2 Ply Parachutes

Good Morning

2011-06-01T09:14:00.000-07:00

Calico Zuchetti.

2011-06-01T09:07:00.000-07:00

Yeah right...

2011-05-30T09:41:00.000-07:00

Egg atop a Desert Savant.

2010-07-26T12:26:00.000-07:00

Confessions of a Lego Prodigy.

2010-07-26T12:11:00.000-07:00

CHAPTER I: A photograph in a tin.

I moved large scoops of dirt to the side. When I got deeper I would just strike at the dirt with the tiny garden shovel, then use both of my hands to remove large portions to the side of the hole. And when the hole was deep enough I placed inside it the tin box that had been sitting off to my side. It was composed of chipped red and silver paint, ordained with what once may have been flowery mistletoe decorations along the side. Perhaps it had once proudly contained an assortment of popcorn or nuts. Now it would serve as a tomb for a rag tag assortment of objects.

I was preparing to end its miserable life as a Christmas tin; and begin its new life as a time capsule.

Before I could pull the dirt over the box and let it rest I needed to say my final goodbyes to the contents within. I popped the lid and dumped out its belongings. I arranged each item in a semicircle, orbiting the hole.

The tin sat at 12:00 directly in front of me.

To its right at 1:00 sat the last remaining piece of my grandest Lego creation of all time; the nose piece of the Velvet Kobiyashi. Hands down my masterpiece. The facial details inscribed with erasable marker still held true. It brought pain to my heart to even lay eyes upon it.

At 2:00 was a porcelain statuette of Mount Rushmore; acquired on a vacation with my father two summers ago.

At 3:00 there was a pile of random junk. A broken wine opener; along with a variety of bent, mangled silverware rescued from our kitchen drawers. As I had ran short on items I was willing to sacrifice, I figured my mother wouldn’t mind contributing a few of her own.

Off to my left, in the 9:00 position was a dozen or so slides from a Spider Man View Master series. I would sorely miss these, as it was my introduction to Doctor Octopus. An epic, no holds barred battle, that I had watched dozens of times. But as much as it pained me, I reasoned it was necessary to let go of at least one prized possession. Only this sort of sacrifice would make the excavation truly worth while. Though I popped the first disc into my cherry red View Master, and watched one last time.

At 10:00 was the plastic remains of a fallen member of the G.I.Joe team. A broken Scarlet action figure. She was missing an arm thanks to my new baby brother. However, I had recently purchased an updated version of her; one that featured the new swivel arm battle grip.

And finally, at 11:00, there was a Polaroid photo of my best friend, Anton Michaels. Just a few weeks ago his parents had returned home from a vacation to discover his lifeless body lying in his bed. His death was not an accident.

CHAPTER II: Facts and accusations.

Anton had been discovered 2 weeks ago lying in his own bed, in the attic of his home. It was just a few months ago that he had begged his parents to move his bedroom from the ground floor to the attic. They warned him of the ferocity of the midwest sun pounding down on the roof just above his head, but the opportunity to occupy a space all his own trumped any warnings his parents could offer. Despite this, the summertime heat was not the cause of his death.

As I understood it, officially, he had passed away from breathing complications. Though he was tied down, he had not been strangled. A sharp object had punctured his lung and eventually he choked to death on his own blood.

For months afterwards, families would sit and discuss the minutiae of the investigation at the dinner table. And through all these rumors and speculation, a wave of fear would wash over our peaceful Midwestern town as we had never experienced.

Talk spread of the FBI helming a thorough investigation. Our neighbors were all convinced he was still here, still waiting in the shadows to claim his next victim.

“Children of the Corn” had recently been in theatres, and devout mothers spread rumors of cults bread from the lucid imaginations of impressionable teens. Kids, such as myself, were held to strict curfews and sat through countless tiresome lectures on dealing with strangers.

The weekend in question, Anton’s parents had left him with his grandparents; so it was unclear why he had been at home, all alone, that one terrible day. His house appeared to have been broken into, as his mother’s jewelry was missing. The home rested on the edge of a densely wooded acre of land, behind these trees there was a city park. Their back door window was broken and the door unlocked. They supposed the thief had made his way under cover of trees, snuck to the back door where he shattered the window and entered.

Was it blind misfortune that Anton had been home at the time? And even more puzzling was the state in which they found his body. The killer seemed to have gone far beyond what would have been expected of a chance encounter with a thief. And though the lab reports were not entirely final, as far as anyone could tell there was no evidence of sexual abuse. It was noted to be a very patient, methodical job. Care and diligence had gone into Anton’s demise. This was indeed out of character for a common thief .

Anton had a massive contusion to the side of his head, but the coroner said this was not what responsible for his death. It was supposed that somehow the killer had knocked him out with this blow, he then drug him to his bed and while unconscious wrapped two entire rolls of duct tape around him; securing him tightly to the frame. Anton was discovered laying face up, on his back, arms spread wide like a child making angels in the snow.

Most terrifying of all was how it seemed there had been very special attention given to the position of his head. The majority of the duct tape had been used to angle his head so it looked directly up at the ceiling above him. His face had been covered strategically, almost like a mummy. Only holes for his eyes and nose remained. His head was immovable through these layers of duct tape. If he had been alive, struggling, there no was no way he would have budged an inch. It took them hours to cut him out without damaging his body.

And then there was the string. A single piece of simple white sewing string that dangled down from the low ceiling of Anton’s room. It had been thumb tacked into the roof, directly above him, where it dropped down 5 feet. Terminating in a frayed tip about 3 inches directly above Anton’s nose. For this curiosity no one had yet presented a single hypothesis.

Though they found scattered drops of blood, they could not find the weapon that my friend had been stabbed in the chest with; that which had ultimately taken his life. Nor could they find the heavy instrument which had knocked him unconscious. There were no suspicious fingerprints on the door, nor on the duct tape, nor anywhere at the scene. Care had been taken to prevent such tell tale hints of the fiend in question.

And like clockwork, each morning the papers would announce a new smoking gun hypothesis which had been overlooked by local law enforcement. Each more far fetched then the last. And all their theories and speculation would evaporate into baseless accusation.

CHAPTER III: To rekindle the lost art of Legos.

We spent entire summers together. Creating tree forts. Spending the night at each others houses. Playing board games and diving for pennies at the public swimming pool. It was just before the age of girls, and all those thoughts that complicate and confuse life so. And it was summer and there was only the fear of baseball practice to burden one’s existence.

But more then anything there was time for Legos. Those tiny blocks that would snap together, which had thousands of intricate and diverse little pieces. They were the erector set of the new generation. But next generation style and flexibility came at a price, and thus legos were just outside the scope of my parents lower middle class earning power. Anton, however, had a nice collection. It was composed of a healthy cross section from a variety of play sets; 2 space stations, a naval destroyer, a fairly bland city play set, a moon rover, an elaborate dune buggy set, and a dozen or so smaller sets mostly from space themed collections.

The space sets were always the holy grail of any Lego collection. You see…the value of a Lego play set was not defined by the quality of its preset design. It was determined by the originality, complexity, and functionality of the pieces that composed it; and the space sets always had the most incredibly diverse pieces.

This is what separates a Lego enthusiast from a Lego auteur. If only now you are understanding this, then you were never more then an apprentice. A slave to the instructions included in the box. You never grasped the true nature of Legos.

I was a Lego prodigy.

My mother had observed my aptitude for visual design and geometric awareness at a young age. One day I approached her and asked her to teach me how to use my right hand; as I was ashamed for being the only left handed child in my 1st grade class. She told me this; “Honey…your left hand is what makes you special, it’s what makes you creative and unique and allows you to do things that others can’t. Keep this a secret...but in many ways your left hand is magic. When you get older, you’ll understand better.”

Unlike most, Anton may have had glimpses into the true nature of Legos. But he, like everyone else, could not comprehend the bigger picture. To me Legos spoke. To me Legos were a religion, and I was a prophet who could transcribe their message. I was put here for a reason; and while at this age the message was not quite clear yet…I knew that through these little plastic blocks I would be shown the way.

And that said, one may hypothesize that I was using Anton only to take advantage of his treasure chest of space sets. This was, in fact, not remotely true. There was never any insistence on my part to play Legos, nor on Antons part that we do otherwise. Antons purpose, the reason for his very existence on this world, while still my friend, was simply to provide me with what my parents could not. To show me the divine path. Anton was a marker; whether he knew it or not.

Legos were present even in my earliest memories. I remember going to my grandma’s house for Christmas and my cousins coming down from Minneapolis. They were quite wealthy, and every year they would bring down a massive play set their parents had given them as a gift. We would use these play sets to create world war 2 era monster movies in the basement. All of our sets and vehicles were created in Legos, and for characters we used little green army men. We would then charge each member of our family 10 cents to come down into the basement and watch our epic films which we would act out in front of them.

A year later we showed up for Christmas. I was excited to see my cousins, but even more excited to see what new Lego set they had received this year. But they didn’t bring them, they had left their Lego’s at home. My mother would later tell me that their parents didn’t allow them to bring them. After Christmas last year, they had went home and tried to re-create the worlds and characters we would build in the basement together, and they just couldn’t do it. It became an exercise in frustration, a bitter slap in the face that without me the picture on the box was all they were capable of creating. And they grew to hate that about me, and eventually despise me. And to them Legos were simply a puzzle to assemble…and to me those little bricks were the clay with which I could sculpt entire civilizations.

I had lost many friends like that, and while Anton could not fathom the true nature of Lego’s…he was creative, and he was quite astute at putting unique things together on his own. At times I could see him get frustrated, but at an early age I had learned the ways of positive reinforcement; and somehow I always managed to convince him that his designs were exceptional…even if they were fairly remedial.

This was not kids games. This was art. There were masterpieces that were constructed and destroyed for the sake of drama. And through all those worlds, and creatures, and robots, and starships…something was speaking to me. It’s voice was becoming louder. Sometimes Anton would catch me staring at the bricks, lost in a trance. He’d snap his fingers and ask if I was ok, and I would simply play it if off as a joke.

The day Anton was killed we were in his attic playing Legos. I was with him shortly before it happened. This was a special day for me because I had created my current masterpiece. A starship of absolute artistry; a solid, elegant, silky smooth design which I had christened the Velvet Kobiyashi.

It was both graceful and powerful. It glowed with a sort of magic that only a true artist can fully appreciate. Like the best art, it had happened spontaneously. It was solid and durable. I had dropped it and not a single piece had broken off. And it was also intimidating…more so then I could have imagined. You see, there was tension in the air, and slowly it became clear that things were not as good between me and Anton as I had believed.

CHAPTER IV: Last voyage of the Velvet Kobiyashi.

It was a rainy day, especially chilly for a Midwest summer. Though we loved the thunder and lightning rattling above our heads. Antons parents were out of town and he was staying with his Grandma who lived a few blocks away. Anton was on his way back to his grandmothers from swimming lessons, and decided to stop and see if I was home. The rains were pouring down outside interspersed with blasts of lighting; and thus our default afternoon activity was not an option, as the public pool would be closed. It was Anton who suggested we sneak into his house, and continue our Lego projects that we had begun a few nights earlier.

He took the key they hid in their gutter and we entered in through the garage door, locking it behind us. We went up to his bedroom in the attic and pulled the shoe box of spare bricks out from under his bed and over to his electric train set. The tiny plastic railroad tracks spanned three interconnected 4x4 plywood sheets. Inside this giant pill shaped span of tracks we sat cross legged and put the final touches on our creations. My masterpiece needed only a front landing gear. This took me roughly 15 minutes to complete. And after I was done, Anton continued to fumble away. Randomly trying different blocks; his creation taking on a new shape every couple minutes.

An hour passed, and I did my best to hide my impatience, and I could tell his frustration was growing stronger by the minute. He had no more control over what he was creating then I did over the rains pounding against the window.

Unconscious of my action, I let out a gentle sigh. Anton looked up at me from the indiscernible abomination resting in his hands. “What’s your problem” he asked me in a gruff serious tone, his brow displaying a look of bottled rage?

I told him that I was just waiting for him to finish, and that I wanted to play, and that, honestly, I was getting a bit bored.

He let out a sarcastic laugh and said “play? How are we even supposed to stage a damn battle if I have a piece of shit like this going against something like that?” And he pointed at my ship.

Having seen these outbursts before I tried to calm him in the typical manner; by lying to him and saying his work was better then it actually was. But he would not have it. Something was different this time. Perhaps he detected my insincerity. He rose to his feet, his anger was no longer bottled. Now he was openly furious.

“You know what this game is? This game is insulting to me. You make me look like an idiot. I hate playing these games with you, because you just make me look like a moron. Is this fun for you? Finishing something in two hours that’s so damn cool I could probably never create anything like it in my entire life? Is this a joke to you?”

“But Anton, your ship is good.“

“Don’t fucking lie to me!!! I’m sick of it. Don’t come over here and use my fucking Legos if you’re going to lie to me.”

“Anton…I seriously think…”

“Shut up. Did you hear what I said. These are my Legos. You might make these insane things…but you know what; these are MY Legos. They are not YOURS.

He paused for a second. Rubbing his temples in frustration. His face red with rage. Then he turned to me, looked me straight in the eye and said, “Now we are going to play my game. Destroy your ship and put the pieces back in the box. We’re not playing Legos here any more. Never again.”

“But we haven’t even started…we haven’t even begun to tell a story…”

“We are done with Legos. Now break apart your ship and get out of my house. Maybe now you’ll stop using me for my Legos, or you can go ask your drunk for a dad if he’ll buy you some.”

There was a moment of silence. His statement had triggered something in me. Something was different. Any notions of compromise vanished in that moment, I became someone else entirely. I replied quietly, under my breath…

“No.”

“What did you say?”

This time I looked up from the ground and stared him in the eyes, and I said sternly… “No. This ship is my masterpiece.”

There was a moment of stunned silence. Anton did not know how to respond. A look of rage came across his face…he turned away from me and stomped over the train tracks. Before I even realized what he was doing he had picked up my ship. He placed it into the palm of hand. And in one fluid motion, like a pitcher releasing a baseball, my ship went flying across the room.

To me it all happened in slow motion. I saw it rotating through the air, moving towards the wall; but I couldn’t move fast enough to stop it if I had tried. And though it was durable, it was not nearly capable of withstanding a collision of this magnitude. In my mind it was not unlike a car commercial where you see test dummies smash a car into a wall at 70 miles an hour. On impact with the wall it seemed to compress, squashing flat against the wall as it fractured into dozens of little pieces. Tiny plastic bits ricocheted of the wall and pelted us. And the largest remaining chunk, the face from the nose of the ship, somehow landed at my feet. Looking directly up at me.

It was gone. My ultimate creation had been returned to its primal form; nothing more then a scattered corpse of tiny interlocking bricks.

CHAPTER V: Duct tape and a string.

Then Anton turned to me and said; “Get the fuck out of my house.” I stood there, On my face was a look of disbelief, but behind my eyes there was unbridled rage and a growing need for redemption.

Again he said…”GET OUT!” I did not budge. Enraged by my stubbornness Anton put out his hands and shoved me with all his strength. I was not expecting this and I spilled backward towards his desk, reaching out my left hand to brace my fall. Expecting to feel his desk top or chair, I instead felt a sharp, horrible pain. My outstretch arm collapsed; and the weight of my body took me into the desk, my back ramming into the top shelf of the desk, and my head went back and smashed into the cabinet above it. Pencils and paperclips sprinkled over me.

I pulled my arm around from behind me, to see what had caused the white hot pain emanating from my palm. To see why it felt awkward and clumsy. I discovered that my left hand had been pierced by an old file spike sitting on top of Antons desk.

The long, sharp, chrome tip had passed cleanly through the very center of my palm. My hand now rested at its base, neatly stacked on top of two or three pieces of homework. Bright red blood was already oozing out onto the immaculate white surface of the desk.

Anton had destroyed my masterpiece. He had humiliated me. And now, I was convinced he had stolen from me the one thing that made me special. He had taken my hand. My left hand. The hand my mother had told me was my gift, that one unique element which allowed me to create sheer unquestionable beauty from a pile of chaos.

He stepped towards me with wide eyes. He could not believe what had happened, fear radiated in his eyes. But it was too late, I had now given fully into my rage. I wrapped my right hand around the large rock being used as a paperweight on the side of his desk. He took another step closer…and in one swift motion, with all of my remaining strength, I swung my arm around and the rock connected directly with the side of his head. He collapsed to the ground.

I pulled my hand from the shaft of the chrome prong. I grabbed a long sock out of Antons’ clothes drawer and tied it around my hand to stop the bleeding. Slowly a new feeling was washing over me. I felt cheated. I felt that Anton needed to experience the pain that he had given me. It was not enough that I had knocked him out. My masterpiece was destroyed, my hand had been robbed from me, in that moment I believed I had been reduced to nothing more then an average mortal child.

He was heavy, so it took a while, but I managed to move him over to his bed and rolled him onto his back. I found a roll of duct tape off his shelf, then bound him as best I could. I paid special attention to constricting the movement of his head. I taped and retaped his head until it was frozen looking directly upward. I stuffed pillows behind his head to reinforce the angle.

I then took a spool of thread from Antons junk drawer, a thumbtack, and a scissors. I tacked the end of the spool to the ceiling, directly above Antons head. I let the spool drop, unwinding as it fell through the air, eventually bouncing of Antons lip and onto the bed. I then snipped it off about 3 inches above his nose.

I picked up the last remaining piece of my ship. The nose piece that had landed at my feet. I had used dry erase marker to scrawl a sinister face on it, inspired by world war 2 bombers. I took this piece and duct taped it to the end of the string dangling just above Anton’s nose, and carefully tilted the face so it was staring down directly into Antons eyes.

I wanted this final remaining fragment of my masterpiece to be the last thing he saw before he died.

And eventually he awoke. And by that time I had cleaned my blood off the desk and returned all the Legos to the shoebox. I tossed the file spike in my duffle bag; along with the rock I had hit him in the head with. I went into his parents room and took a handful of jewelry from the box next to their bed. I ran down stairs and broke the back window, then propped open the door, giving the illusion of a robbery. I took extra special care to prevent fingerprints or any indications of my presence. And finally I grabbed the spiral metal wine opener from the silverware drawer in their kitchen.

Just as I was returning to his room Anton was returning to consciousness. Slowly his eyes grew wider and began to dart back and forth from me into the unflinching gaze of my creation hanging just above his nose. I could hear him screaming from behind the duct tape over his mouth. I gripped the spiral metal wine opener and straddled Anton’s legs. I placed the sharp tip of the wine opener to the right of Anton’s rib cage. I placed each hand on either side of the handle as I leaned into him and twisted.

I looked up at his face, and now he was staring wide eyed into the depths of the Lego gods eyes.

. . . . . .

In retrospect, I admit I was aiming for his heart and clipped his lung. Unfortunately my aptitude for geometric construction is far advanced to my knowledge of human anatomy.

I took the scissors and snipped the head of my masterpiece off from the end of the string, still staring down into Anton’s lifeless, wide open eyes. I tossed it into my bag and carefully crept out the back door out and cut through the woods so no one would see me. I tossed the rock I had hit Anton in the head with into a pond I passed on the way home, along with the jewelry.

And as for the time capsule? Well I returned each of the objects inside, beginning with the View Master slides, and ending with the wine opener that had punctured Anton’s lung. I placed the tin box in the center of the hole then pushed the mound of dirt on top of it. I then packed it down with my fists, and stomped on it with my feet for good measure. And with that I said goodbye to Anton.

My hand would heal. Infact, the injury had been slight. The prong must have passed so cleanly through that no nerves, muscles, or tendons had been affected. It took no more then a dash of antibiotic ointment and a band aid on the front and back of my hand for it to heal completely, excluding a tiny scar. My parents never even noticed.

Its true a part of me would regret not having his company. But I did not cry; nor was I angry. I simply went out and got a paper route. You see, at last I had realized that I could not depend upon others any longer. It was time I purchased my own set of Legos. Then I could be free of the limitations inherent in the damaged egos of all inspiration stifling cry babies.

EPILOGUE:

One evening, two weeks later, there was a knock at our door. I opened it to discover Antons mom standing there with a shoe box. It was the shoe box that had contained Anton’s Legos. She looked down on me with serious eyes. A bittersweet smile came across her face and she leaned forward and spoke. She said she had been cleaning out Anton’s room and discovered his collection of Legos under his bed. She stretched her arms out and handed the box to me.

She put her hand on my shoulder and said, “here…I know he would have wanted you to have these.” A tear rolled down her cheek, then she turned around and walked away.

Etienne St. Pierre

2010-07-12T19:21:00.000-07:00

Flash Casavetes

2010-07-12T19:17:00.000-07:00

Murietta Bloom

2010-07-12T19:13:00.000-07:00

Patty Sweets (Low-fi remix)

2010-07-12T19:07:00.000-07:00

Open Mic

2010-07-01T10:53:00.000-07:00

Patty Suture Sweets

2010-06-29T13:39:00.000-07:00

About Last Night...

2010-06-29T13:27:00.001-07:00

You are him. Whether or not you think you are, from this point on…you are him.

And you are not alone. There is a woman with you.

“It’s a strange night out there,” she says to you. Her long fingers run through your hair. A gentle summer breeze flickers the candles on the table. Despite her calm façade you know underneath she is a ball of anxiety. She has no patience for the pre-game. She has an agenda, a laundry list of things to accomplish, and you’re just another item to be crossed off.

Tenderness gives way to frustration as her impatience with you grows. She casts off her dress in a motion so elegant and efficient it feels rehearsed. You feel her wet tongue lick the length of that valley that runs up your spine and stops at your C4, and with that lick she senses the entrance.

You jerk away when she touches you there. Not violently like a hornet landing on your elbow, it’s a mild reaction, like a doctor tapping your knee to test Patellar reflex

It’s subconscious, but she thinks it cowardly. To her this is simply one more indicator that chivalry is dead. That we live in an age of overly sensitive men, and liberated, apathetic, woman who scorn the existence of their fatherless sons.

Her ability to seek out and penetrate the entrance is unparalleled. She sees all things with clarity. When she looks in the mirror she perceives more then a sad byproduct of a soul rotting consumer culture. She sees the reflection of a simian seductress evolved 2.5 million years to perfection. You see, she believes she’s flawless.

She casts aside her frustration; pre-game is over. She’s behind you now, and giggles as she grabs your hips and forces you back into position. Stomach down, head to the left. You can feel her skin against your back.

She positions her knees on either side of your hips. With your face planted in the bedding, your right cheek bares the brunt her torso’s weight on top of you. You see her move out of the corner of your eye, she plants a kiss on your left cheek, which you find stimulating. Though, you realize, a kiss from those lips is like a dog urinating to mark territory. She's claimed you as hers.

Without arms or legs it’s impossible to resist. She's toying with you. You feel her torso glide over your back, outside your field of vision. Her head comes to rest on your right shoulder, you feel her breath against your neck. With the entrance exposed, you don’t trust her outside your view. Thus, you bury your forehead into the bedding, arch your back with all your strength, and quickly roll your head so you face the right.

Your eyes meet just for a moment, then she smiles and playfully disappears back to the left side of you. As she crosses over your back you feel her breasts skitter across the tips of your shoulder blades.

You’re that beached whale and her an agile pigeon that moves in elegant leaps and bounds. Despite this, you take a deep breath and roll your head once again to keep her in view, but you are too late. She is already on the opposite side of you, with a gentle breath gliding over the contours of your shoulders. It rolls upward, over the lobe of your ear, and finds its way to that place where it spreads down the coastline of your spine in a wave of shivers.

You give up, because you know you’ve been beaten. And at that very moment, just when you’ve come to terms with the hopelessness of your situation, is when she slips inside you, stepping in one foot at a time.

Your torsos align concentrically, as she fidgets and shifts her entire body to her liking. You do not speak, nor could you if you tried. It’s not painful, as you suspected it would be, it’s just awkward. Once she's in, you feel the entrance seal up behind her.

There are strange moments, as you breathe out, and your stomach collapses, just as she breathes in and her lungs expand from within you. As this happens you feel her stomach pressed snuggly against yours, making it difficult as you struggle to once again fill your lungs with air.

At first she draws her satisfaction simply from being inside you. But she quickly grows bored of this. She squirms and wiggles about. She stretches, pushes and pulls. Eventually your flesh expands and slides around her like a pair of silky tights contorting to long shapely legs.

Hands and elbows begin to take shape where previously none existed. At first they appear as webbed flippers. Ping pong paddles of semi transparent skin, a veiny membrane stretching between vague indications fingers.

She wants to stretch, simply to release the tension in her muscles. When she finally does it’s a long cat like yoga stretch. This is the first and only time you feel pain, but once complete you realize that you, as her second skin, are now wrapped tightly around her shoulders, breasts, knees, even those tiny spaces between her fingers.

You can feel the full width of her womanly hips, those hips that give her body those sensuous curves. Dipping in and out to define her classically beautiful figure. You feel her pelvic bone rubbing against you. But it’s strange, as this is not an external sensation, but an internal one.

She begins to slide her head out through your mouth. Like a moth from a cocoon her head slowly emerges. You attempt to keep your mouth closed to prevent her escape, but it’s futile. She is too much for you.

At first, her dark hair is pulled tight against your lips, forcing them to expand like rubber bands so they can fit the circumference of her brow. Your lower lip slides down over her forehead revealing long dark lashes above closed eyes. As the bridge of her nose comes into view, lids open to reveal olive green eyes.

As she emerges, your eyes and nose sag backward, forcing you to look upward. There you see yourself in a mirror mounted above her bed. Her head appears as an enormous black oval emerging from your lips.

She tilts her head downward, which pulls, then releases her shoulder length hair from the tourniquet of your lips. Her curly hair contracts with a snap then settles back into its natural position. It falls gently over your face, cast over your eyes; you can only see vague blooms of light through the canopy of her hair. You imagine your self as a child looking up at the sky through a forest of trees.

Eventually her head is entirely exposed and your lips wrap tightly around the base of her throat. Your nose angles upward, towards the nape of her neck. As you exhale through your nostrils it rolls over the delicate silk that marks the edge of her hairline. She trembles.

With her mouth now fully exposed, a sensuous grin rolls across her face, and she releases a gentle sigh of ecstasy. “You see,” she says, “now it’s you sending shivers down my spine.”

Your tongue is pinned tightly against her throat. You can taste her. She is aroused, you are too. She rolls her neck around to explore her freedom of movement, causing her hair to gently dance across your nose. You sneeze and her hair fluffs into the air. Eventually it falls back into place, and after a short time you sneeze again. And with each sneeze, the air shoots from your lungs and your muscles contract tightly against her, adjusting the fit to perfection.

Soon you stop sneezing. And she’s no longer a woman, and you’re no longer a man. Eventually your lips no longer wrap around her neck, and your face ceases to sag back over her spine.

Together you sit on her deck and watch the sun rise over the building tops of Brooklyn. Sipping Chamomile tea, as you debate a matinee at IFC center and a walk through Prospect park.

Noah Olyphant

2010-06-24T13:57:00.000-07:00

The Nynnoksmvrt Twist

2010-06-22T14:11:00.000-07:00

Nikolai Zosimov was a family friend. My mother met him and his wife, Saschenka, when they joined our church in the early 80’s. Him and my father bonded over a love of baseball, cheap beer, and Cold War tales told from two starkly contrasting cultural perspectives.

My parents welcomed them with open arms into our community, as they felt this was the Christian thing to do. In the midst of the Cold War, being a Russian immigrant was not an easy burden to bare, especially in small town America. Prejudice was a daily reality for the Zosimovs.

Nikolai was a large, square jawed, brick of a man. He had graying hair and a face etched with the valleys of a man who had lived a hard life. Each word he spoke seemed deliberate and carefully chosen. Though this was partially due to his inability to speak fluent english, it also hinted at a modest, grandfatherly wisdom. He was calm and collected, I never once saw him angry. It was clear that he cared about Saschenka deeply, and he enjoyed his job working for the railroad.

Despite films like “Rocky 4” and “Red Dawn” the Zosimovs would eventually win over everyone with their genuine compassion and work ethic. Though this didn’t dissuade me from begging Nikolai for the occasional “Ivan Drago” impersonation. He would wipe all emotion from his face, look me deep in my eyes, and respond in a menacing russian droll... “I will break you.”

I never inquired how or why they came to the US, and when a person broached the topic directly, Saschenka would speak for her husband by vaguely stating “It was a most difficult process.”

My father was an Alcoholic, and although Nikolai was a good man, he would prove to be a poor influence on my father. They would disappear for long nights, watching games and sharing war stories, only to return home to the fury of their wives. I can only assume, that it was on one of these weekend excursions that Nikolai first shared with my father the details of his past.

One rainy evening, I asked my father to tell me a story. He had been drinking heavily, sufficiently skewing his filter enough to pass on information that wasn’t meant for his children. It was in this way he had told me many horror stories from his experiences in Vietnam, but tonight’s tale was something different.

He made me swear to secrecy, even from my mother. Then paused for a moment, teasing me with the notion that I was unworthy of the covert intelligence at his disposal. Only after I begged and pleaded did he continue on.

He told me that Nikolai had been a member of an elite special forces unit in the USSR, and eventually the KGB. His job had been to eliminate people who spoke out against the government. My father spun this into a moral of how lucky we were to live in a country were we could do and say as we wished with out the fear of such consequences.

I was shocked, and my father could see the awe in my eyes. It was no surprise what governments were capable of, but I was bewildered that Nikolai had directly served such masters in his past. I believe it was my obvious reaction to this information that encouraged him to continue.

Then, as a good story teller does, he slowed the pacing and built up tension by hinting at his knowledge of a myterious Russian assassination technique. A practice so secret and difficult to master that it was only passed on to a handful of soldiers each year. Evidently, Nikolai had been one of these soldiers. When translated, to my fathers ears, the method in question was called “Nynoksmyrt.” According to Nikolai, with this technique, you could kill another man using only your finger tip.

As my father told me this, he took his index finger and poked me gently in the stomach. There was a moment of silence, likely triggered by my father seeing the shock on my face as I half expected to keel over dead from his touch to my belly.

At that moment my mother called him to the kitchen. He gave me a sincere smile, then patted me on the head. He stood up from the couch and bravely walked into the kitchen where my mother was waiting with another interrogation session.

I sat there on the couch lost in my thoughts. Though at that age, I did not yet know what morbid curiosity was, in retrospect it was exactly what would consume me. For better or for worse the word "Nynoksmert" had been imprinted on my young brain.

This was a time long before computers or the internet. When research was plagued by vague references in the Card Catolog. A host of public libraries offered only the most superficial information on modern military history, let alone classified Soviet assassination techniques. Over a period months my quest proved fruitless.

I began to believe that my father had lied to me, or perhaps Nikolai had simply shared an old Spetznaz fairy tale meant to frighten young children into conforming to the wishes of the ruling party.

One weekend I jumped at the opportunity to spend some time at the university library. At this time my father had been working as a recruiter for the college, with his office just across the foyer from the main library. While he finished work, I’d sit at those study tables pretending to be an adult as I sketched pictures and browsed microfiche. I used this opportunity to spend an entire afternoon blanketing the library for the tiniest morsel of information that would shed light on Nikolai’s tale.

In a dark, dusty, corner of the library, hidden somewhere in the history section of the third floor, I came across an aging book cataloging bizarre torture techniques over the centuries and how they had evolved into their modern day variations. The index took me to a section on Russian methods dating back to the 1700’s.

After a brief period of skimming I stopped on a rather graphic illustration of a finger being pressed into another mans naval. The section was titled “The Nynnoksmvrt Twist.”

In 1812, during the Franco-Russian War, a Russian general named “Kutusov” devised a technique for torturing captured soldiers of Napoleon’s Army. Vastly out numbered against Napolean, Kutusov fell back on a policy of Scorched Earth warfare, which eventually lead to Napoleans defeat. In the wake of the victory, the torture technique evolved into a form of specialized assassination, meant only for deserters and treasonists.

The assassin would drive their index finger deep into the navel of an enemy and with a brisk twisting motion, cause the enemies belly button to unravel or snap.

A moment later intestines would poor from their stomach onto the floor around them. If done artfully, as the Spetznaz, were taught to do, you would hear a little “POP” as if a bottle of wine had been uncorked. This would signal the eyes being released from their sockets, drug outward via the spinal column, from inside the skull, and dropped to the ground. Landing on top of the mess like two cherries on an ice cream Sunday.

As a naïve child fascinated with war, and G.I. Joe, my curiosity overcame me. I decided to ask Nikolai directly if he had ever performed the Nynnoksmvrt on a living person. If he was open to my requests for Ivan Drago impersonations, he may also be willing to share with me the secrets of his past as he did my father.

And so, one afternoon over a game of “Hi-Ho-Cherio” I broached the topic. The mood of the game took an immediate turn as his face became grim and serious. He raised his hand and looked at it, staring at those massive fingers, tips yellow from a man who smoked a pack a day, with skin thick and calloused from his work on the railroad.

After looking down at it for a moment that hand reached out, across the table, and gently landed on my shoulder.

“The Nynnoksmvrt is not for children” he said. His emotionless lips gave way to a concerned smile as he lifted his hand from my shoulder and he slowly stood up.

As he walked down the hall with his back to me, I heard him say. “Me and your father shall, how you say…have a chat?”

Ursula Precipitata

2010-06-18T17:49:00.000-07:00

Off the roof.

2010-06-15T07:28:00.000-07:00

Blodwynn Morgana

2010-06-01T22:01:00.000-07:00

Calvin and Nanuq

2010-06-01T21:30:00.000-07:00

Calvin Encinata had grown quite anxious living in the city. You see, dear reader, a Bible placed in the hands of a child with an overactive imagination can be a terrible curse. So it was for little Calvin.

Like Chicken Little he was waiting for the sky to fall. He’d look up in panic with the roar of a jet, or grew flush with dread as a single sinful thought passed between his ears. He sought to flee his urban existence for fear he could be living in the next Gomorrah. So began a childhood fascination with the most remote mountains of the world.

His sister, Alicia, had run away long ago^[1], leaving him all alone in his sheltered, homeschooled, hell. But she left him with two gifts which would one day inspire him to make his escape. On the night she left, under his bed pillow he discovered a cassette tape and a childrens book...

The 90 minute Maxell recording tape was unlabeled, and it's write protect tabs had been snapped off. He had assumed it was a message from his estranged sister, though he would discover it was a collection of songs unlike any he had heard before. "Led Zeppelin IV" would change his life, forever giving Christian music the aspartame taint of caffeine free diet rock.

The book was titled "Oh the Places You'll Go!". He would commit to memory these words by an odd man named Dr. Suess:

"So...
be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray
or Mordecai Ali Van Allen O'shea
you're off to Great Places!
Today is your day!
Your Mountain is waiting.
So...get on your way!"

These words ignited him. You see dear reader, now more then ever, Calvin was certain that he would one day make it to those mountains he saw in his dreams. To spite his parents for imbuing him with the fear of God he embraced his craving for catechism of the non-creationist sort. And so Calvin gave up theology and garnered a mechanical engineering degree with a minor in marine biology.

Here our tale takes a sad turn. For school was meant to purge those pious fears via his knack for science; instead his studies saddled him with even more trepidation. He came to see the world around him as a petri dish of death. Thus he surmised that anything eaten, inhaled, or touched contained microscopic pariah on par with any demon the old testament could conjure.

The world was dusted over with a thin, invisible layer of carcinogens. Virulent strains of hemorrhagic bacteria waiting patiently with one primary goal in mind: to be absorbed into his blood stream. There they would swiftly be stored away in his fat cells, biding their time, gestating, slowly uncurling microscopic tentacles to infect their neighbors. He imagined every cell in his body as a ticking time bomb; cellular torpedoes set to seek out his brain and induce dementia at any given moment. A common cold or the most subtle episode of forgetfulness could send him into panic attacks.

After graduation Calvin became a port worker in Vancouver B.C., using his skills to keep the portainer cranes running smoothly in the shipyards. On weekends he would drive into those mountains which towered over the city. It saddened him to discover they could'nt give him the solace he thought they would provide. Perhaps he was still too close to the city?

And thus his anxieties overcame him and he fled deep into the mountains of the Yukon. Bringing only a fishing rod, his Brahma chickens, Mattie and Marian, and an Alaskan Husky named Nanuq^[2]. Casting away his dependence on Paxil, Ativan, Prozac, and Klonopin. He sought a new beginning without god or science. Trusting only a sketchbook^[3], his pets, and a daily dose of Ginko Bilboa and Saint Johns Wart.

Every night, after washing his hands until they bled, the anxiety would slowly taper away. He’d lay there in bed wondering if god created cancer to make him afraid, or a cancerous brain had unnaturally increased his fear of god.

Like clockwork, at midnight his dog would leap up onto the bed and rest his head on Calvin’s thigh. The Husky would stare directly into his eyes with that crumpled dog brow illustrating concern for his master. Eventually Calvin would fall asleep with Nanuq resting peacefully at the foot of the bed.

Hell hath no fury like a Scientologist scorned.

2010-05-28T17:02:00.000-07:00

At this very moment, somewhere in the midwest...this has been going on for thirty minutes…

He clasps his hands together and brings them to his mouth as he lets out a deep sigh, as if this feeble discussion is above him. Psychologists, familiar with body language, would tell you this is often a sign of perceived omnipotence. Of course scientology is waging a war on psychology, so I dare not say a thing.

As he exhales he begins to speak again, with his hands still at his mouth. Never making eye contact with me. Only looking off into the distance, with a deep contemplative look as if his insights into my psyche are a stress to his regular pattern of pristine thought.

“You see Bart, what you do for a living is a want in our society. It is not a need. You have no idea of what it is to provide something that is necessary for our society to perpetuate itself.”

Considering I’ve been spending most of my nights in the room he’s renting out to the spunky girl from Italy…I’d say I’m very keen on what it takes for our society to perpetuate itself.

“You, Bart, simply have not experienced what life is all about; you’re young of course. Not as young as me when I realized what the world was about, but that is OK." As he says “OK” he gently puts his hand out has if to stop an over eager car at a cross walk) “I’m one of the fortunate ones of course. Due to this lack of experience you simply have no idea what life is all about. You, my young friend…cannot fathom.”

“It occurred to me that you never crossed over Bart. Yes you entered the adult world. Yes you live outside of your family’s reach. Yes you provide for yourself. But no…you have never even remotely crossed over. I can remember when I…”

I interrupt him, “what the fuck does crossed over mean?”

He puts his hands together, palms flat this time, as if he’s preying, his knuckles move to his lower lip and press to it as he makes an expression of deep, straining thought.

He exhales a long slow breath...

He exhales again, the look of his thought process growing more intense...

He then shakes his head and says, “you know Bart, …you simply could not comprehend it.”

“Ahhh, of course, now it all makes sense to me…” I think to myself.

“L.R.H once said, Bart, that life is a long journey, and blah blah blah blah blah blah, P.T. Suppression, blah blah blah, according to L.R.H. blah blah blah…”

When he begins to talk in terms of scientology that’s all I hear. Slurs and random meaningless acronyms. Sometimes I pick up nothing at all. This is a good thing.

“Bob” I say, “This is very simple, you promised me a four month lease. And now I have less then one week till the end of the month and you have suddenly decided that you’ll only sign a one-year lease. I have no time to find anyplace else to live and I can’t afford to sign a one-year lease. My life is too uncertain right now. I’ve been laid off twice in the past yea…”

Bob cuts in, “You know Bart, …that right there is the problem. You see, I don’t know where you spend all of your time, but you’re never home here. And if you’re always getting laid off, that tells me that you aren’t working very efficiently in whatever job you are working on. If it were me, I’d make myself, unexpendable. I would work so intensely, and so hard, that they could never even afford to lay me off. Clearly Bart…this is not the case with you.”

I feel my fists clench. The only thing I remember from Karate in 3rd grade was the instructor telling me “do not punch the board, but punch THROUGH the board, see your fist on the other side.” At this moment I am imagining my fist on the other side of Bob’s face, resting comfortably in the soft squishiness of his brain tissue. If L. Ron. Hubbard is looking down on me from that shiny sci-fi heaven which is his…he is not happy with me right now, dare I say he’s reserved a special section for me in scientological hell.

“But Bob, I think my situation is a bit dif…”

“You see Bart. You speak to my point. You need to settle and stay in a place, and focus all your effort and physical energies on a single purpose. Don’t set yourself up for what LRH would call…oh never mind, you wouldn’t understand anyway.”

I can’t help but giggle to myself. Yet I want to tell him what type of person the man he idolizes (almost as a god) truly was. Is it cruel that I do not? Would he even believe me if I did? Launderer, plagiarist, con artist, wife beater, paranoid schizophrenic, drug abuser…

"...This is why I’ve decided I’m only going to offer you a one year lease. The rent is cheap...but more importantly... You need to be in a situation where you are forced to settle Bart. To deal with life, and not just get up and move to a new place when you are faced with adversity. I can help you with these things.”

God, what did I do to deserve this crap? God being whichever one is listening that is not affiliated with this fruitcake.

Without wasting a second more of my precious time I pick up my cell phone and dial a number. Bob stops speaking, curious to see who I could possibly call that would be important enough to break in on one of his rants.

“Chris, what’s up, hey man, this is Bart. Month to month lease right? Great, I’ll take it”

I snap my cell phone closed and walk into my room, slam the door, and begin packing. Without waiting for him to knock and continue his rant I crank up track 9 on Sticky Fingers.

And this is how our precious time together ends. With me telling him to fuck off via Mick Jagger.

Igor Koulikovsky

2010-05-20T23:19:00.000-07:00

Keep Santa Cruz Weird

2010-05-20T07:49:00.000-07:00

On my first day in Santa Cruz I saw this bumper sticker mounted on the rear window of an old VW bug, driven by an aging surf bum with his board mounted on top. “Keep Santa Cruz Weird” it said. It made me laugh, though I took it with a grain of salt. In my expierience, there were many places that claimed to be things they were not. I would soon discover that Santa Cruz was not one of them.

Rarely in my experience has there been a place whose reputation for something has lived up to the claim it stakes. People make such claims on whim or assumptions based on brief visits. No such claim can ever be validated until you have actually LIVED in the place in question. In all the places I’ve lived there has only been two that have lived up to the hype of their reputation. One is Detroit (‘nuff said) and the other being Santa Cruz...

It’s hard to explain, its something in the water…a feeling in the air. Something was always just a little off kilter in that damned little town. The problem wasn’t that you were on edge; the problem was that you were far too at ease. One could say it was too perfect. It was like the society ignored the larger picture, that this tiny patch of beach side land situated at the top corner of the Monterey bay, trapped between the ocean and the red woods of the Santa Cruz mountains, was plagued by things that aren’t supposed to exist. And yet the naïve citizens of this community go about their daily business enjoying their perfect climate and pretending that all is fine and dandy in their nifty little ocean side community.

They overlook the pale, skin and bone gutter punks that line the streets and look like they are infected with some rare skin disease. They ignore the freak butterfly invasion, the fortune tellers, the frighteningly charismatic street musicians, and frighteningly beautiful cross dressers.

They overlook the 7 foot man dressed in the blue plush jester outfit, his face concealed behind a mysterious mask; standing on a box playing strange instruments while he hypnotizes children like the pied piper did rats. They ignore the group of well-to-do woman who would gather outside my apartment every weekend, dressed in strange outfits, singing bizarre ritualistic chants, and then stop to stare at you as you’d pass. Giving you a sadistically evil eye as you uncompfortably made your way to town. Only when you were a fair distance away would you hear the chanting begin again.

They overlook the zombie like man who walks with one foot in front of the other, literally toe to toe at a mathematically even pace, up and down the main street. He is a brick wall; his eyes looking only forward, nothing can be done to make him acknowledge your existence. A joker like perma-smile plastered on his face while holding a big black umbrella above his head. Umbrella? It never rains in Santa Cruz. Theres barely ever a cloud in the sky.

They ignore the bizarre noise that would permeate the town at night and roll in off the ocean like the sounds of sirens luring men out to their deaths. At first you’d think it was the sea lions...but listen closer.

Though not too close.

At night, we would drink on that pier, listening to the seagulls and the waves crashing. We would stay up all night hedging our bets on the origin of this uncanny utopia. We knew that if the dead should rise, we would have no where to run, trapped between the mountains and the ocean.

Some thought the town was constructed over an Indian burial ground or a ghost ship lay sunk just off its beaches. No one questioned the existence of the vampires that inhabited the mountains, deep in the forests, hanging upside down from the limbs of the giant redwoods waiting for night fall.

I was a firm believer that everyone in the town was a member of a secret cult. The town had clearly been brainwashed and coerced to play out its mysterious agenda. Or perhaps Santa Cruz is just a door way…a door way to some other place. A skewed alternate reality where man, as we know him, is not meant to exist.

And the fog rolls in at night and the secrets reveal themselves, but you can only discover them one at a time, because that is the nature of fog. It prevents you from seeing everything at once. And so right when you think you have it figured out is usually when you’ve lost your way and discover you’re all alone, deep in the Santa Cruz mountains. Surrounded by pine trees, darkness, and the knowledge that there is something out there in those trees. Something waiting for you to let your guard down. Something that’s been leading you deeper and deeper into the forest.

So don’t stray too far from the main streets. Don’t ask too many questions or appear too suspicious. And whatever you do…well, I cant post it here for fear of what would happen to my family and friends. But some night over a few drinks you might get it out of me if you’re lucky. And that’s all I’ll say.

And after a while I felt myself being infected. Like the body snatchers were curling their plant like tentacles deep into my flesh, while I watched my clone come alive as I died a slow dreamy death. I realized that I had accumulated secrets that no one should know. Done things that weren’t right, but here in Santa Cruz weren’t necessarily wrong. I was not the person I used to be. I felt like I was not a person at all. I was becoming something else. A ghost perhaps, or more likely one of these creatures that apathetically inhabit the streets of Santa Cruz and is sucked into the timeless eternity that this town perpetuates.

You never die...you just get stranger. Until that one rainless day you find yourself with an umbrella, shuffling down the street toe to toe.

But that said, I never learned what the slogan “Keep Santa Cruz weird” meant until the week before I left. A local explained it all to me. It seemed that a more conservative branch of the city council had tried to push a measure that forbids street performers from performing within 40 feet of any entrance or window of downtown establishments. Theaters, restaurants, bars…everything. To enforce such a law would mean the literal extermination of all street performers and one of the vital assets that made this weird fucking community so god damn fascinating.

There was an immediate outcry of protest. Within days posters and bumper stickers were printed that simply said “Keep Santa Cruz weird!”

And eventually the law was rebuked. And to spite those who tried to push the measure through the town initiated another plan that allowed for the street musicians to register themselves and receive a payment for their mysterious gifts.

And so dear reader, our story ends happily. In the sense that Santa Cruz, though suffering a bit from the effects of commercialism, is still as fucking weird as ever.

And sad in the sense…that I am not there any more to be infected by it.

Calista Corazone

2010-05-18T23:49:00.000-07:00

Last Race of the Zanzibar 3

2010-05-18T17:25:00.000-07:00

He was the best at what he did. And what he did was race RC cars.

Yet it masked his loneliness, and his inability to forge a relationship with a real person. All he had were these tiny cars, the racing trophies on his shelf, and a Redline Carrera 2 BMX bike handed down from his older brother.

His brother had been his one true friend, and when he left for state college two years prior, the adjustment had been difficult. His mother worked full time and his father was an alcoholic. An introvert by nature, Anton Zimmer was an outcast who found solace only in his hobby.

These battery powered race cars were his obsession. Over the last two years he had forged many great vehicles but there was one that had vastly out performed all the rest. The one he had poured all his heart, soul, and the hard earned paper route dollars into: the Zanzibar 3. The third and most perfect iteration of the Zanzibar series. It represented the apex of his technical and aesthetic skills.

One tragic summer night, in front of his house, he sought to push the ZANZIBAR 3’s RC controlled handling to its limits. So much so that he was oblivious to a Volkswagen weaving awkwardly down his culdesac. The Zanzibar was racing a series of figure 8’s. Anton decreased the radius of his turns with each lap, while subtly increasing speed, as the figure 8’s grew smaller and smaller. The tiny racecar was nothing more then a blur to the casual observer...

Taking only one lane, he assumed this drill would provide plenty of freedom for oncoming traffic. As the Volkswagen approached it abruptly swerved out of the lane it was mean to be in. The impact didn’t register so much as a speed bump. The Zanzibar 3 was flattened, as if it had been a paper cup.

The car stopped. From the drivers seat a 16 year old girl stepped out, followed by her father on the passenger side. Her hand went over her mouth in horror as she looked down to see the flattened RC car lying at her feet.

Ava Selkirk’s father had been giving her driving lessons, it was her first time behind the wheel. While trying to down shift gears on the aging VW Rabbit, she had momentarily lost focus on steering. Long enough to swerve out from her chosen lane and crunch the Zanzibar 3 to a plastic pancake.

Only a sad little Antenna remained vertical. Bent awkwardly out of shape, hanging limply in an ark that connected to the plastic corpse at its base. It gave the impression that it had frantically tried to escape the oncoming car. It was still bobbing gently up and down, in denial, trying to convince itself everything would be ok.

That’s when Ava noticed him standing there. The remote control still in his hands with his finger pressing down on the throttle. Tears leaking out from under his fake Louis Vuitton sunglasses, which were held together by an odd combination of duct tape and wire.

“I’m so sorry.” she said.

Ava and her father invited him to dinner that night. The very next weekend he would join Ava in driving lessons. Unlike her he would quickly adapt to driving a real vehicle. The summer would end with them taking long walks together, watching B horror flicks, and sneaking out the VW Rabbit and doing donuts through the gravel of the stadium parking lot.

Over time Ava’s father helped him buy back the pieces to construct the Zanzibar 4. But it would never be completed. Anton was devoted to a new pastime. Her name was Ava Selkirk.

Syringeous (The Nano Implantor)

2010-05-14T23:00:00.000-07:00

Death Knell of a Sharpie

2010-05-14T13:12:00.000-07:00

It was about 5 in the morning and everyone had shimmied off to bed. Either due to being exhausted, or being offended by my inaudible knackered rants. I stayed up pouring myself drinks and working furiously to polish off the bottle of 151. At some point, sitting there by myself in the wee hours of the morning, I became conscious of the fact that I was entering the point of no return. I was now in that fuzzy area, drifting swiftly to that point where memory is worthless. I had drank enough that I would likely not remember anything, especially if I continued at my current pace. In this realization I was inspired to attempt an experiment. And so I began writing notes in the hope that they would remind me the next morning of what strange thoughts were going through my mind this early Sunday morning.

Standing out on that cold deck overlooking the back yard. The fog had descended making it seem like the entire world consisted only of this tiny little patch of land, and to march beyond that opaque boundary you would most certainly take an infinite dive from the edge of my tiny little Bacardi induced utopia. And there I sat for a time, with the entire world asleep and only the hazy glow of lights off in the distance to keep me company. And one of those lights spoke to me. Told me secrets that I was not meant to know. And at some point, evidently, I became convinced that my ultimate purpose in this world had been revealed to me. My one true purpose. My singular divine purpose. I ran to my pad of paper and furiously jotted it down. This much i remembered, although vaguely.

Over the course of the next 2 hours, and the rest of the bottle of Bacardi, I emptied the entirety of a sharpie marker onto some 30 pages of typing paper recording every nuance of this image in my mind. Despite my state, there was perfect clarity...

It was simple, and elegant, and obtainable. My path was laid out for me in its entirety and it all made perfect sense. If there is such a thing as divine intervention, it could not be far from what I was experiencing.

But I was in that place of darkness; I had crossed the point of hazy recollection and partial recall long ago. I knew that if I did not record this thing, in all of its vivid inspirational detail…it would be lost. Because my memory, in its current state, could not sustain it.

I labored over it…and eventually I finished, as the sun was peeking its rays through the trees and the fog was lifting. And for a few minutes I sat there. With a dead sharpie marker, an aching wrist, 30 pages of what I believed could possibly be pure brilliance, and the knowledge that the next day I would awake and be completely surprised at this strange letter sitting next to me in my own handwriting. I must have folded up these pages gently. And with the sharpies death gasp I scrawled on the back of the folded memoir… “Hope you got some sleep old boy…good morning…now take the time to read this”

*************

I woke up the next morning, in great pain. Dehydrated, feeling like my head had been plucked from a dog’s ass. Hating my existence. And I rolled over, and sitting next to me when was a tiny stack of typing paper folded in half…with the words “Hope you got some sleep old boy…good morning…now take the time to read this” written on top of it. And though I wrote them earlier that morning, my eyes were now seeing them for the first time.

And somehow…through the fog of my hangover…I thought…“My god. I think last night I may have discovered something very important about myself.” And so I jumped out of bed and furiously opened my midnight memoirs...excited to see what deep, mysterious, insight into my psyche I had unraveled.

And I discovered that my last act, before giving into my exhaustion and making my way to the couch, must have been spilling my drink directly onto the stack of papers.

For all that remained of “my purpose on this earth” was 30 pages of smeared, indiscernible sharpy ink that smelled like Bacardi 151.

Quanika Callar

2010-05-11T23:15:00.000-07:00

A Winters Worth of Dog Shit

2010-05-11T19:39:00.000-07:00

Hell hath no fury like a meter maid in 90% humidity just before her shift is up. Unless, of course perdition is where the situation presents itself.

So, dear reader, let me set the stage for you...

It’s the busy season, the mercury’s boiling and the humidity is thicker then two day old shit on a gravy soaked biscuit. An it goes without saying that the ass end of the afterlife ain’t no temperate climate.

I’ve locked up the office. Everyone is long gone. Only the echoes of my footsteps inhabit these lonely halls. Government work doesn’t pay OT. And as usual I’ve put in more then my fair share.

So it’s late in the day. I’m beat, wanting nothing more then to drink a cheap beer, watch the news, then doze off to crime drama mind rot.

Given my slightly surly disposition, I didn’t react well when I walked out the front door to discover my vehicle getting a ticket hammered down on it. I had come face to face with the queen demon bitch of all meter maids.

Sure the meter was expired, by just 3 GOD DAMN MINUTES. But I approached her with cordial suave. Burying my frustration I squarely looked her in the eyes and said;

“Thanks miss, but that won’t be necessary. Ya Dig.” I even tagged on a little wink; just to drive home my oratory debonair.

Gently, at first, she turned to me. Black lashes fluttered above insect eyes. Mingling amongst her deceptive smile, and a thick cockney accent, her mouth released these words:

"Listen closely mother fuckah...this ain’t like tipping an extra 5 quid because you dig your baristas bum and a dash of flirty chit chat. This shit ain’t optional. Ya Dig?

Completely rattled by her aggressive, and certainly unfounded verbal attack, I take a step back feeling like I had just been blasted by a jet engine lighting up.

She turned to continue her business, filling out the ticket. The second ticket I now noticed…and I could feel my anger rise.

“Listen ma’am, I’m a lead public defender for the main office of Dis, I work directly under Mammon and this is…”

“Oh, is that a Halo around your head?”

Her sarcasm wasn’t appreciated. Everyone knows angels don’t have halos.

And besides, I was obviously no angel. In truth I’m not sure who or what I was. Memory is a fleeting thing down here. Occasionally vague nostalgia washes up on your shores, but the tide rolls out quickly; leaving you standing barefoot in the sand wishing for one last wave to crash.

A couple hundred years ago I landed on the fringe. Out on the most remote borders of this place. For which my sins couldn’t have been too terrible, as its known as the “Circle of the Uncommitted.”

Uncommitted to what you may enquire?

Lets just say its not unlike a retirement home for swing voters; chock full monocle clad intellectuals, D&D aficionados, and on-the-fence ivy league professors who got the plug pulled before they could come to terms with “the great mystery.”

Folks who can’t make up their minds about dinner, let alone faith. Punishments were modest but the days were long. Their ideal afterlife consisted of a pack of Marlboros, a bottle of cognac, and a heated theology debate over crumpets and tea.

I’d walk down to the beach, and on a clear day I could see through the fog, to the Circle of Lust just beyond. I’d catch a glimpse of those sirens of the damned, taunting me, calling me out to join them.

It was time to move on.

I needed a job and that meant relocating to the Sixth circle; The city of Dis, home of the heretics and the Burning Tombs. Sure crime increased and life got a bit more complicated. Fuck, it’s the city. But it was more interesting than listening to a bunch of gaudy snobs debating the pros and cons of being a Buddhist bodhisattva in Nirvana vs. a saint in Christian non-denominational heaven.

It was quite simple really. My credit was good, I took out a loan to pay Charon. And I was off to bigger and better things.

Here in Dis, it may indeed be bit more complicated. But its also more interesting. And, I’ve discovered, when you’re down on your luck sliding deeper into the abyss, a little challenge can make all the difference in your state of mind.

It took time. Maybe decades. But I paid my dues and worked my way up the ranks. I started as an assistant. I worked with Simonists, Soothsayers, Hypocrites and Thieves. And eventually Blasphemers, Sodomites, and Gluttons.

Today I do casework for the big boys. Geryon, Barbariccia and Belial. On occasion I’ve been lucky enough to work with the chairman of the council; Beelzebub himself.

Sure, the majority of my time is spent doing sentencing for atypical gluttons and the greedy. Occassionally I’ll get lucky and deal in Heretic litigation, but I’ve never worked a solo case that’s gone beyond the 7th circle. I cant help but dream of high profile cases beyond the abyss. And certainly outside the wretched walls of Dis.

Oh Malebolge, you seem so far away.

-------------------

So here I am.

Fighting with a meter maid on the dilapidated streets of Dis; as Pintos, Porsches, and worn down jalopies cruise by. Battling their way home through rush hour traffic.

I decide to vent my frustrations toward her, and only three words escape from my mouth, “Jesus Christ Lady…”

“…Christ ain’t got nothing to do with this shit, sorry to break you in on current events here law man; but you’re about as far away from Christ as you’ll ever fucken be. And even if he was here, in the holy flesh, it wouldn’t stop me from ticketing your ass.”

Though technically I only believe the first half of her statement to be true, I take a deep soothing breath, then rub my eyes. I calmly remind myself that I’m in no mood to argue.

It’s then I realize she’s still staring me down, waiting for another remark with which she can reflect back on me with witty pestilence.

She begins to speak in the ancient tongue, The official dialect that the innocent use to speak to the guilty, a stab at flexing her wit into the realm of intelligence.

“Cut the shit lady. Just give me my fucken ticket and be done with it.”

Seeing that I’m defeated, she turns and finishes up. Her blood red, pseudo transparent claws scrawl the last of what she needs to record. She turns and gives me one last “don’t fuck with the meter maid glance” and goes about her business.

And despite my suppressed rage I realize I’m very lucky to be where I’m at. I could be on the streets, trapped in the body of a second rate street demon directing traffic. I could be taking appeals and repentance submissions at the icy gates of Giudecca. I could be administering flesh tortures or shoveling coal to keep the blood boiling at Phlegethon. I could be twisting the heads of Soothsayers or delivering Leprosy, Madness, and Hemorhaghic fevers to the Alchemists in Bolgia 10.

I was blessed to get the job I have. And case work suits me just fine.

Sure the humidity sucks here, but at least its warm, and there’s a great bagel shop two blocks from my bungalow. Its fucking Florida with an ocean of blood. Saltwater with a tint. Please file your complaints at the front desk. The one by the gate with the inscription that reads: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”

Nah, the inscription should have read “its a coin toss baby, but you certainly can get your teeth kicked in.”

Heck…I could be back in the Midwest. With the snow melting, dealing with a winters worth of dog shit on the ground. Putrid smells permeating the air like the stockyards in a Nebraska farm town. I’ll take the scent of sulfur anyday; and with a smile on my face ta boot.

That’s odd…was I from the Midwest?

I take a moment to contemplate this memory, before it disappears and I loose it forever. But I make the mistake of glancing at the tickets, the second fine being twice the amount of the first.

“GOD DAMN!” I say aloud.

From two cars down I hear the meter maid reply with a hearty smile on her face:

“Shiiiiit mother fucker...you don’t get it...”

She turns to face me and somehow contorts her beastial mug into a look of feigned motherly sincerity.

“Honey…damned is exactly what you are. Congratulations chief, you’re here for the long haul.”

And she turns to walk away, laughing as she saunters to her next target. With her back to me, she points the index finger of her claw directly into the sky and I faintly hear her say “Besides hoss…he ain’t in charge down here anyway.” She continues laughing as she disappears into a cloud of thick steam which escapes from a street vent.

Everyone’s a fucking comedian.

Profile of a Cat Killer.

2010-05-07T15:30:00.000-07:00

I knew this guy. He lived down the hall from me when I lived in this rat infested tenement building in Minneapolis. He was an odd bird this guy. Had two cats. They made that mean old bastard feel at ease. Ironically, I suspect they made him feel a bit more in touch with the world too. Only damn thing on this earth he truly loved.

Sometimes I’d pick up cat food for him, drop it off, he’d pay me, then the door would shut without a word. A few dimes in the karma bank never hurt anyone.

One morning, one mean motherfuckin Minnesota winter morning, I awoke to some commotion down the hall. Got up, threw on some long johns and peaked out my front door. The man was being hauled away by two burly cops, firmly handcuffed, pissed off as ever. Was strange. Mean as he was, I never figured him for a felon or a sex offender. And that was the last I ever saw of him.

That Friday I was down at the front desk paying my rent and I asked the landlord what was up. I’ll never forget the look that came over her face, as she put her hand over her eyes and told me the story. She said that he had been in the building for decades. She suspected that as the years passed the cats had become his only friends. He never left his place, never attempted to.

She said she'd done her best to fit the pieces together, and from it all this is what she'd observed. Despite his love for those cats, every 6 or 7 years he began to secretly look forward to the death of one. As he perpetually had two, there was always another to keep him company...

He enjoyed the trip to the humane society, the way the hostess greeted him, thanked him for his generosity, sheltering a stray and the like. It made him feel grounded and human. He enjoyed bringing a new member into his family, and watching them grow up and take on a personality all their own. Always unique, always fascinating. But without fail this fascination would always wear off. Slowly erode away until all that was left was contempt, as the cats would grow into those aloof, independant hunters that they are. So eventually he found himself slipping tiny amounts of arsenic into his cats meals. Just a very tiny amount, enough to have them slowly get sick, so he could once enjoy the feeling of their dependance on him, shaving a few years off their life. He enjoyed the last few months especially, that feeling of being desperately needed by him, in those final weeks before their death. And eventually…his cats were dieing every two weeks.

The girl from the front desk had been doing grocery runs for him. She became suspicious when for two years straight he ordered nothing but kitten food, and she noticed the cats that met her at the door were different every time. She gave into her curiosity, and being the landlord, demanded that she be let inside his apartment for an impromptu inspeciton. And when he let her in, she saw it. There. In the corner it stood.

What it was…I’m not really sure. Cause over the past few sentences I ran out of steam. So fuck you. Go read some pro bloggers bloggery about political scandals, or the war, or how “Survivor” Guam is wrapping up. I got nothing on those guys. Lower your expectations of me. You watch too much damn TV as it is. Reading more would do you good. I’m tired. Good night.

And god speed.

Caliope Zespan

2010-04-30T16:12:00.000-07:00

She’s typically shy and introverted, loving nothing more then a book in the park on a warm sunny day. The one exception to this being her obsession with men’s clubs. She’s fascinated by those large fake breasts the way small children are fascinated by goldfish in a bowl. Especially those breasts with just a hint of glitter. During the occasional lap dance, if the breasts in question lack these sparkly flakes she’s been known to reach into her pocket and provide her own. The strippers, typically, are quite receptive to this. She believes a fake rack without glitter is like a summer movie lacking popcorn.

She lost her mother to the ratcatcher outbreak in '78.

She survived a Catholic upbringing and now sleeps on a bed of nails.

The Anti-Eastwood

2010-04-28T23:14:00.000-07:00

Who Eats Who?

2010-04-28T17:29:00.000-07:00

You do not eat it, it eats you. And slowly you die from the inside out.

It secretes, what may be, a morphine like derivative. One can only speculate. But one thing is certain…you think you are at peace. That the world is just fine. That re runs of Oprah are 2 thumbs up, and only because the remote is buried too deep in the cushions for you to excavate it and search for Jerry Springer.

It allows you to convince yourself that you aren’t bent out of shape waiting 4 years for the next Harry Potter book. And that if the chick you met online isn’t down for shacking up after a gin ginger ale and a spritzer of cannabis then she’s just prude, and simple, and you’re smarter then her anyway.

Eventually you notice the blotches on your skin. But you keep eating it and it keeps eating you. And the blotches turn bright red. As you are on the way to see the doctor one of them bursts open and blood and entrails pour out from your stomach, but it doesn’t feel half bad. Now you are dizzy and your fluids are filling the base of your car. Things are going from fuzzy to black, and all you can think about is that you are depreciating the resell value of your vehicle by mucking up the interior.

And when you awake you are no longer you...

It owns your memories but does not allow you access to them. It replaces the little bits of missing flesh on your tummy with its own tissue, a thin little Kleenex like membrane that prevents further intestinal drainage. Then it walks your body to the meat market in the center of down town. The one behind the Starbucks just off 3rd street, and the butcher welcomes you with a hug and a pat on the back. Even though you do not know the butcher, it really does not matter, you are not you. Who the butcher recognizes is someone else, someone else swimming in your skin. You are just along for the ride, it owns you now and you bend to its will, even though you are not allowed access to its thoughts. You are just a marionette carrying out a thoroughly rehearsed performance.

The butcher gives you a handsome little reward, though you aren’t sure why. Witch you then take to the bank and deposit in your account (but it’s not your account, its someone else’s…that person or thing pulling the strings, the one who has consumed you).

Then you return to the butcher. He tips his hat as if to say “tah tah for now mate” There is a brief handshake and then he swipes you across the neck with his meat cleaver. Not in a violent hateful way. In a smooth, nonchalant, business like way.

He then cuts you into tiny pieces. Your choice bits get shrink wrapped and have little blue ribbons pasted on them. Your leftovers and bone get hung from an iron wrack in a pressurized room. The room fills with highly concentrated blasts of steam. The steam heats and liquefies the gristle, and the last bits of meat drip from your bones onto a collection filter on the ground, and your bones get tossed out. The remains get poured from the filter into a blender with a corn starch paste and puréed. This gets tossed into a little can labeled “cat food.” And by the end of the day you (and it) sit neatly wrapped in roughly 50 separate cans, packages, and display cases.

2/3rds of you will be sold out to other people. People who will cook you for dinner, or pack your for lunch, only to slowly be consumed from the inside out. Eventually they too will return to the butcher, just as you did this day. Like you, they will take his money and drop it into the same mysterious bank account, then continue the cycle over again until the butcher has made ground beef and pork cutlets out of a fair portion of the upper east side. All will merge into this uni-conscience, this meat eaters hive mind.

Eventually it will have you (mixed in equal proportions with thousands of other people) cash out the account and retire to a time share in the Bahamas during the off season, and perhaps a bungalow in London’s West Indian Quay during the summer months.

The last 1/3rd of you will sit in the butchers display case and rot under the neon lights until you are thrown into a rusty dumpster 5 days later and you will be finished off by flies, maggots, and the occasional crow.

But fear not. Take heart in the fact that they are not eating you.

In reality it is you eating them.

Bleak Deakins

2010-04-27T23:00:00.000-07:00

A 3 Foot Wick On Your Dynamite Stick

2010-04-27T16:06:00.000-07:00

He held the stick of dynamite sideways. Tightly in the palm of his fist, so its length was parallel with the ground. The wick was off to the side, gently arcing downwards.

He reached his free hand into his jacket, retrieving a thin red disposable lighter. Only then did I get a little nervous.

He turned towards me and said, “Now ya may not know this, but there’s rules to lighting a stick of dynamite. Ya hold it like this, so the wick goes off to the side or down. Ya never do it like ya see in the movies, where they hold it wick up. Cause if you light it wick up…and one single spark should fall to the base...well, heh heh…then I’ll be picking your pieces up and mailing ‘em back to your mum in a box. Hear me?

I nodded.

---------------------------

My parents had been on my case to get a job for weeks. I was 17 at the time, and a job was the last thing on my mind. Summer was dominated by soccer, swimming at the lakes, attending bonfires hidden deep within that infinite stretch of Midwestern cornfields, or far upstream on remote bends of the Missouri river. I had an on again off again girl friend, and solving the mysteries of the female mind was a far more pressing issue then finding a job.

Despite my lack of diligence, my mom pulled me aside one day and said she had found a job for me, whether I liked it or not. She gave me the address, then told me she didn’t know much about it except that it was definitely hard labor, and it definitely paid well. There was little room to argue, I clearly didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. “You start on Monday, 7:00. a.m.” she said as she walked away. And that was that.

I drove down one of those barren Midwest roads. If not for the occasional marker, it easily could have been any other country road in the state. About 20 miles outside of town I took a right onto a dirt road, the name of which I’ve long since forgotten. Eventually tall cornstalks eclipsed the horizon off to my left and right, they swallowed all hints of civilization...

Down this winding path I continued, until abruptly I slammed on my brakes in the gravel driveway of a farmhouse. I went to the front door and knocked, there was no answer. Out behind the house I could see an enormous dump truck. It was releasing a big black pile of what I hoped was not manure. There were two men there, so I headed in that direction.

The farmer was a gruff angry looking man. Thin wisps of grey hair gave way to the etched wrinkles of a perma frown; dressed in weathered, dirt caked denim from head to toe.

As I approached the farmer handed the driver of the dump truck a large wad of money and told him thanks. He got in his truck, wheeled it around and drove away; not hesitating for a second to count his payment. Clearly they shared that unsaid bond common to men of Midwest blue collar roots. A bond that had undeniably passed me up.

The farmer turned to me, and in that deep hollow rasp of a man who has spent a lifetime smoking he said sternly, “You the city boy?”

“Uhhhh…yeah.”

“Boy I’m gunna put you to work.” He reached into the inside of his jacket and pulled out what appeared to be a stick of dynamite. He unwound a twist tie, and a long silvery wick dropped to the ground.
------------------------------------------------------

Second rule of light’n a stick of dynamite…always assume your sparks have a 1 foot radius. So…let’s pretend you have stick of dynamite with a one foot wick, and you light it up. Good chance you aren’t going to get two steps away and…BOOM!!!

I jumped back a bit, my heart pounding.

“Heh heh…you city boys sure are twitchy.” He chuckled a bit as he shook his head.

“Now third.” He said, “Always estimate that each foot of wick you have is 4 seconds of time before she blows. But, never…NEVER include that first foot in your estimation. Understand me boy?!”

“Yeah. I think so.”

“I don’t want ya to think! I wantcha ta know! Now how much time we got?!!”

So far I wasn’t liking this job so much. The wick appeared to be roughly 3 feet long. “Uhhh…8 seconds?,” I replied.

“Good enough…not bad for a city boy. Alright then.”

I followed him towards the hill released by the dump truck, which to my relief was composed of dirt, not manure as I had earlier supposed. Next to the mountain there was a rusty iron disk in the ground, about an inch thick and roughly two feet in diameter. The disk was split down the middle, the two halves resting on a circular concrete base.

“Now here.” He said, and out of his coat he pulled a wad of cash, saturated in dirt and grime. A rubber band held the money in a tight spiral. He handed it to me and I stuffed it in my pocket, later I would discover it was twenty-five $20 bills.

He then slid away two iron plates and we were staring down into the blackness of a deep dried up well. I barely had a second to ponder what my job may be when I realized the farmer had lit the dynamite stick, and gently tossed it into the well. I could hear its harsh sizzling sound dissipate as it vanished into the pit.

I turned around and realized the farmer had already begun running. Sheer panic threw me into a desperate sprint, I ran as hard and fast as I could.

From behind me I heard a hollow, “BABOOOM!!!” The ground trembled and I dropped to my knees and instinctively put my hands over my head. A few moments passed, then I looked up. The farmer was on his feet, arms folded; a grim, serious, look on his face. He faced the direction of the well, a plume of smoke rising from its depths.

A few moments passed before he spoke again, I used this time to regain my composure as he looked towards the smoldering pit and seemed to be in deep thought. And then he said, “Ya see that well there.”

I nodded my head, “uhhh…sure do.”

“I’ve known her for a long time now, as long as I’ve been here. A couple weeks back I almost fell in.”

Again, silence descended. His thoughts seemed to trail off. So I replied, “And you want me to fill it in with that big pile of dirt there?”

“I want you to make it like she was never there. In fact…as of this moment…she never was.” And as he said this he handed me a shovel, then he turned around and began walking away.

As he was leaving I shouted, “If you don’t mind my asking sir…what was the dynamite for?”

He paused for a moment, and looked over his shoulder with a crease in his brow exclaiming curiosity. “Dynamite?!”

“Yeah. The stick of dynamite you just tossed down the well?”

He turned around and kept walking, and replied without looking back to me. “Well? I don’t know anything about a damn well?! No well on this property!”

I stood there with that shovel, watching him walk away. Thoroughly fucking confused. There was no sound except the wind blowing through the stalks of corn. After a few minutes I walked to the well with my shovel, and slowly began scooping loads of dirt into its depths, still smoking from the dynamite. It took me almost 2 weeks. I never asked why he didn’t rent a bulldozer or use the snow plow attachment for his pickup I saw in his garage; as after that moment I never saw the farmer again. Not once in the two weeks I worked.

And when I finished I knocked on his door one final time. And per usual, there was no response. I had my money and my job was done…so I hopped in my car, drove away and didn’t give the old coot a second thought. As far as my parents were concerned I used the money to buy a new pair of soccer shoes and get a set of winter tires for my car. Though mostly it went towards funding another month of bonfires, mad dog 20/20, and a tent for those summer nights on the banks of the river snuggled in a sleeping bag with my girlfriend; until school began again and those little white razorblades started falling from the sky.

Werewolves of London

2010-04-26T17:47:00.000-07:00

When I was in 3rd grade we were talking about the UK. There had recently been riots in LA, so I gave into my curiosity, raised my hand, and asked the teacher if there was racism in London as there was here in the states.

How was I to know how silly the question was?

The teacher laughed at me, abruptly followed by the class.

****

Last year I was in the UK with a friend. It was our 2nd week in London. We had just visited the tribute to Lady Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed at Harrods. It was evening, a bit chilly and the streets were wet from a fresh rain. Walking back to our motel we cut into a magazine shop. We had blown an hour collecting an assortment of strange design mags, foreign film publications and anthologies of european page 6 girls. All for friends back home of course.

We had been there for a few minutes and the chimes on the door jingled and I looked up to see this gorgeous African woman walk in, drenched in rain. She was clearly a model, the clothes she wore were only of the sort a rock star could pull off without looking like a fool. But she wasn't tragic looking either, she had a refined elegance about her that words couldn't to justice to. And I had to forcibly take my eyes off this siren and go to the opposite side of the magazine rack and pretend I was reading some euro football mag that made no sense to American eyes… just so I could take a few mental snapshots without fear of being spotted. And elegantly she strolled over to some fashion mags, picked one up and thumbed through the pages. And I looked back to my friend and we exchanged a glance that implied we were both astounded by this incredible creature that had stumbled into our lives for a few moments...

And then all of the sudden there was a scream from the back of the shop. And a man came running out. In his cockney accent he thundered…”Get the fuck out of my store. I don’t like your kind here.” And the girl turned left and right, to make sure she was his target, clearly astounded by his baseless attack.

She kept her composure and replied… “Excuse me sir…I was just reading a magazine…is there something wrong with that?”

“Yes there is, you people come into my store and steal my magazines all the time. Its your peoples fault. You should all fucking leave, you are bloody werewolves. We turn our back and you take advantage of us.”

For a moment she looked sad. I thought she may just walk out. And then, suddenly she exploded with rage. “HOW DARE YOU FUCKING ACCUSE ME OF STEALING YOUR SILLY MAGAZINES YOU PITIFUL LITTLE BASTARD…”

And the screaming match escalated. And my friend nodded to me, we put down our magazines and ducked out of the shop just as the man was threatening to call the police.

Outside it was raining hard now. We stepped under the awning of a nearby building, shared a smoke and exchanged bewilderment at what we had just seen.

Suddenly, the doors from the magazine shop burst open and the woman furiously stomped out, slamming the doors behind her. She stepped under the awning where we stood and fumbled about with her umbrella, not having much luck through her seething rage. She towered over me with her tall legs and high heals. Tossing out unfamiliar British curses under her angry breath. She looked over and saw us standing there looking at her. We had been caught.

She kneeled down a bit, bringing her head to my level. She looked into my eyes, and for a second I thought she might smack me upside the head with her half expanded umbrella.

With her nose almost touching mine, she said sarcastically “do you have a problem little boy?”

I had no response. There was an awkward moment of silence with just the pitter patter of rain on the awning above our heads. A part of me wanted to lean forward a hair and drop an tiny kiss on her lips…but surely she would have clocked me good, as in that moment she associated me with her enemy.

Then her umbrella popped open and she disappeared into the sheets of rain.

We sat there smoking cigarettes trying to look cool. Like confused American tourists have a tendency to do.

And for some reason…her question made me think back to that day in 3rd grade.

Abrahim Esperanza

2010-04-25T23:18:00.000-07:00

The G-Spot

2010-04-25T19:28:00.000-07:00

And we barricaded ourselves in hiding from the fog of baby powder death that slammed against our windows and crept under the doors.

Startled out of a mid afternoon study session by what sounded like a gunshot blast, I dropped my pencil and flipped my trigonometry book closed. Had these months of hibernation made one of my housemates crack? Indeed, one of them was from Florida. Months ago I had caught him staring at a John Deere Combine slowly rolling down the street. Absolutely transfixed, he had never seen anything like it.

Or perhaps it was the security guard that lived below us. He had been training to be a cop with aspirations of joining the Iowa State Patrol. I recall, he had made light of the fact he slept with a gun under his pillow?

I tossed on my shoes, a winter coat and scarf for good measure. It was well below zero outside. And with strong winds dropping the Wind-chill into the -30’s one didn’t have to be exposed longer then a few minutes to feel the effects.

To reach the downstairs apartment you had to step out onto the balcony and traverse an exposed flight of stairs that would take you directly to the front door of the apartment below us, where the sound may have originated. I rushed out and down the steps with the most recent 6 inches of snowfall crunching beneath my feet, and razor blades slashing my exposed cheeks...

Without knocking, I threw my weight into the door and fell inside, slamming it shut behind me to escape the cold. My rag tag collection of apartment mates groaned as the cold reached its icy tentacles in just long enough to slap them in the face.

At first glance all seemed innocent. They sat in a semicircle. Some on the couch, some on a collection of foldout chairs. Girls clad in bikinis baring the logo of large beer corporations covered the walls. The room was adorned with half drank bottles of beer and an assortment of Dixie cups, some containing a swampy graveyard of smoked cigarettes and chewing tobacco. On the couch there was Max, Husk and Chewy. Red and Jeff sat in Chairs. In the middle of them was a half empty case of Miller light and another was hidden in the fridge. No one in the room was of legal drinking age.

Clearly I was the only one present who was alarmed by the same sound I had witnessed. And when I inquired, all I got were a few non descript laughs as Max gestured towards the kitchen, before spitting a spot of chaw into his plastic spit cup. At this time I became vaguely aware of the scent of gunpowder in the room.

The couch faced the kitchen. A giant flattened box of cardboard sat up against the kitchen wall, just above the sink, facing those on the couch. It was laced with tiny holes, each vaguely the size of a headphone jack in a walkman. On the kitchen table, between the couch and the cardboard, sat an empty 2 liter coke bottle.

Duct taped to the top of the bottle, lengthwise, was a cherry red shot gun shell. The brass head and its primer facing those on the couch, with the business end of the shell facing the cardboard. Giving the effect of a small starwars robot sitting on the kitchen table staring at us.

Sadly, that shotgun shell would never receive it’s fairwell love tap from the firing pin of the 870 Wingmaster striking a James Dean pose near the door. No, its fate would not be that of the standard 20 gauge shot gun shell. On this particular winter day, in the middle of a blizzard with the world shut down, locked away in our caves, it would serve as the sacrificial lamb bringing joy from misery. On this day where VHS rentals and liquor stores could not provide, with resources thin, one had to improvise. And improvise they had.

It was only when Husk, brandished a tiny pump action pellet gun from the side of the couch that the game became clear. He sat 15 feet from the shell straddled coke bottle, and pumped the air gun 5 or 6 times, then raised it in the direction of the shell, and bore down on the shells primer.

Husk fired. The bebe missed and became lodged in the cardboard. But from where I was standing it had only missed the shiny g-spot of the shell case by less then an inch.

Husk passed the pellet gun to the next person on the couch, Max took his shot, and he too missed…opening a big hole in the cardboard behind the bottle and most likely in the kitchen wall behind.

Upon examining the crime scene, I noticed a number of spent shotgun shells resting on the floor. Upon closer examination you could see little silver pellets scattered through out the apartment.

I took a seat at an open space on the couch, and I was handed the pellet gun. I took my shot, and missed. I handed the rifle to Jeff, who was cracking a beer and nonchalantly passed it on to Chewy… a moment later the windows of the apartment rattled with the sound of the shell detonating.

Seconds after the explosion, after the ringing in your ears cleared, you could still hear the sound of buckshot dancing around the room. Bouncing off walls as the room became a giant pinball machine. I felt the taps of tiny impact tremors as they collided with my puffy jacket.

After the ricochet of the pellets stopped Max stood up and said ”Well shit!!” We all turned to look, and a trail of blood was flowing briskly down his left leg, from a wound on the side of his knee. Rogue buckshot had pierced him just below the rim of his shorts.

The room became quiet for a second. We asked him if he was OK, how bad the wound was, if the pellet was still inside him. Lurking in the air, mingling with the scent of gun powder, was an unnamed childhood emotion. That of a group of boys fearing for a friend they have caused injury, but unsure if they're willing to quit the game that caused it.

Max turned to Chewy, who was still holding the pellet gun at the far end of the couch. The smile left Chewies face. I thought for sure Max was moments away from asking for a lift to the hospital, or scolding Chewy for wounding him.

His face was serious. He grabbed his spit cup and hocked a large wad of tobacco, never breaking eye contact with Chewy. He gently sat the cup down. Then he reached out his hand and gestured for the gun from Chewy.

Chewy reluctantly handed over the gun.

"Get over there and set us up a new one ‘Chew. You’re up on me 2-1."

A Letter to Tabitha...

2010-04-19T15:39:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, taking a shortcut home, down one of those dark damp allyways of seattle, I discovered a letter sitting next to an old rusted out dumpster. It was mangled, water damaged and barely legible. Normally I would not pick such a thing up, but it had clearly been labored over, and I could not repel my voyeuristic tendencies (can you?). This is what it said...

My dearest Tabitha

I was sitting here with this cigarette in my hand, watching the smoke make strange hypnotic swirling zig zags in the air and it came to me. A pair of quotes, which I had committed to memory earlier this very morning, the latter of which was the motivation for the manuscript you are now reading. I had come across a book in which the beginning of each chapter was marked by a relevant quote to the events of the story, after reading two chapters I came to the conclusion that the quotes were more meaningful than the book itself, and I spent the next hour skipping from chapter to chapter trying to unravel the psyche of various men and women with the help of only a few words. It was Benjamin Franklin who initially caught my attention with the quote “It is easier to suppress the first desire than to satisfy all that follow it.” As I sit here trying to count the times that I promised myself I’d quit smoking, these words ring loud and clear. What you are reading now is something I’ve been debating long and hard about doing. Oscar Wilde wrote that “An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.” And so it began.

Although I have sworn to silence certain events must come out, not only to relieve my own conscience, but also to finally tell the world the truth about what occurred when I was 16 years old, and how that would haunt me forever. Let it be known that these events were recently (for the most part) resolved, but only at great cost to the family (and the larger organization in question). The people involved will of course deny all of this, but the facts and evidence I have are far greater than anything they can offer, as they are my memories. The depictions of these events will also require a great understanding by you my dear Tabitha, as one can only***large chunk of unreadable text***. For you must understand that although these people have in the past decade turned for the better, and the large majority are truly good and decent, there are those that have sought to sweep all of this neatly under the rug.

Perhaps its an alternative hope of mine that with the included manuscript, if ***large chunk of unreadable text***

At this point the letter ended in the middle of a page with a jagged pencil line trailing off the edge of the paper. What I found was most likely a discarded attempt at finding the perfect words, ending in bitter frustration...though in my perfect fictional world I will go on believing that the author was violently murdered before he could render the final words. His already dead hands dragging the pen down the slope of the page.

Either way, I was left only with questions and my mind playing delicious little tricks on me.

I once had a teacher who told me I should rip the last 10 pages out of every book I read and burn them unread. He said “ this will ensure that every story you take in is unforgettable.” At the time I thought he was a loon. A fruitcake stirring his crock of shit.

But now I’m not so sure.

Decibal Von Dragomir

2010-04-18T23:18:00.000-07:00

The Third Eye

2010-04-18T14:06:00.000-07:00

It was ten days until the end of class. Our easels were arranged in a semicircle around a 2 foot platform constructed of 2x 4’s. On it was an old dining chair draped in grey sheets.

I was staring at the empty chair… sweating, exhausted, tired. Praying that she would show up on this day, the last of many we had spent together. Warm up with a series of Contraposto poses for 2 minute gesture drawings then slide elegantly into that chair for a series of six 20 minutes sketches.

The teacher came around, making small talk as he made sure we were preparing to draw, both mentally and physically.

To him this class was about metaphysics, just as much as it was about craft. He saw it as therapy, meditation. If done correctly it was a religious experience. And thus it was of utmost importance that our heads were in the right place.

I tried to keep focused. But 10 minutes had passed? WHERE WAS SHE? I couldn’t contain myself. I turned away from my easel in frustration letting out a tense sigh.

He was there, immediately behind me. Staring at me. Arms crossed. Clearly he had sensed my aura with that clairvoyant scalpel of a his. His third eye was open wide, and I knew he was I peering deep into my Etheric body as I asked…

“Excuse me sir is Alicia going to be our model today?”

And with that I realized I had said too much. Shared something about myself I did not intend to...

He paused and tilted his head to one side. He stared at me with those beady brown eyes, peering out from just above the frames of his transitions lenses which clung stubbornly to the tip of his nose. Had the lenses reacted to the light pouring in from the windows, causing them to turn an ink wash grey…or were they simply reacting to the thoughts he was excavating from within me? The cracks at the corners of his eyes compressed as his eyes narrowed. It seemed that even the spiral colic of graying hair just above his left ear had subtly tilted toward me, like a radar dish tracking a satellite.

Could he see inside me, did he know what I was thinking?

His gaze did not let up, he had bypassed my superficial shell of lies and excuses, peeled them away like an onion skin layer, he dove deeper...yes he suspected there was more.

The nonchalance of my absences on non-Alicia days gave him reason to explore further. I constructed a firewall of lies relating to my obsession with drawing the perfect portrait, providing a red herring for my true obsession. Hoping he would abandon the spelunking of my neural network before he found the truth. He kept going. Deeper. He suspected something else.

He was close now. A drop of sweat ran down my forehead. I tried to speak and could not. Was that a smile?! Did the left corner of his lip curl ever so slightly? Fuck! He never smiles!

Frantically I remapped pathways to guide him into flamboyantly labeled directories containing information meant to subvert him. A search for Alicia/Model dumped him into a spider web of warm, fuzzy, childhood memories spent at my parents cabin on the Columbia river Gorge. Parasailing, glassy water reflecting the pine trees of the Cascades. He was reading me like a book, and I could not pull away.

It only took him a moment to see past this. The smile was spreading across his face. He closed these folders and pulled back out to the top level, quitting his local search on a folder by folder basis. Instead opting to do a full sweep at global level. In seconds he would have my secret. I relaxed, let out a deep breath. I prepared for the inevitable.

And then she walked in.

Dressed in black. Head to tow. She was wearing bowling shoes and a low-cut blouse that whispered the notion of her perfect breasts beneath. Breasts she would soon expose. I would spend the next 3 hours rendering her to perfection on a 18x24 piece of Strathmore sketch paper.

I turned back to the teacher. He was still staring at me. He made a gesture with his hand, flipping his palm upward, as if to say “ask and ye shall receive.”

Then, with complete sincerity he patted me on the shoulder and spoke.

“I’m glad to have you in this class Samson. You’ve made some huge strides, broken some bad habits. Center yourself man. Get ready to put pencil to paper. You seem tense today.” He turned away…

“Alicia^[1]” he said sarcastically, “so glad you could make it…can we try to be a bit more prompt next time?”

My secret was safe.

Ava Selkirk

2010-04-17T23:34:00.000-07:00

Illegal Alien Hunting Permit

2010-04-17T14:57:00.000-07:00

Today on the way into work I was cut off by a man in a maroon, rusted out minivan with duct tape holding his rear bumper in place. Seconds after his desperate maneuver we were brought to a stop as a light changed red. This provided me with the delightful opportunity to take a mental snapshot of the moment.

His bumper, or rather the stickers upon it, indicated that he was very fond of George W. Bush and supported our troops. Another sticker stated that he had an "Illegal Alien Hunting Permit."

He had a tiki doll hanging from his rear view mirror and big fuzzy seat coverings. I observed that he had also applied fashionable rodeo like stickers to the base of his van, though their feeling was much diminished by the rust patches which broke the flowing contours of the lines in various places.

Another sticker on the rear window mentioned that he was a Vietnam vet, and somewhere below that another mentioned he was lucky enough to have god as his co-pilot.

At some point he decided to answer his cell phone, when shortly there after the light turned green and he did not respond I denied myself the satisfaction of slamming down the horn and decided to see how long it would take for this man, who was in such a hurry to cut me off, to finish his phone call and be on his way.

And so I sat, detached from my anger yet conscious it was present,

And the cars behind me honked,

And eventually I laughed to myself,

And the cars behind me honked.

And as the light turned yellow he slammed on the gas, an explosion of emissions showered my car from the tail pipe of his delightful van… and he rocketed through the light, and the rest of us sat there waiting for it to turn green again.

I was lucky enough to catch up to him again at the next light, 2 blocks down the street. This time his response time was much more efficient.

The Rat Catchers

2010-04-06T17:44:00.000-07:00

I always hated the farm. I could take the smell and the dirt, it was the rats that I hated. I was just 10 years old when I told pa I was going to leave the farm and move to the city.

We don’t know where they came from. Though it was shortly after that terrible lightning storm that ma said she started hearing things scampering across that old attic floor just above our heads.

At first we thought it was the mice. But it was odd. There were none in the traps. In fact we hadn’t seen them in months. None in the barn or under the porch.

They were gone. And on the farm, that just doesn’t happen. Pa thought it might be the new poisons he had tested, but he couldn't be sure.

Then the dog went missing. But he was old and half blind so even that wasn’t much of a surprise.

But when the cattle started disappearing pa became afraid. We called in people to check it out and they told us it was thieves, come in the night and took them away.

Of the animals our cat, Esiah, lasted the longest. We’d wake up late in the night to hear her terrible hiss. As if she was waging some unseen battle for survival off in the cornfields behind our house. In the morning she’d be hiding in the rafters. Afraid to come down, her fur still standing straight up from the night before...

And then one night Ma woke up to go to the bathroom. I heard her scream. She said she saw one of them, sitting there staring at her from the shadows. It pointed at her with one of its little hooked fingers and then licked its lips. It turned to show her Esiah. Our cats eyes were lifeless, her body wrapped tightly inside that thorny spider-palm that sprouts from their shoulders. Her tail dragging limply behind it as it pounced off into the darkness.

After that it all happened quick.

Ma and Pa are gone now. As is everyone else. Its just me.

They’ve been leaving gifts for me. They want me to make it easy for them.

The towns I drive through are all quiet. Theres nothing on the TV or the radio.

Nothing is being broadcast from those big cities I always wanted to go to.

Alicia Encinata and Marta

2010-04-01T23:42:00.000-07:00

Doom Cookie

2010-04-01T15:57:00.000-07:00

"Despair has its own calms."

Thats a Dracula quote in case you were wondering.

Heres another...

"No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be."

You see what I'm doing? Thats right. I'm setting the tone for this post.

Oh shut up...just read.

--------------

A goth walked by me on the street today.

I was walking my dog and she paused to give him the obligatory scratch between the ears.

She looked strikingly out of place with the sun shining and the birds tweeting. I’ll spare any description of her, and let your mind default to a stock image the word Goth implies, suffice it to say I did not find her attractive. Despite this I decided to inquire about her station in life. How does one become Goth?

Ophelia Desdemona Galswinth (as she liked to be called) explained to me that she was not always this way. And that the death of a close highschool friend was her tragic undoing.

Naturally this lead her down the path of Gothery and hand crafted Ouija...

It was her introduction to a local Glamgoth legend Blodwyn Morgana that truly brought her into the fold. She said that Blodwyn showed her the bittersweet beauty in the darkest eve, and joy in absolute sadness (though this had the ring of an oxymoron, I rolled with it). He told her that true Goths existed thousands of years ago. He denied their post punk roots (and especially any association to Joy Division.)

Though I preteneded I had heard of Blodwyn, this was not true. Indeed I was growing bored with our discussion. Only when she mentioned her living selling hand carved Ouija Boards did my ears perk up.

Infact she guarantees their effectiveness (I presumed a warrantee of this sort was a rarity among todays Ouija makers, how does one prove a faulty Ouija?) She claimed she was the runner up of 2003’s Samhain competition for best beginners Ouija carve. She flatly rejected the current trend in laser carving. I nodded my head in agreement. Laser carved Ouija’s?... Please.

She insisted she frequently communicates with her deceased highschool friend. She likens the conversations to a cheaper version of Skype. But with dead people. She also claimed close affiliations with G.G Allen, Bon Scott, and Dom Deluise.

On her forehead I could see little beeds of sweat, sneaking their way out from pores burried beneath her pale white layer of makeup. Yet she kept talking, you could tell she didn’t want to stop. This goth was braving warm afternoon sunlight for an impromptu sidewalk discussion with a complete stranger?

Goths aren’t supposed emote. Brood yes. Share no.

Was she lonely? Looking for a connection. A person to share all the minutiae of goth life, to validate her existence. Perhaps she thought that person could be me, if only just for a moment.

But I couldn’t be what she needed, and I had to let her go and get back to my world of computers and drycleaning. Of work and personal expectations. Of defining my own odd little subculture for others to scoff at.

When I interrupted her and told her I needed to move on, she gave me her card. It was a fanciful little Ouija board^[1] illustration on one side and her email address on the other. I thought to myself that OpheliaDesdemonaGalswinth@hotmail.com was a very long name to type in.

I took her card and told her to give my best to Blodwyn.

She surprised me with a big Goth hug that left a streak of white makeup on my cheek.

The Plight of Alicia Encinata

2010-03-31T18:01:00.000-07:00

Alicia had confessed when she was just 8 years old that she would one day have a wedding of biblical proportions. Her wish would come true.

12 years later she stood at the alter as her world collapsed.

It was only through sheer luck that Alicia was able to stop Calista Corazone from ushering in the age of perdition.

Corazone had uncovered an original version of the Ars Goetia. One of the books King Solomon used to evoke and imprison 72 of the great daemonum. She was attempting to use this ancient grimoire to awaken Orobas, and Amon from the infernal regions. She sought simply to remake the world in the image of her home, the stygian limbo from which she was spawned.

At the end of the day Calista was defeated. The ingress was sealed. Its aperture was shrunk to a grain of sand and plugged with a sewing pin plucked from Alicia’s wedding dress. Though it was a bitter sweet victory as the groom was mortally wounded by Corazone. He died that evening in Alicias arms.

She took it upon herself to find a way to destroy the great grimoire that had allowed this to happen. For years she searched, and has yet to find a solution. The Ars Goetia^[1] remains hidden and protected in a location of only her knowing.

...............

And so life went on and she tried to make sense of it all. To cope, she sought to dround herself in work. Having forgone traditional university education for a 2 year certificate in the dark arts, there weren't many job opportunities that fit her qualifications. Especially in the midst of a massive economic downturn...

To keep her landlord happy she juggled a number of part time jobs. She took freelance work where she could, starting a popular blog laying out the conditions for a successful seance. She worked the front desk at a veterinary clinic during the day. At night she worked as a nude model for a prestigious local art academy.

It was here she met Samson Hofferstroff and they fell in love.^[2] Within a year they were married. They kept the wedding small and only invited close friends. In two years they had given birth to a daughter they named Marta.

Once a year they leave Marta with her grandmother, Alibi, and they travel the world seeking a way to destroy the Ars Goetia.

Alicia has a star tattoo on the small of her back which she has come to regret, and another of Godzilla^[3] on her right shoulder, which she does not.