday.

            Candles chocolate ice cream cake lawn is green sky is blue sun is yellow balloons are red memories are but spectres of might have beens.

            (a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z hamster in a cage, tiny desks, teacher’s desk #1 Teacher coffee stains, mug tipped over, blood slick tile floor, memories but not your memories but memories made fragile click click [bang bang bangbangbang twenty seven dead] memories can’t be true and can’t be kind because images are, in our great Gibson-granted future supplantabled between the static and replaced and the ideal is lost and replaced with the truth)

            addict

            Homeless man, hair fallen out, hands cut shattered broken, ink just below left thumb and cop recognizes it from somewhere, lying cold piss frozen vomit shit stains no pulse, and people walk by and stare dead ahead, and last night pulse fading, clicking out, homeless man begs quietly for help 3am, on way home from club look down and grimace just keep on walking and one notes to another how pathetic, weak, pathetic, broken, and one girl pauses at cries for help and shivering quaking frail body but then sees tear in jacket far too thin for night this cold needle marks patinaed across deflated veins so she walks on, so he died to laughing voices and this morning one of those who laughed now walks past body and remembers night-cry for help and this one won’t sleep tonight even as girl caught in small of his arm sleeps soundly next to him, chest rising, falling gently and he thinks of telling her but he’s forgotten the word for death and he stays up alone staring out the window looking for stars but there are no stars here.

            At night lying in the gutter is a baby’s rattle and in the gutter there is washed up trash and collected refuse and half of a shattered bottle of Jack Daniels lies up the street from the gutter and it’s shattered perfectly halfway no jagged edges, perfect line, and it looks like it was intentional but it wasn’t and a dark trail reflects neon on the asphalt leading from the bottle towards the gutter and someone looks at the bottle and thinks of picking it up, so particular in its destruction, but then sees the other half of the bottle and loses interest in both halves and goes home and watches TV and eats dinner (home cooked, not great, but edible) then goes to bed alone and he falls asleep with a smile on his lips remembering something that he remembers wrong.

            Red eyes eyes down down beat beat off off key key coke. Red eyes.

            Bass strong vig light night heavy club empty chamber full.

            Then empty and body cavity full and eyes empty and head loaded (last trip, DMT not drug of choice but choice ain’t got nothing to do with it)

            Razor blade cyanide revolver barrel (once heard chest better than head more certainty though too more pain but that DMT trip never could score it might as well take it while he’s got it) heights, depths, didn’t leave a note, unless they searched the dumpster (crumpled up tossed off way out).

            When her heart stopped they brought her back but they didn’t bring her all the way back and now she’s here legs and body and brain, and now the brain really is cut off and the lips instead of “hey, like, what’s up” now go all “blip blip blip” and her mom cries and her dad left and he drinks now and used to never drink at all and now all he does is drink and the boy still sits in black in the hallway and he heard something about it but he doesn’t connect it to the legs because honestly he’s forgotten the legs and by the time the brain connected to the legs had its heart shut down it had forgotten about the boy in black too though now with only time to think and every thought to think and no words to speak the brain thinks of everything and she thinks of the boy and wonders if he can see the stars from wherever he is because her eyes still work and she can only see tile ceiling, every day for the rest of always. k.

The Good Fight | Theland E.Thomas

We find our young hero kneeling in the ashes of his smoldering home, desperately grasping for his father’s charred hand, causing it to disintegrate and scatter in the wind. That same wind lifts the tears from the boy’s cheeks and carries the boy’ screams through the remains of the ravaged village, over the bloodied bodies of his family and friends. Those screams, the cries of innocence shattered, dreams crushed, identity torn away. That day, heartbroken but resolute, our hero vows to seek out evil anywhere it may hide and to destroy it.

Cold and alone, he travels to a neighboring village. They take him in, treat him as their own. There, he learns and trains. He develops strength, speed, and ferocity. He holds anger and passion, but lacks wisdom and discernment. Heartstrong and headstrong, he presses on until his skill surpasses that of his master. And when the invaders come, he rises up to lead an army.

No longer a child, our hero and his men charges headlong into enemy forces though they are outnumbered ten-to-one. But the village has trained their men well, and each warrior fights with the strength of ten men. And our hero is the bravest of them all. He moves like a man possessed, spinning and splashing, anticipating the enemy’s every move. How courageous he is, how fearless, how gallant. Through the roars, blood, smoke, and clanging, our hero emerges victorious.

The village celebrates with a feast in his honor. To commemorate his valiance, they dub him, the Righteous Warrior, prophesying that he will wield Justice in his hands and leave Peace and Prosperity in his wake.

The next day, our hero begins his Righteous campaign. With a band of brothers in arms, he goes out to destroy the enemies where they lay. They traverse the mountains and the plains tirelessly until they reach the City. Oh, the magnificent City, that bastion of evil, that malignant sore upon the earth. Cursed by God and man, the ulcer cowers behind sky high walls, spewing forth gold-adorned wretchedness from the bowels of Hell. All night, the City revels for they have nothing to fear.

The Righteous Army strikes then, shooting down the watchers, blasting through the walls. They set fire to the dwellings and ransack the mercantile streets. They strike down the messengers and advance upon the castle where the drunken soldiers scramble for their weapons. Our Righteous Warrior searches the castle until he finds the dastardly emperor and brings down Justice for every one of his villagers slaughtered.

From then on, our Righteous hero rules the empire with Justice by his side. He brings Peace and Prosperity to the land. No longer bowed under the burden of oppression, the empire flourishes and expands. What marvelous Peace, what joyful Prosperity Justice brings! All doers of evil and workers of inequity tremble in Fear at the mention of Righteous Justice.

But our Righteous hero stirs in his sleep and awakens from nightmares at the thought of evil gathering in the shadows and corruption festering within. He seeks to eradicate evil where it may be found and to excise corruption from humankind. And thus, he wages war upon evil itself. Oh, how singing turns to mourning, how laughing turns to weeping, how dancing turns to marching. Peace dies and Prosperity withers when Justice becomes Perversion.

Our hero fights his Righteous battle, but the evil multiplies everywhere he looks. It eludes him, vanishing in one place and appearing in another. It shapeshifts and transmutes. Here, a foreigner, there a friend. Here, a fugitive, there a family. All sought out, all destroyed, all eradicated, all brought to justice in blood, blood, blood, blood.

Still our hero is troubled. Still he cannot sleep for he knows that some pocket of evil still remains. After scouring the ends of the earth, our hero realizes that the ultimate Evil, the ultimate, Corruption, lies within himself. His looks to see his hands dripping blood down his throne, and he realizes he reigns with Perversion by his side.

Solemnly, our Righteous hero wields Justice one last time.

People Don't Fall in Love Like they do in the Movies | Alexander T. Damle

Encounter

            Though thy soul speaks loud into the deep empty night to those stars around immediate you lie usually silent for want of words somehow fitting, they shine bright and yet you’re all burnt out, used up, tossed off, crumpled fast food wrapper.

            Late at night having an emotional break down and you can’t sleep because you don’t sleep so you scream at the walls and blast sad music whose singers you fall in love with because the voices you can talk to because you don’t have to worry about them talking back and they say the voices are all in your head but that doesn’t mean they don’t scream too and sometimes you have to tell the voices to fuck off and you know that’s a bad sign but all you have now is bad signs.

            And yet her you’re talking to and it’s easy, and she’s not like the voices, she doesn’t make you want to curl up into a ball in the corner and pound your head against the wall and take a long knife and cut your arms and you’re talking to her and it’s easy.

            On that first night the voices for some reason lay silent, and you used to think and sometimes still think that the voices are your voice too, and without them never would you have anything to say, and yet that night you spoke loud and you had something to say without having to think what you’re supposed to say.

            And she was so beautiful but you didn’t notice, you didn’t notice she was laughing at your jokes, that she seemed to actually take an interest and it was good and that was the last time it was easy but not the last time it was good.

            A galleon is pitched heavy long across the waves as above stars shine bright for want of lights to drown them out, and the moon hangs in gentle crescent, and somewhere below deck the captain sits, feather to page, his words stretched out and hung all lackadaisical, and he spent as much time making the woman’s name look beautiful at page’s top as he did in crafting all the words lain below.

            Worthless, your words are worthless, you type like it matters, like it will be read, all is nought but cliche, and that goes for the world too.

            Gas fires light the Texas night.

            A girl sketches out on Oxy on backstreet of Tangiers.

            Could use a drink.

            After you talked to her you went home and when you did the voices came back and this time you couldn’t block them out and they screamed and screamed and screamed, and you begged and you pleaded and they didn’t listen.

            Keep on.

            Persevere.

            The ship captain now guides his ship cutting through waves threaten to engulf even the stars, and yet he does not bow and he does not break and somewhere below deck, a bottle of ink is overturned onto a stack of papers and all is obscured.

            After much consternation on the subject, you ask her to an old movie and you regret it immediately.

Motion Picture

            Don’t you have a different record to freak out to? Another record to sit with your eyes hanging all Basset Hound, fingers missing keystrokes, tired but cannot sleep, bowed but never breaking? Somehow you believe that having old voices sympathetic, carried on from a you you thought you ended makes it easier.

            Nothing makes it easier, bullet worming between ear and temple excepted.

            The movie was a disaster because of course it was a disaster. Not for her, and not for us, but for me, because, well, that’s how I tend to make these things.

            Rival gangs/spy agencies/pick your trope line up across a bridge, snipers waiting in the rafters, right hands under leather jackets/peacoats, old Springsteen number beats out, then right at mid-bridge, kid drops the briefcase and everyone starts shooting everyone.

            Can’t scream because of sleeping bodies separated by cheap drywall, can hear everything, nothing for him to hear, not but shuddering gasping body singular at rest but restless, want to cry so bad but can’t cry, so hard to cry anymore.

            Into the cave the gondolier paddles, leaving night sky behind, world now enlightened only by single torch (oil burning) hung from front of gondola, cave walls, dappled with imperfections, hung with moss, can’t see into the water, too dark, going forwards the sky behind disappears too now and it’s just the gondolier and his gondola and the walls of the cave and inwards he keeps on because it has narrowed too tight to turn and he doesn’t like paddling backwards, too much work, so on he goes and around each pipe bend of cave walls he expects to find but never does and on and on the walls curve, minutes hours days weeks months years life till death, waking moment and sleep, always the cave.

            Used to be an artist, but now he just jerks off and rubs his jizzm onto the page, calls it art. No one can really tell much of a difference between the artist before and the husk now.

            Want to hurt like want to be high, want to pound fist into wall until blood flows liberally in vaguely tragic patterns reminiscent of 700 year old glass running down its own pane, want to shoot up, not as addiction, but affectation, all an affectation.

            Movie was David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago, shown with intermission as intended by artist (without jizzm stains), used the toilet three times. Thought somehow this would be a deal breaker in her book. Afterwards rather than drinks she said she had to go home to do a secret santa with her flatmates and you walked home together and you didn’t even hug and she made some casual remark about getting drinks and you figured it was all just a line and you figured that was that, another first date without a second and

            I wish I could just set off across the American waste on the back of a motorcycle and maybe curve south, go through the other Americas, jungle and desert and mountain and plains and beaches and small towns and cities and all that out there and yet you’re here and maybe that’s good and things are good but they’re probably not.

            Evidence A. you’re listening to the record you listen to when things aren’t good, it itself a suicide note. You’ve never written a suicide note.

            Writing from the story’s middle, doesn’t work with true stories any better than it does with fiction but you have to write something you just have to write something because if you don’t write anything then you’re not a writer, isn’t that what you always say?

Boozing

            And yet despite previously told prophecies that was not the end, for drinks did happen, with time, and you drank and you talked, you both, long into the night, closing your favorite bar (only time you’ve ever done that) and that was also a good night but not a great night and so much you fucked up, opportunities lost, a woman like her, not going to wait around.

            Make your bets and make them well, poker face on.

            Trying to cry. Trying your best to cry but can’t cry. Need a dead lover to picture, some great personal tragedy to regret.

            Bourgeois self obsession made manifest on page and in mirror, more masturbation, pushups and pullups and sets and routines and protein shakes and health foods and calorie counts and carefully assembled outfits, and no one gives a shit but the one staring back forlornly in the mirror, all that preening and yet it’s never enough, face in the magazine stares up at you and it’s not your face because faces don’t work that way.

            And then she says she has something kind of awkward to tell you and this is the moment you were all kinds of braced for, yet just those words a part of you fractures a little and then she says she has a long distance open relationship and this you weren’t expecting, and it’s not the relationship, that doesn’t bother you, not really, you have enough potential deal breakers yourself that you have to accept whatever you get with any potential partners, after all, aren’t the years long self-hate that is the running conversations with the voices in your head close enough to an open relationship? What does bother you is even talking about a relationship, not ready for this, not even close, so used to girls going on first dates with you that they assume are just friendly meet-ups, then never talking to you again. You can’t even deal with the idea that a girl might be into you. Breaks you.

            After the date you know you should kiss her, but you don’t and you don’t even really consider it. Too drunk to think, too tired, too broken, used up, tired, this whole dating thing has fucked up too many times for you to even consider it going right this time.

A Return to the Land of Oz

            Then Christmas comes and you two go your parting ways, and you talk sporadically for those couple of weeks, and it eats you up inside and she mentions in your talk, just to clarify, that she is indeed single, and you say you’re single too and it takes her a couple days to get back to you, and in those couple of days everything hurts and you want to throw up and you can barely eat and you can’t sleep and you know it’s absurd, it’s just a few dates, you’re doing exactly what you shouldn’t do and you’re building it up way beyond anything reasonable, and you wish you’d get in a potentially lethal car crash.

            Icy roads, traded paint, twisted metal, smell of burnt breaks, flaming gasoline, snow coming down hard, half light, blood.

            You get back and you get drinks again, somewhere different, and it all feels wrong this time, and when you use the bathroom you stare at yourself and you ask yourself what you’re doing, and whether you actually care for this girl, if you aren’t just looking for something to fall in love with because you’re so fucking lonely, another excuse to not kill yourself for a couple more months.

            You walk home together again and you stand staring each other caught in the light of Edinburgh streetlamps, as a faint rain beats down, and you stare at each other, and she smiles, and you lean in then stop and it would be so easy but you don’t kiss her, and eventually she breaks the moment and kisses you on the cheek, then gives a little wave as she walks off, and that kiss and that wave melt your heart a little bit and you feel the moisture from her lips on your cheek as you walk up to your apartment.

            Then the kiss dries and all you can think about is that you didn’t kiss her and she’s going to lose interest, got to take a chance, too scared she’ll pull away and then you’ll wake up in hospital bed, all the events of the past few weeks just another overly hopeful pipe dream, an excuse to believe you can make yourself better.

            Mental patient howl. Beat the walls, bloody cement, bloody foam, bloody straightjacket, no drug strong enough to fix you quiet.

Late Late Nights

            You’re not a jealous person, and yet all you feel is jealous, when she so much as talks to another guy and you’ve only gone on a few dates.

You’re an absolute joke, you thought you’d changed? You thought you were ready for a relationship with this cool, funny, smart, outgoing, beautiful woman? You’re going to shatter her like China, like everything that ever makes the mistake of getting close to you by choice rather than circumstance.

            And yet you’re going out with her again tomorrow. Some people never learn.

To be continued.

The Parable of the Cogwheels | Alexander T. Damle

            One day Francis Grant McDonald woke up, though memory of going to asleep escaped him, and all about him he could hear a great low roar. When his eyes opened it was dark, black as pitch though not so black as that time he was locked in a windowless basement by his stepfather for three days, but too dark to see much, just the sound of that low roar, metallic, steel, glimmering steel against steel turning churning plates of steel against plates of steel, car crash nightblood.

            So he waited for his eyes to adjust to the light and he shifted around a bit because whatever he was lying on was cold and it hurt his back, bad back, football injury childhood cheerleaders lonely thought with the uniform he could fuck a cheerleader but then he realized he didn’t want to fuck a cheerleader and that was an awkward locker room conversation and then that day his own teammate ran him down on the field and it was just an accident (coach said, teammate said, saw eyes turn to him, body shift) but his back has been screwed up since then and now it’s giving him trouble then his eyes adjust.

            Above him the sound explains itself in giant gears the size of big men or small trees turning over and over about points of centre axis connected to seeming nothings, dripping occasionally with engine oil color of night soil, and then he looks down and it looks like a steel girder maybe as wide across as he is and then he looks over the edge of girder. More gears pounding away into nothing and he thinks what would happen if he had shifted in the darkness and he had fallen into the gears, they not far below the girder, not more than six feet, how would pain have felt in that perfect dark? (belt buckle), (doesn’t love him anymore), (car crashes again, life theme).

            Before him though is the biggest gear, at least his height times five, and behind him much the same, and these gears turn upwards with motion gentle and lumbering like high school football captain plus twenty years, brain damage, quiet, weight gain, wife beating, dead end job, meatloaf for dinner again? But above it is another gear this one up too and above it another gear pattern much the same and he looks down and he looks up and he recognizes down is not an option and sides too far to reach and they but more cogwheels, these not so perfectly situated for virtiguous climb.

            So onto cogwheel edge he grips, moist, oily, slick, can just hold on, scraping off metal with fingernail tips, good thing he didn’t trim them, and he feels his body pulled upwards and sick sinking feeling in his stomach and his arms aren’t strong anymore, used to be like ropes, toned them, Robert liked that it was what got them talking and who would have guessed rope arms could be start of something like that and it's over now but it sure was something before it was nothing.

            And up and up the cogwheel climbs, Francis clinging to its face sheer, fingernails skittering but holding death to life and backwards again, opposition to inevitable, climb up, then next cogwheel and he knows he has to move before he gets dragged between the cogwheels, body popping like overripe melon, not enough light here for that shattered watermelon colour, and just before final moment, life now before death, he grabs onto wheel above him, and this one grip is harder, negative grip he thinks its called or maybe that’s something else, either way vertical part ways towards him and he’s slipping but wheel seems to be rising faster and before he can fall he is high enough to lock feet (remembered to remove feet from last cogwheel at just last minute, right minute, could have been finality) and clarify grip, and upwards on second cogwheel now he climbs.

            Up and up and up and he glances down to see the girder and it seems not so far as it should seem and he still can’t remember falling asleep and can’t know how he woke up here and just knows he did wake up and the oil on the wheels is gumming up his hands, sticking together but sliding off the metal, and everything hurts and he wishes he’d bothered to use that pull up bar he got God knows why, would’ve helped now, but he’s moving and he looks up and he thinks he sees light or maybe it's an illusion but

            Very suggestion, notion, idea, theory, light at end of tunnel, point of hope against the darkness, star singular on cloud socked night, spurs onwards new strength in arms and two more cogwheels he rides and he thinks maybe he can do this and though the light seems not closer and in fact seems fainter he knows in his heart he is approaching fast and that the light shall soon be with him and he shall be free of this Hell and all shall thenceforth be good.

            Maybe call back that guy from that bar, he seemed nice and maybe go visit his mom at the retirement home, no wait, dead, keeps forgetting, not callous, just hard thing to force self to remember, can’t just sink in like into water, hard thing to believe, death, especially one so close. Should have called that guy back. Visited more.

            But his arms are giving out and his fingers are slipping more and more and his shoes what tread once had is now coated thick with oil and all is slipping and falling and all burns and then he looses his grip and he meant not to loose his grip but he loses his grip.

            As he falls through the darkness the light seems but a dream of fresh baked bread cooked with cinnamon and apples on Autumn night long gone, kid again, happy again, never happy, but the bread was there and his mom was too and it was good and it was warm and the night was beautiful and the stars all above called to him and were there and maybe the light and the stars and the bread were all made of the same stuff and he’s falling and he feels air rushing under him, air tastes sour and wrong, and he’s falling.

            And then he hits hard, feels right ankle snap immediately, screams but no one can hear him so he doesn’t scream and just opens lips and rushes air through lungs, tongue forms pattern of tongues, and he feels leg being pulled under but immediate moment before impact, pain, fingers grabbed something, looks up, girder, and his leg is being pulled under and there is no word for the pain because pain is an easy word and this isn’t easy and he reminds himself he can’t pass out, must free his leg, shock will save him from the pain, just has to stay awake, and he pulls and his arms strain and pop and pull and that word again pain said too easy, wrong, and but still he pulls loose somehow his leg, and onto the girder he pulls his body and lets it fall there discarded behind 7-11 on county highway fast food wrapper used condom homeless man.

            He looks now at his leg in front of him and below the knee it exists not but bleeding seems minimal by grace of God and he pulls off his shirt, tears it into bandage, staunches the blood flow, then lays back, pain subsiding.

            And he lays there for a long time he doesn’t know how long because now the light seems practically non-existent and even if it had stayed with him it was unchanging so time was unchanging too, but it doesn’t matter because the light is gone, and he tries to measure time by the sounds of the gears, but every time he thinks he has some scheme reliable to his purposes, they seem to speed up or slow down.

            And eventually his leg stops screaming at him and his arms feel rested, grown stronger even maybe for the stress and pain of his first attempt at a climb, so he pulls himself, half crawl, one leg now, to the cogwheel in front of him, and he grabs on with his two hands (a blessing) and begins once again his ascent.