I'm Happy to Have Fiction in the Current Issue of Clavmag

I love the way this magazine is opening a new frontier of fiction and other genres, hybrid genres, informed by LGBTQIA inventiveness.

I also love their name and logo. Visit the magazine to read about why the clavicle was chosen as the objective correlative. It's rather fascinating.

Thanks much to editors Freya and Gabrielle for including my short story. 

Here is a Short Story

I wrote about phrogging.

Pound

“Timmy’s missing again,” my wife sighed as she lorded it over the stove top, stirring a wooden spoon slowly in a pot. “And dinner will be ready in less than an hour.”

I sighed back, “I’ll check the pound.”

As usual, the parking lot was packed. It wasn’t a long drive, though, so I was there in fifteen minutes and walking past all the children whose fingers were invariably wrapped tightly around the wires of their cage fronts or poking through those wires, as they eyed me and shouted out, “Pick me, Sir! Pick me!” A pasty-looking girl in a ridiculous pinafore barked, “I get straight As! I’ve only had one B in my entire life!” As I drew closer to give her a second look, she snarled and then bounded out through the hole at the back of her cage into the exercise yard, presumably to bite another child.

I saw Timmy consorting with the child in the cage next to his. They were trading something, some sort of contraband. Timmy smiled up at me broadly and asked me what’s for supper. I won’t reproduce the string of invective that flowed from his mouth as I called the kennel tender to open the cage of the child next to his. I didn’t look back once as we three went off together, to sign the papers and pay the fine.

I arrived home with three minutes to spare. The large empty bowls were on the dining room table. My wife smiled much more peacefully as she ladled out the mix of vegetables and who knows what else.

“Welcome home,….?” she said to the boy sitting in Timmy’s chair.

“Ralph,” he finished her sentence. He had heard the question mark.

“Thank you, Mother,” he chimed as he began spooning the stewy muck into his mouth.

“I’m Mom, but I’m also Doris,” she explained, pointing to her chest with her expensively manicured index finger. Her apron had “Fran” stitched on it in red thread.

“I love my family so goddamn much!” I barked in my gruffest dad voice. “Let’s go pass a football after dinner!”

“Indeed, father,” Ralph said, as casual as any psychopathic child. “Footballs are the super-glue of families.”

Mr. Bully Boy, our pit bull, came trotting into the dining room just then and took a chunk out of my wife’s leg, then threw his huge body against the screen door out in the kitchen, which gave way, and ran off to enjoy it somewhere.

“He doesn’t know her yet,” I explained to the boy as my wife went off to bandage her gaping wound.

“Maybe you should take him to the pound, Dad,” Ralph wisely suggested. I liked this kid already.

“Actually, how do you feel about a new mommy?” I asked, as I stroked the chip-off-the-old-block’s hair.

“It sounds like a capital idea, Sir.” my son whispered ingratiatingly. “The spicing of this stew is pedestrian at best.”

But as I went to pee, I heard my wife on the phone in the next room, in total darkness. I could hear the pretend panic in her voice. We’ve all gotten so good at that pretend panic voice now.

“Is this the pound? Listen, there’s a strange man in my house. He’s impersonating my husband. Please hurry. And bring the right goddamn sedatives this time. The last husband ruined my china before you got him to the van. What sort of amateurs are you hiring these days?”

I went into my bedroom and started packing, loading my pockets with a few of my favorite things.

And then I thought about how to say goodbye to my son. I tried to remember words from a television movie I really hated.

Too bad she beat me to the dial. I’m going to miss that kid. One more call and I think we could have had the family just right. The dog knew she was wrong for the role. Dogs always know. I’m gonna miss that dog.

I heard the van brake loudly out front just then, so I sat on the edge of my bed and prepared to act surprised and emotionally wounded.

The Peasants

The peasants drank.

The peasants drank and talked. They pantomimed. Mostly, they pantomimed the war which had consumed them. The war had been over for years. The small tavern of shadows where they congregated, a collective shambles, was like the intermediate stomach of a ruminant where things that should not have been consumed are somehow digested.

They drank beer. They drank mostly in the evening in their village which had been destroyed by the war. They drank the alcohol made from plums. They drank alcohol made from the beautiful rye grass. They drank herbed alcohol made from the fermented juice of fruits with the bodily forms of young girls and women. They drank mead. They drank to the cemetery. They drank to the brave. They drank to the worms. They drank to the fire and the fire’s children.

They got insanely drunk and talked about the village war dead. Someone would talk about A. An old man would get drunk and would act out A.’s death for the rest of the bar. A. had not answered a certain officer of the occupying army correctly. He had stood before an officer of the army which had owned their village for the duration of the war and answered incorrectly. He had answered as if it was a performance. He figured the officer was giving a performance in that funny costume of his. A. had wanted to perform too. He had been very young, the village comedian. He had all the playfulness and natural comic instincts of a puppy. He had been promptly taken to a nearby barn and shot. The entire village had watched.

A’s pantomimer would tell the story of A. over and over, night after night, year after year. Was the story a joke? It was told in the tone one tells a joke, with broad smiles all around. The smiles of the drunks remembered the fate of A. and his comical words spoken into the face of the officer. Certainly, the shooting of A. was told as a sort of punchline. The voice telling the story got louder during this part and then everyone guffawed. “Shot dead in that barn.” “What was he, seventeen? Eighteen?” “Sixteen, I think,” an old woman chimes in. Laughter follows.

But what sort of laughter is it? Could it be compared to the laughter of schoolchildren on the playground? Or is it a rarer sort of laughter? The story would not change. Only the storyteller would change, his face becoming wizened like a dried apple, his teeth less, his teeth uglier each year. And the faces of those who listened to this story would deteriorate along with the storyteller’s face, as if in a secret sympathy.

So the bar collected drunks that would pantomime the various war dead of the village. Each dead person had a stand-in. The stories of very young children who had been murdered by the war were not told. Their stories must have gone somewhere else to be told, somewhere even darker.

The old lush who told B.’s story down the years droned on and on. She would sit in a dark corner of the bar where she could see everyone. She knew who everyone was, what everyone was. People no longer talked about who had been good in the war, who had been bad. It was the stories that needed to be pantomimed, not morality. People are story magnets. And drunks are the most magnetic old story collectors. When you’re drunk, you need a rope. And stories are like ropes you can pull yourself along. Any old story with a barb in it will do for thinking, will do the thinking for an old drunk.

The old lush would tell how B., a simple mender of shoes, had made bombs. He was attempting heroism. But he blew himself up before he had a chance to place those bombs under the occupiers’ vehicles. He blew himself up in his own barn. He blew himself up, but also a pregnant horse. That was the sockdologer for B.’s story. The drunks had even named a cocktail after B. It was called “The Pregnant Horse.”

It was drunk on the darkest nights, on the heels of the tragedies with the most teeth. Maybe it was an amulet. The younger citizens who frequented the bar, who were born after the war, had no idea what the nightmarish denizens were talking about when they toasted each other with the memory of this horse exploded in time immemorial.

And so on and so on. C.’s pantomimer recalled that young woman who had slept with the enemy for favors and was later found hanging from a large branch over the river with an ill-gotten couture bag around her neck.

D.’s story was that of an old woman who had been forced to kneel on her family’s soil with a pistol pressed to her head. She had been given the choice to spare her beloved pig or herself. She had chosen to save the pig, so the trigger was pulled. The pig was shot immediately afterwards, of course.

E. had been an educated man, the villager with the most books, who had tried to lecture the occupiers in front of his fellow villagers. He had been tied to a chair in his study and burned with his books. The drunk assigned to tell E.’s story would make the flames with his hands and his arms. He would become the flames as he laughed uproariously, a strange glitter in his eyes. The alcohol would feed the story, down at the roots, would feed all the stories.

The young people were trying to reclaim the tavern for their generation. It became easier with the years, as the bodies of those who remembered the war, its pantomimers, drifted off to the village cemetery. The stories went quiet, the stories went dark. Rain and snow fell on the cemetery. The names on the tombstones became fainter.

These young ones, who were interested in making love and making money, had no interest in these old stories. They would be polite. But they could not laugh at these stories. They would stare stony-eyed at the punchlines. You had to have been there to get it. They understood that these wizened creatures had become these stories and that this tavern was their home. They mostly tolerated them.

On the rare occasion that one of the younger drunks would go after one of the older drunks, the older drunks would form a posse and grab bottles. The young man would usually back down once he saw all the missing teeth of his adversaries and how even the old women were ready to draw blood.

The one all the old-timers wondered about was M. He had lived just outside the village. Nobody knew what happened to him or how he had behaved during the war. He just disappeared. His little house was still there but empty after the war. Nobody had even thought to check on him. Was he young? Some said yes, some no. Was he old? Some said yes, some no. Was he crazy? A monk? Did he have a family? Certainly, he did not or they would have been remembered. He must have been solitary.

But what was he? The only people who might have known were dead. If anyone had ever known. The best people could do was a story of a story of a story about M. that was usually soon discounted as hearsay.

M.’s story was the one story that changed constantly. All the other stories remained the same. M. was a community project, the one story in which the storytellers (and they all took turns telling M.’s story) could use their imaginations. They could embroider, they could reinvent. Some nights everyone was sure M. was a villain. He must have been in the enemy pay, in the enemy headquarters, “giving them information on all of us.”

Other times, he was off doing something heroic to save the village. Certainly he existed. He wasn’t fictional. Though he existed now as a series of permutating fictions. He had been real.

You could still see his house at the edge of the village, decaying. Its little roof had turned to moss long ago and had begun to cave in. All of the furniture had been taken by scavengers. Birds liked this little house now. It had become a bird hostel, a come-and-go-as-you-please aviary. The drunks were mystified. The tongues returned and returned to the missing story the way a tongue returns and returns to a missing tooth.

Maybe M. had been a saint and preached to the birds like Asisi. Maybe the birds were the souls of the dead villagers and M. had left this rainy house to them, that they might perch in its windows and watch the wild grasses and wildflowers of the summer fields nod in the wind outside their beloved village.

So the old-timers prattled on, such nonsense that rankled the ears of the young lovers and businessmen sharing the tavern with them. So long after the war, everyone still had magical hopes. And magical hopes are only chatter, the young men and women thought.

When the last old drunk found himself the only person in the bar who remembered the war, to whom could he tell his story?

He was like the last exemplar of a lumbering species now going extinct, trapped in a zoo. The others were outside his cage, looking in. Look at those strange eyes in the creature‘’s head.’“Do you think it guesses it’s the very last one?” a young woman would whisper to a young man. “And the smell!” a student would intone, elbowing his buddy and shaking his head.
In the corner, the old man faced outwards, drinking himself deeper and deeper into the only story left to him, since he could no longer speak, the conundrum that burned inside him almost as ardently as youth itself: “But what really happened to M.?”

People Talking in Their Sleep

"The diamonds and emeralds, the rubies! That little dog is not your dog, that dog was always mine, he loved me more and you hated me for it!" an eighty-five-year-old man in pineapple-pattern pajama bottoms growls and punches his pillow, which this moment is a brother who has been dead since 1969.

"I'm the Queen of Snow Peas!" a four-year-old girl exults, so proud to be handed the crystal scepter and see those countless green minions, who stretch to the horizon now, jumping up and down and cheering her, just before she rolls out of the top bunk and crashes to the floor, waking up crying and screaming for her parents, from the pain, but mostly from the sudden revocation of royalty.

"I always will, Essie, I always did love you…your brother is a liar and I killed him cuz he poisoned you against me….put 'em in a garbage pile….like a carrot!"mutters  someone in New Jersey who thrashes under a blanket, as a dark nurse stands in the dark doorway, half watching a CSI rerun on a television in a room across the hall.

A woman who has become her long-dead Yorkshire terrier in a series of dreams chases the sled on which she (as a six-year-old girl) flies so joyfully down a snowy hill in a cemetery near her former home, long-razed, where a strip mall now stands, barking merrily all the way down.

"Yes, I used the toothpaste to masturbate," an astronaut-in-training reverted to his eleven-year-old self abjectly confesses to his father, who is a mouse twice his size, standing before him, next to his mother, who is now younger than he ever remembered her, platinum blonde and dangerously alluring in a way that he knows only from photographs in a family album that was rarely brought out.

An eleven-year-old girl who has recently studied the history of American slavery is shouting out numbers, bidding at a slave auction on all her classmates, white children who have become African-Americans, but still look exactly like themselves, had they been born black, in another century, and not ten or eleven years ago in a Connecticut city with the highest per capita income in the state.

"Be quiet, I am punishing you," a thirteen-year-old boy tells his little sister's favorite stuffed animal, a pink rabbit, in a dream, but the lagomorph fights back, and soon he is on his back and the pleasure is everywhere until he is woken by something like a bee sting and the thrashing of his necklace, its crucifix, so tired he had been last night that he had forgotten to remove it, and now his fingers discover (his eyes with the girlish lashes are still closed) it is wet with something he is sure must be blood and probably the blood of weeping Jesus his grandmother in the mental hospital warned him about.

A homeless man wrapped in several blankets on a park bench that overlooks a river whose hard surface deer now cross, going from blue forested island to blue forested island, freezes to death in the night, but not before reciting The Gettysburg Address to perfection in the presence of his parents, who keep nodding approvingly and smiling, though he murdered them seventeen years before for drug money.

(science fiction)

A NEW BLITZKRIEG



American Airlines’ Flight AA2497 departed Atlanta in the early evening, just after six, bound for Dallas-Forth Worth. It took off into a warm July sky. No storms waited in its flight path. The passengers felt mostly relaxed. It had been expected to touch down on earth again at 8:33 pm. local time. But it didn’t happen.

At 8:33 p.m. the flight was still circling, refused permission to land or continue on to any other airport. The United States Air Force had scrambled an E-3 Sentry alongside two F-22s. These interceptors waited to see what word would come down from on high. They were fully prepared to destroy civilian aircraft and snuff out American lives.

This is because Flight AA2497 had become two Flights AA2497. As the flight approached DFW, it had morphed into a set of mirror image twins. Both flights contained the exact same crew and passengers. And both craft were in a panic, as visual contact had been made between the two planes in mid-air. That is, passengers had seen their doppelgangers looking out the windows of the plane flying next to them. Transmissions from the pilots and co-pilots of these dual cockpits were nearly identical. Nobody was sure which plane was the “real McCoy” or whether such logic could even be applied to what had happened. The air traffic controllers were bewitched into stunned silence when they heard the same pilot transmitting from two different planes, his voice overlapping his voice.

The secretary of defense and the president were conferring. Since a state of war existed between the United States of America and that nameless species which had lately announced its existence as interdimensional beings living with us, able to travel right through us, interpenetrating us like photons, the decision was not an easy matter. They had already attacked our infrastructure and information technologies. There had been human casualties. Nobody really knew what “they” were. We had found ways to block them, we had used the best code we could finesse. But increasingly they made new incursions. They were able to interfere with the natural progression of time. They were able to use backdoors in space. We were at war. And yet nobody had ever even seen the enemy.

Everyone knew this anomaly of Flight AA2497 had been caused by them. But nobody knew the meaning of it. The President and the Secretary had to make the judgment call. The flight was running out of fuel and refueling mid-air was not an option. It was ultimately decided to let both planes land. The military was evacuating the airport of civilians and all other flights were diverted elsewhere.

The planes taxied down separate runways only moments apart. The passengers and crews on both airplanes were told they could not deboard. They were to be quarantined for an indeterminate amount of time — until the matter could be resolved. This was depressing news, but the passengers on both aircraft were genuinely relieved that they had managed to finally touch down, reach the ground alive. They had seen the armed interceptors tailing their planes. They knew they had survived a close call.

The president breathed a huge sigh of relief when he was apprised that no earth-shattering disaster had occurred when the planes landed.

“We just have no idea what to do with all the extra humans,” one general joked. “And which ones are the originals and who are the copies?”

They were still laughing about this when the call came through from the military brass on the ground at DFW. It was a panicked voice that relayed the information: “Sir, it’s the worst possible scenario. Nuclear option tenable. We no longer have two identical planes. We had two….then we had four identicals..then eight…sixteen…you get the picture. They’re just materializing and destroying the airport. It appears to be some sort of virus…some sort of spatial virus! There are hundreds of them if not thousands already. I have to evacuate because….”

There was a huge crashing sound of twisting metal and a scream. Many screams. Then silence.

And the mitosis of planes went on through the landscape, that warm summer night in Texas. Flight AA2497 went on duplicating, horizontally, city to city, and vertically, jets piled atop jets up into the clouds, even to the asscrack of doom.

And the passengers wondered and wondered and wondered as they watched and sometimes caught a glimpse of themselves through the wreckage, looking back at themselves in terror and hoping, hoping to get off the plane as soon as possible.

Stop Me, Oh Oh Oh Stop Me, Stop Me If You Think That You've Heard This One Before

Gary was driving home from a Friday night poker game with old friends which beer and b.s., mostly b.s. of the sports variety, had prolonged into the wee small hours.

He wasn’t drunk, but he was tired and tapped out and saw by his dash that it was after 2 a.m. This was just as he was driving along the seemingly endless expanse of the large Elysian Fields cemetery.

As he looked away from the digital clock and back to the road, a young woman in white came rushing out of the darkness of the cemetery and ran right in front of his car. Barefoot, no less. And in a long gown. Gary swerved and hollered the expletive-laced name of a messiah at her.

His car braked to a stop less than fifteen feet from the woman, whom he could see now was more of a girl. She was standing stock-still, facing directly away from Gary’s Hyundai. He thought about blowing his horn, but he figured something was wrong with the girl. Seriously wrong. Maybe something horrible had just happened to her. Maybe she was the victim of an assault or worse. She certainly appeared to be in an altered state. She was holding a small bouquet of flowers upside down in her right hand. He watched as she tossed it off towards the cemetery bushes without even looking that direction.

“Are you alright? I’m sorry, but you just came out of nowhere. You know?”

He was talking loudly out the driver’s side window, hoping she could hear him.

The night was very still, so she had.

“I know,” the girl said. She still wouldn’t turn to face him. It unnerved him.

“Listen, I would normally offer to make a call for you, if you need a ride. You’re probably not going to believe this, but I don’t have my phone on me. I can offer you a ride if you need one, but I understand if that’s not something you’d be comfortable with. I mean with a stranger out here in the middle of nowhere…”

But before he could finish his sentence, she shocked him by turning and walking directly to his driver’s side window. She leaned her arm there, her slender white arm, and smiled with little trace of fear. A big smile on a small, pretty face.

“How about this? You move over and let me drive. I’d be much less afraid that way.”

“I’m not so sure about that. You seem to be missing your shoes. Where did you come from, anyway? Is that a prom dress? It seems an odd time of year for….”

“Do we have a deal?” She was still smiling.

Gary reluctantly slid over and she opened the door and took the wheel.

“I’ve never driven one like this. All these new-fangled doodads!”

But already she had them in motion, headlights picking out their way down that long street otherwise deserted. Everyone in the small town had found their beds already.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I have to ask: you haven’t been drinking, I hope?” Gary realized it was a slightly ironic question to pose.

“No, Buzz and Joey were the ones drinking. Drinking like hogs. I told them to slow down. That punch bowl stunk to high heaven. But they don’t listen to anyone but each other. Egging each other on like idiots!”

“Where exactly are we going?”

“Why, of course, I’m going home.”

“It isn’t far?”

“No, not far at all. You’re very kind to help me out.”

By now, she had already taken some dozen turns and they were in a part of town with no streetlights. Gary was not familiar with these rural areas at all. He began to wonder if this might not be a set-up. Was there some guy waiting with a gun out in the countryside to roll him where no one would even hear his cries for help? And the one time he didn’t bring his phone. He slipped his wallet under his seat surreptitiously. She didn’t seem to notice.

“I’m gonna need to use my g.p.s. to get back out of here. I don’t know all these backroads. I can see we’re getting higher. Could you do me a favor and keep a few feet more to the right of that barrier? That looks like a hell of a drop off.”

“What the heck is g.p.s.?” she laughed. “You know, it was just terrible what happened to Joey and Buzz. Some say they deserved it. But did the others?”

“What happened to them?”

“They went off the cliff on River View Road. They were picking up pieces of them in the ravine for days. Them and all their passengers. That car was just crammed with kids who had come from the dance.”

She shook her head, crying then.

“I’m so sorry,” he commiserated. “Listen, you seem pretty upset. Why don’t you pull over and we can switch seats.”

She began to accelerate then. It really scared Gary.

“No point,” she said. “We’re almost home.”

“What do you mean we’re almost home?” Gary asked. “And you’ve gotta slow down, this road is getting narrower and narrower. Where the hell are we, anyway?”

And then the headlights picked out an old street sign that read “River View Road.”

The car was going about seventy at that point and he began to scream at her to stop the car, hit the brakes, this isn’t funny at all.

But she was laughing now through her tears.

As the car left the road and Gary felt his stomach, his ass, everything, try to float, the girl turned to him and said, “This is the part where you hope, but it doesn’t come true.”

The Plant

     My mother's closest relationship when she died was with a plant.

     What can I say? She was a weird woman. And she was old. Old enough to have crotchets, eccentric ideas. I urged her to explore the possibility of a pet, the warmth and personality such a spirit might bring to her apartment and her life. But she insisted the plant was better than any cat or dog. And it was much less work. I say "plant," because when I first saw the green tropical thing in her digs, it wasn't even as tall as I am. It barely came up to my waist.

       Over the years, it grew much larger. Maybe I shouldn't say "plant." Perhaps I should call it what it is: a tree. Some sort of exotic palm tree. It did cut a somewhat different silhouette. If I speak candidly, there was always something about it that I found a little unsavory. I almost used the word "uncanny." What was I thinking? How can a tree be uncanny?  But if you had seen some of the things I had seen! The way she would throw her arms around that tree and whisper in the place where you might expect there to be ears. The way I would see her tip her drinks (Mother loved alcohol) into the plant's pot, as if she were sharing sips with a lover.

        "Won't that kill your beloved?" I would ask.

           "Hardly! She drinks more than I do, the lush," she giggled.

            Crazy old women. You just don't argue with them.

        My mother and I had our difficulties. She thought I didn't see her enough. She called fairly constantly, sometimes several times a day and even at night. I always reminded myself that a widow's lot can be hard. This wasn't easy on Natasha. Natasha is much younger than I am. Perhaps that is what is responsible for the imbalance of power in our relationship. Or maybe it is just N.'s somewhat overpowering spirit.

      Initially, N. played polite during these barrages of calls and exchanged a few perfunctory sentences with Mother before handing me the phone. But it wasn't long until she was answering the phone without saying a word, marching it directly to me, letting Mother guess correctly on the other end at what was happening: a freeze-out. But this was fine with Mother, since there was no love lost on her end for N., whom she considered a gold-digging (silver-digging? aluminum-digging?) wastrel.

         When Mother died suddenly, I was saddened, of course, but I would be lying if I said I didn't anticipate a warming between N. and me, a renaissance of increased goodwill and more charitable feelings, if you will.

            But there was a hitch.

            Mother's estate was rather hefty and she had been quite generous with me, her favorite son (if I am allowed to speak candidly). There was a proviso in her will, a ridiculous proviso, that I must "adopt" her beloved plant. Not legally adopt it. Nothing that crazy. But I must take it. Her tree, which had occupied the very center of her living room, like a performer in a nightclub, was now to be, perforce, relocated to our apartment.

           I looked at the attorney and said, "You're joking, of course."

       He explained that it was no joke. He was required to visit my dwelling to make sure the plant had indeed been relocated before the arrangements could be finalized for the disbursement of assets.

             N. sighed heavily at the news but we did what was required of us. We hired a moving company and soon Mother's beloved palm tree was ensconced in our living room. Its top fronds found themselves crowding up into our much lower ceiling. N. suggested we pick up some shears and "hack the shit out of it."

              So this is what we planned to do.

              Unfortunately, this is where the story takes a strange turn.

               While we were cruising with our shopping cart down the ridiculously wide aisles of the hardware warehouse where we hoped to find shears, a ridiculously handsome, ridiculously young man accosted us. He looked like the sort of chap you'd see on an afternoon soap, dark featured and oh-so-poised.

                He asserted that he was N.'s lover (he had actually followed us to the store in his hybrid, imagine!) and that they were to begin a life together anew. She had promised him. I laughed in his face. Then I saw N's sheepish face.

                She left HOMEWORLD with the twenty-five year old that night, climbed into his hybrid like a tall, displaced princess in a very poorly-written fairy tale, and I rarely saw her again after that.

                 I might have thought briefly about killing myself, but I no longer was in the mood to kill mother's beloved friend.

                                                    *

              I was alone for a few weeks, drinking again. But only for a few weeks, I promised myself. I remembered to share my screwdrivers and other cocktails with Mother's alcoholic tree. It did seem to perk up her leaves even more.

              Why did I say her leaves just now?

                Well, it's hard to tell you this part. It's hard to tell you that I began to see shadows around the tree when the room was dark, when I sat there all alone, sinking into the ugly black couch whose upholstery was always too much like melting butter for my taste. No support at all for a man. That was N.'s choice.

                 True, I was drunk. But I began to see feminine forms, voluptuous shapes, shadow breasts and legs turning. Dark legs, dark arms. Never did I see a face. Just this....woman shape.

                   Whenever I would jump up and switch on the light suddenly, trying to catch her, I would just laugh.

                It was nothing more than a palm tree. And I was a pitiful drunk.

                    I drank on. Once I went over and hugged her in the darkness. I pressed my body against her. I was hard. I heard a moaning. A satisfaction coming from her. My lips slobbered on her trunk. My hand found a wetness. A sort of wet bole. You've surely seen a bole on a tree before that looked like a woman's secret source. You've had to have wondered. When you were a young man. I didn't understand it. Not one bit.

                      And then Natasha came back.

                                                         *


            Natasha came home one night and just flipped on the light switch in my bedroom, found me passed-out drunk. She threw the bottle off our balcony. I heard the crash. She was shameless. She wanted to be taken back with absolute impunity. She took on the role of my savior. With a straight-face. I agreed immediately.

                 She looked at the tree with even more disdain now. She gave me to understand right away that the tree had to go. The lawyer was not going to come back and "check up" on us. He had as much as winked at us and said, "What you do later with that tree is your own business." Natasha had flashed him a grateful smile then. She really hated Mother.

                     So I came home from work one day soon after that and the palm had been lugged out onto the balcony. It was snowing out there. I came in carrying the groceries and set them down where I stood, just inside the front door. Somehow it bothered me so much. And how had she gotten that heavy pot out there? No way on earth she had done it by herself. Could it have been a strapping twenty-five-year-old who had given her the necessary assistance?

                    And there was the matter of my new inheritance. Was it really the fact that her young lover was "impossible" (her word) or was it that he was "practical" (my word)?

                     As the snow continued to become denser and denser throughout that evening, as Natasha and I sat there watching television together like two pilots on a long distance flight, I couldn't help stealing glances at her. By her, I mean the palm. She was barely visible in the white-out now as a squall whipped through our city.

                      Natasha grew furious at me for stealing glances at the plant, for making comments about the brutal weather.

                     "Don't you realize that tree is your Mother? She's in there, somehow. It's the last stranglehold she has on you. And you're...tree-whipped! It's me or her!"

                       People who look like models can generally get away with murder. But I had had a bad feeling, a hunch about Natasha for months now, and our breakup-makeup thing had not done the work of breaking a bad union and then resoldering it. I tersely explained that we were through.

                            N. packed what little of her things she had brought back to our apartment and left within the hour. She showed her usual degree of emotion. Think negative numbers.

                              My first act was to go out on the balcony and drag the palm back into the center of the living room. My living room now. Or should I say our living room still. The tree had been good company in N's absence.

                                                               *

                        I did go on one more brief bender. I did take a few days of vacation from work. But I told myself I was grieving the real loss of Natasha this time. The final goodbye.


                                                             *

                         One morning, after a night of heavy indulgence, I did wake up with that tree in bed with me. I was naked. Was the tree naked too? Aren't trees always naked? I didn't even open my eyes. I was listening to the whisper coming from her leaves. I remained pleasantly blind as a newborn kitten. I told her I wish I could take her to a tropical island, that we could have a getaway vacation together. But I just couldn't see her getting on a plane. We had a special kind of love, one that would work best on a desert isle, perhaps. I stuck my naked feet in her pot of soil and dug my toes in. It made me giggle like a schoolboy who has finally bedded his first crush in her parents' house. The humus was wet and gave nicely. I had nowhere to be for days and it was so comfortable, so real. So real. The earth is one sexy mother, isn't it? 

Plus

      For honesty's sake, it is better to tell your life story when you are tired.

      For the ultimate in honesty, it is best to tell your life story when you are dead.

                                                 *

      Leon was finishing up in hospice. He was not afraid to die, for he was tired beyond fear. He was obscenely old. He was alone in the world. He had, in fact, detached himself from the existence of his large, globous body entirely, except for when this corpus-soon-to-be-corpse managed to sneak a pointlessly punitive message of pain, a sort of ridiculous holler, an idiotic yahoo, through his pharmacological defense shields, which were tended not quite assiduously enough  by the not quite beneficent but nevertheless smiling and amiable nurses. The chief weapon in that arsenal, the one which deployed the shield, which protected  floating being from actually being here, was morphine. Morphine, that king of drugs, the king of no fucks given today, Ma'am.

      Leon stared at a little bouquet of flowers that had appeared while he was sleeping, which had suddenly materialized on what he liked to think of as the "floating table," that little service station on casters. The table floated like a ballerina. It was Ginger Rogers to any nurse's Fred Astaire. This bouquet came from nobody he knew. It wasn't for Leon. Rather it had been purloined, Leon intuited, from a nearby room in the hospice where someone had just checked out in that final way. Someone had checked out to go check into that dark hotel below our feet. The hotel of infinite capacity.  Some nurse, probably Jim, had rehomed these flowers. Probably the nurse thought he had repurposed kindness. But the flowers had merely moved from a room of the dead to a room of the dying. To say what, really? What is it that we imagine a gift of flowers says to the moribund or the dead? Leon remembered archeologists giving accounts of finding flowers (ancient pollen) in Paleolithic graves. So when we brought flowers into hospice rooms, when we decorated our funerals with them, we were being Neanderthals? We had come so far? Not at all in these moments. We had put no distance at all between us and that aporia the Neanderthals felt in the face of death. You might as well shoot Silly String as place a bouquet on a grave. It made Leon smile, despite his muzzy hopelessness.

      The man tried to hump himself up a little on his pillows and told himself he knew who it was that went this time. That silver-haired little smiling gamine across the hall. It must have been. He seemed to remember hearing a quiet commotion across the way in her room that morning. Asleep, he had known what it was and had known it was not worth rousing himself up into full consciousness. But now the memory returned. The sounds which had tweaked his consciousness. It had been nothing as loud as a resuscitation. What was her name? Oh yes, Barbara. How he hated when she hummed her way down the hall with her walker. And hummed her way back. But she was a nice little woman. No use denying that. He was sure he could remember the exact moment when she received the flowers, that cooing and excitement. A grandson had brought those, Leon knew, because the oversize adolescent had turned into his room by mistake at first, with the little bouquet in its vase palmed in one if his huge hands. He had redirected the peach-fuzz giant across the hall.

      Leon knew he was missing a clue here about the fragile woman. But it was irretrievable. It was meant to be irretrievable. Something about empathy, something about grieving even strangers. The morphine put the kibosh to that. Good.  It was good it was that way. Sleep in being awake and the sort of jigsaw sort of holds together.

      Leon stared at the flowers. Merciless beings. They were merciless because they were a puzzle. They were merciless because they were ferociously alive and determined to give meaning to color and form. In this late hour. Their own color and form. Or so they thought. Bother, bother, bother.. But they had already been snipped. They were in a plastic vase drinking water. They were in a hospice themselves. There were orange cups and cusps, pink labials and little dry white antennae. What a load of shit, to feel the vibrance and the engagement these things wanted with the man lying in the bed, waiting his turn. The vibrations they gave off.  But they wanted that engagement with anyone. They needed attention. They wanted a painter to see them. Obnoxious things. As bad as people, Leon thought. Or as good as them. Same difference. Bloom, attention.

       They were careful about  mirrors in the hospice. The staff discreetly hid them. There had to be full length ones, but they hung and hid on the dark sides of doors turned to walls. Leon knew the patients, clients, inmates--whatever the polite term was these days, he had forgotten--usually wanted to control the reckoning of their own reflection and all that it implied. One hobbled, one fell, one was often stooped if one was ambulatory at all. But then there were the funny cases. The ones who could have danced a jitterbug right up to the moment they went dark. Some were even young. Better not touch that with the mind. Isn't it funny how a thing like than can happen, Leon wondered. That sudden precipice. How you can think you're fine but be moments away? Then Leon giggled and suddenly died.

     A cerebral event. The nurse actually did nothing. She watched quietly from the doorway, calling no one. Though the machines were sounding a surprisingly polite alarm. There was no family to summon. No real alarm. She bit her thumb. At the nail.

      Leon didn't know she was there. She saw the man rolling over into it. She did the human thing then, approached and took his hand. His big hand covered in seborrheic keratoses, glued-down disgusting chocolate chips. Did he know she took his hand?

       No.

     

                                                                    *

     Suddenly, all the time in the world was there. It emerged from a beatific doorway that was somehow insanely wet.

      Leon lay on a large bed in a high-ceiling bedroom. A shadowy room protecting itself from a sunny afternoon. Dark blankets over long curtains over the tall windows. A vague insinuation of a city out there. So vague.

     Leon lay back and admired his voluptuous breasts.

     I am this way forever, Leon knew. He was right.

      His lover entered the room then. It was the male corollary of the tigress Leon had become. Everything was to be given. There was fruit in the bed.

       He entered the lovemaking from the other side. He realized instantly he had missed out his entire life. That he could not be entered in this way. It was criminal but he had not known.  But now it was here. Searing pleasure.

         The man making love to him did not look like him. But he knew it was him inside there. They must be the same.

          Here, here, here, his body said. Her body said. There, there, yes there, his body said.

          They were enfolded in a swath of light, for that is what this sort of living is.

            The tongue of flame is what he would remember and remembering, Leon knew, was now forever.

                                    *

         He was a dog in the night. Leon was on all fours, a black dog, trotting through the darkness, drinking from puddles. He drank the moon from puddles. It tasted so good.

        What is there in a dog's mind that is wrong?

        Well, there were shadows that teased, and the smells were infinite! There were threats and promises and worries. He noticed he still had his breasts. His voluptuous human breasts somehow seemed natural on the underside of his dog body.

           He would deliver them somewhere.

          His lover was far behind him now, Leon knew, down at the end of the longest street ever. It was the man in the apartment who had just taught him everything there is within his body, the power of surrender.

           Leon ran forward. The man would remain forever at the end of the long street, running towards the black dog. The distance between them would elongate infinitely. It was a beautiful thing. It was like a violin string that could go around the circumference of the world while being played. No worries.

           Leon arrived at an opening in the earth. It was like a cave but it went down.

            He wagged his thick black tail.

             He went down.

     
                                   *

        Going down the slope of the cave, Leon realized how much smaller he had become. He had six legs, not four. He was small but he was immense within himself. He was still the exact size of the universe, whether he was a voluptuous woman, a black dog or the thing he was now.  He was inside the mind of an ant. It was all armor, that head. He had mandibles and a skull of some strange shell. But it was comfortable. Designed for comfort. Ergonomic. Home.  It was like waking up as the moon and knowing you were the moon.

             Leon was slowing down. His body had antifreeze in it. Some ants behind him were closing the entrance to the cave (or anthill) now. Closing the cold out. They were doing such a great job. He felt the tender ministrations as if they were hands touching his body, setting it aright. As if it were a mother tucking him in.

              He approached a group of brethren ants. They were all touching their antennae to each other, slowly. They were closing in a circle. The antifreeze was doing its work. The bodies were sealing up from the inside. Winter was moving over the anthill. He knew he was safe though he heard the wind. He felt so lucky.

             What if some of us were left outside, Leon worried. He asked the other ants in ant language (he was quite fluent) whether they should form a rescue party, unseal the cave, the anthill, and search for any stragglers.

           Stragglers will be fine, the other ants said in ant unison.

           This could be translated, Leon knew, as ant death is not real; only ant language is real. Do not betray this moment.

             Leon had to agree with this sentiment. He realized his empathy for the earth outside and the stragglers left for the winter blades of ice to shear away was a primitive holdover from the time before ant-consciousness had made everything all right again. Evolution had been running backwards all this time. It was the higher-ups, the ones who stepped on us, who had it all wrong. To pity them, Leon thought, is useless.

      So he slept instead in the bosom of his siblings, who had been waiting for him.

She was embarrassed to have to go into the street with the three boys who had all known her. Well, they hadn't known her, but they had known her. The crazy way her mother talked.

She thought of the movie Carrie.

So she stood around in the street while her mother watched from the picture window. The girl was picking some peeling rubber off her mint Converse she had drawn on with a pen, running her fingers through her...stop watching me, she grimaced at the window. The curtains banged shut like an impossible old maid, muted.

Rach smelled two of his fingers and then crossed himself nervously, not even realizing he did it.

"What food do you smell?" Nial asked. He didn't wait for her to answer. "Bananas? Do you smell bananas?"

"No," she said.

He had been practicing to be a hypnotist using YouTube. Which she figured meant he was practicing to be a rapist.

(He had to be buying those ugly clothes for something.)

"Barbush barbush barbush barbush barbush" practically hummed someone in stoner monotone.

What she had been doing before her mother chased her from the house:

She had been dissolving various colored dyes in glasses of water in the kitchen. Peering at them like a Russian scientist. She was conscious of the soft fact that she liked the high ceiling in that room and how it was always deserted in there since her mother was useless. Psychic. Useless. The sound of colors dissolving in water was no sound at all. The air was cleared of some sort of static by this process.

It was as though she were holding the hand of water like a mermaid.

She had been watching the colors plume out into phantasmagoria, vivid arabesques and serpentines. Sea serpents and orgasms. She was a girl, after all. She was these essences, she knew. Was she any good? If she just listened, she knew it would be the way she wanted in life somehow. If she just listened. So she stood on the street with the three boys who had all known her and wanted to know her again and she wondered. Was she really any good? And what good were these boys with her mother behind the curtains she was holding in both  hands now, unsubtle. Her so-called psychic mother who fought and pleaded and fought again with banks like lovers. Her bankrupt psychic mother. Who could not cook or suck a man's cock to save her life. And that was the woe of both of them, wasn't it?

She chased off a perfectly good trucker, a perfectly good idiot, this summer. And he worked ridiculous overtime. Solvent and invisible. What an idiot her mother was.

If she could just haul off and hit her in the face. She knew the feeling but couldn't quite own it, tame it. Punch her. But through that iron curtain. While she cowered in her pusher manners behind the walls of the house they would eventually lose. Let it just happen. Let them ride the wind. Maybe she could pare off from her then. On the wind of shared failure, the way people do. The way people divorce reasons. Or promises. There is beauty in such errors. Such fuck-ups.

"What do you smell now?"

It was Andy, mocking the august mannerisms of the junior rapist-hypnotist.

She was inside the color blue. It could not touch her if she remained inside the walls of the color blue This was an actual place like a prison, the color blue, but with this difference: the rest of the world was looked out and that externality was the prison. Blue means within. This shade of blue was a vivid sapphire. It was a roaming spirit condensed in a still person. It was what gave water its sexual prowess. The sexual powers that water has at night, all night. Wild water. Even the water in a night bathtub has a shade of this.

Neon has nothing on water, except when neon reflects in it. Then it might win. Like a serpent against a mongoose. The mongoose has nasty powers. You know Riki Tiki Tavi. She let the smoke out slowly from her nostrils. She did it right under her mother's glass nose. Let her press behind the curtains into the glass of street looking. Fairy pimp-mother. Let her fuck off, let her hear this thought, psychic bitch.

So her mind wondered and the boys touched each other. Their hands covered each other's hands like lovers. They pushed. They walked backwards. Their language skipped beats like hearts will do when the closeness is all anticipation. The boys. Nervous coiled springs in them like you see in hunting dogs. She noticed how they were doing this over and over. Unconscious, since they were boys. Boys are unconsciousness, she thought. She figured there must be exceptions. But they were lovers in this way. These three in the street. Dancing into each other. Giddy not awkward. They were like Three Graces. Maybe a little homely but still.

Three Graces. With a basketball under the arm of one.

"That must smell like your body odor," she said. But she said it soft, so friendly. So that it was a tease. A sexual poke. A sexual poke given out of boredom, acedia. The sexiest kind of flirtation. The insincere kind with nuance.

She wondered if she would be sentenced to be the insincere flirt (the word is cocktease, she knew) all her life?

Why was it a question? Why was she sentenced to asking questions instead of making declarative statements like the idiots do?

"Do you want to play basketball?"

"No. Kerry." She had to make it clear she understood the real beg there.

"Behind the 7-11..."

"I know behind the 7-11, Kerry." She was forced to be stern with this horny boy nostalgic already for what had happened over and over in his mind.

Did he really not wash his hand for days? You hear the thing.

The dog on the carpet with his belly upturned. (Look at my yummy, well-behaved balls.)

Just imagine the power, she thought. Why am I not abusing the power? She thought she must be crazy like her mother. Was she merely "psychic" too? To call oneself a psychic was to confess one saw oneself as passive before and within the universe. It was not a magical power. It was a form of usual victimhood. There was a sisterhood. A weakness. It was to believe in feeling over knowledge over feeling. Folding over knowledge over feeling. Like laundry.  How did she know this when she was just fifteen? She just did. A puppet. If you sit on playground swings alone, you will eventually become a philosopher. Everything's eventual. She was a girl philosopher. She had spilled her essence but not her thoughts all over the crooks of these boys who believed that brown longnecks behind the 7-11 were magic talismans on a road somewhere.

She was told that she was prettier than the prettiest girl in the best magazine inside the 7-11..With her legs pinned back like a Japanese butterfly.

She should know.

The Blizzard Exhibit

The blizzard exhibit was very popular, one of the favorites of all the museum-goers, and the absolute favorite of children who visited the Time Museum.

People of all ages loved to gather around these moments culled out of distant time, which were displayed under what appeared to be a glass bubble. You could watch these terrible moments from January 12th, 1888 unfold before your eyes again and again. All you had to do was push one of the large buttons located on the walls of the museum. One button was on the ground floor where the "time bubble" was located and the other plate-sized, red button was easy to find on the wall of the gallery walkway above. Guests could stand up there and get a bird's-eye view of the little one room schoolhouse surrounded and beset by the blizzard as it raged in a renewed "live-time". The visibility inside the time bubble itself was the same as the visibility during the blizzard of 1888 itself; it was a pitiless, white void. Museum visitors could watch it with the naked eye and try to see what they could see, but most used the special goggles provided by the museum, which would allow them a thermal view of the young schoolteacher and her beset charges.

Many times a day, Minnie Freeman was forced to face her imminent extinction and the deaths of all thirteen of her little charges.  Each time, the resourceful woman marshaled her wits and tied her young pupils together with a rope and led the thirteen boys and girls into the screaming white void of the storm which had killed so many on that day in 1888. This was not a reenactment. These were the actual moments of time which had occurred, spliced together using the latest technology. Minnie and her thirteen young charges were indeed alive and again living those moments of terror  each time a child or adult pushed either of those buttons on the museum walls. And push they did. It was considered a perfectly innocent form of entertainment by virtually all. It is true there was a vociferous minority which protested violently against exhibitions such as this one. But these temporal ethicists were mocked if not openly vilified.

It was just after noon and the exhibit was in full swing. Minnie had tethered the children together with the rope and they were wandering blindly in the blizzard, their hands held in front of them like sleepwalkers, hoping to touch something, anything, some structure which might mean safety, warmth, survival. Most of the children were crying. Their fingers, their hands hurt terribly already, though they had been in the blizzard only a few minutes. These were children of the Plains, so they knew what it would mean if they passed a certain point of frostbite. It would mean the loss of fingers, hands, possibly an arm itself. Their feet hurt too. They could lose their legs, they knew. They cried, but it hurt to cry because the tears burned their cheeks. They could hear their teacher praying aloud and some of them tried to follow the words of her prayer with her. Some were too young to know the words but tried anyway.

The people in the museum smiled and took holographic photos of the spectacle before and below them. Some had even seen this display before. It never got old. The drama was so vivid.

The saddest part of the exhibit is that Minnie never reached safety with the children. The exhibit, the time splice, showed only the few moments when she emerged from the schoolhouse to enter the blizzard with the children. She wandered to the edge of the time splice and then the vignette ended, right when the school teacher reached the curved face of the encapsulated bubble, which she could not sense in any way. Some museum-goers had complained over the years that the scene should be presented in its entirety. They argued that we should see the whole arc of the narrative, the full event. But it was a matter of expense. And it was very labor-intensive to sample a bit of the time stream and reproduce it in a sustainable manner. It had taken nearly seventy-five years just to code well enough to reproduce this series of moments.

It was a summer's day and museum-goers had just pushed the button to activate the blizzard display when something unusual happened. Nobody could know that Minnie Freeman and some of the children had been experiencing a profound sense of deja vu in their multiple shared afterlives. One of the children had even predicted some of the details of their march through the snow. For example, she "remembered" that her classmate Ada would lose her shoe and panic. She asked her teacher how she could remember something which had not yet happened. Minnie "remembered" this too.

This was not something which was supposed to be possible. The passivity of these actors in the time splice was taken for granted. The "time bubble" under which the time-splice played out was impermeable. It was one-way temporal glass. Nothing could get through to the fourteen human beings below who repeatedly lived out moments that were certainly among the worst moments in their lives, if not, as was probable, the absolute worst moments they had ever endured. But these players on a wintry stage were not supposed to ever realize the moments they were living were no longer singular moments, but were instead now "time samples." These players were sealed within their play. There was no "fourth wall" to break. So we had been told. It was philosophically argued that there was no ethical distinction to be made for the proliferation of pain in "hosting" this event from the past, in replaying it constantly. It was the same, singular event. The "players" did not know they were now trapped in these moments. It felt like the first time to them every time. It was innocent voyeurism. So it was explained and so it was believed.

It took many thousands of "playings" of this tragic blizzard scene before randomness had its say. But just as every recording ever made will eventually develop a glitch which compromises the fidelity of the recorded sounds, this scene too finally degenerated into the native chaos of which our time-stream is actually composed.

It was a very warm day in August and museum visitors were vicariously enjoying the cold contained in the time bubble when Minnie did something no one had foreseen. She led the schoolchildren the wrong direction. She changed time. Only one of the museum-goers assembled to watch realized what had happened. This was a middle-aged woman who had seen the exhibit several years before when she brought her young granddaughter to the Time Museum to see Minnie's resourceful heroism play out under the time bubble. Today she had come alone. She instantly realized the magnitude of this error.

"She's going the wrong way," she muttered at first. And then the hairs stood up on her neck. And she shouted it. "She's going the wrong way! That's not the direction she's supposed to go!" Because she was up on the gallery walkway, her voice carried very well.

The other museum visitors looked at her queerly. Was she ill? Was this some sort of prank? How could the school teacher go the wrong way? This moment of time was finished. It had been finished for centuries.

Then they saw the schoolteacher within the time bubble fall in the snow. The children, tied by the rope to her body, fell with her. They could see through their goggles that the snow was covering their bodies. Minnie got up and stumbled a bit more. Then fell again. This went on for a few moments. Then she apparently lost consciousness. The children struggled to free themselves of the rope but to no avail. They were all perishing. The two hundred and thirteen children who perished in the blizzard of January 12th, 1888 became two hundred and twenty-six children.

The code which set the parameters of the time splice for the blizzard were broken. The scene had been coded to end when the teacher's hand reached a certain point in the time-space frame which had been sampled. Because this did not happen, the boundaries of the time splice dissolved. The blizzard broke free of the time bubble.

The blizzard of January 12th, 1888 broke free into the space of the Time Museum on that August afternoon and instantly all visitors on all floors of the museum were snow-blind, freezing to death in their summer clothing. They were no different than Minnie Freeman. But there was no rope. There was no safe place to reach.

Security managed to push an alert button before freezing to death, but it was too late. The museum sealed itself at the moment that alert was sounded, condemning all museum patrons inside to certain death. It is true the museum was designed without windows as a security precaution and that the walls had been specially fortified, but the blizzard spread and an entire sky from another century was pouring into a single building. Winds soon built up such pressure that even these fortified walls began to buckle. All the tortured skies of  the Nebraska of January 12th, 1888 were now pouring into one building the size of a city block. The walls of the museum were no match for this monstrous storm and they soon gave. The blizzard met the August streets of another century, where it froze many thousands more to death before finding its way heavenward where finally the hot skies could appease this storm with their warmth.

It took three days for time technicians coding furiously, actually an international effort, to close off the opening to the 1888 blizzard. This caused a temporary removal of all time splice displays, much to the chagrin of the public and the delight of the temporal ethicists. One initially bright note in this lugubrious story is that a family of three who had perished in the blizzard of '88 wandered out of the broken time splice into the streets of the new century and managed to survive. Many argued for the return of these unwanted "time immigrants" to 1888. Their memories, gentler hearts argued, could be swabbed clean. Needless to say, that was not something which could be allowed. The government voted to euthanize them the next year.

The Thing

The thing about Rick is that he didn't save the girl in the Popeyes. Sometimes he would say "woman." Was she a girl or a woman? Who knows, does it matter? She was seventeen. Or nineteen. I forget. It was an odd number. I remember that. Strange the way facts have jagged edges like that. You can almost just seize them sometimes.

He was standing in line trying to decide whether to order the three piece chicken meal or the five piece when the guy came through the front door with the gun already out. He was screaming at her, right at her,the girl behind the counter, as he flew across the room of multifarious screams, the people running towards and out the side doors, even the front door the young man had just come through, anywhere they could escape. Dumber or more desperate, unthinking people ran into the bathrooms.

The way Rick told the story he didn't run. He just froze there at his place in line which was no longer a place in line since everyone had gone in an instant. It was as if the man with the pistol, the furious man, couldn't see Rick. He only had murderous eyes for the girl or woman behind the counter. She just froze too. Standing there in the horrible uniform that was supposed to just be a temporary indignity. Now it was how she would disappear.  Rick said there was a resigned look in her eyes. He saw that even in those few moments. Why didn't she run? Scream? Do something? He often asked us this. He knew there was no answer. Maybe she was preparing to reason with him. Maybe she just knew.

It was the usual story of love (or something someone considered love) gone wrong. The moment for Rick to have acted was a very brief moment indeed. The bullet in the face followed immediately after the few short sentences, the reading of the charges against her monstrous heart. And she was destroyed, shattered, gone from view down behind the stainless counter. Though Rick saw the parts of her on the Popeyes menu board he had just been studying. Brain tissue slid down over the bright images of fried chicken, obeying the dictates of gravity, which always has a simple and well-defined job to do.

The man turned and ran after making one more declarative statement. "I TOLD you," he said. To no one. To the air. He said it as if she was still a sentient thing, a cloud of senses inside a body standing behind a counter. She wasn't. She wasn't any longer. And then he ran out the door into the snow coming down. He was apprehended three days later. He might be free by now. Who knows. It's been a decent amount of time.

Rick was drunk. Rick was high. We reminded him of these things. We said he couldn't have processed it quickly enough and he couldn't have known what would happen in those few short seconds after the man entered the Popeyes. Many lunatics wave guns around and it all ends relatively well. No bloodshed. It was a metaphysics problem, irresoluble as these things are, and we tried to get Rick to understand that. We were his friends. It could get exhausting. The scenario was revisited so many times between us all. We tried to listen.

It turned out okay because Rick later shot himself. He shot himself in the head. So, he explained, there would be a karmic canceling out. The girl in the Popeyes would somehow be given this absolute love offering, this admission that her life ended way too young for the universe to ever make sense again, for Rick ever to be at peace again. And Rick was all about peace; he was easygoing. His life had been a mellow, slow, drawn-out party. He had served a hitch in the army, but it had been uneventful. He had two divorces under his belt, but he remained friends with both exes. He could have probably gone the distance and been one of the lucky ones, if only he had not been hungry for fried chicken on that February afternoon, at just that hour. Seeing that young girl taken out somehow took him out. He was guiltless. But something in his brain would not let him see that.

Rick had explained to everyone that he had inoperable brain cancer, so everyone decided to go on this death trip with Rick to varying degrees. I mean he had announced his suicide. He was going to go off into the woods he loved and end it there. Those are the woods where he always went on "hunting trips" that were thinly-disguised drug parties with some obligatory shooting of guns at phantom deer and phantom bears and whatever phantom else Rick and his mostly lowlife but reliable friends hallucinated. They would tell you they were "ghetto rednecks." They did fine in the city but they had a country side that came from somewhere. Rick had indeed grown up in the country but had adjusted very well to living in a shit part of town. He was non-judgmental. Sweet with the vulnerable ones. Tough with the ones who would slit your throat if you ever showed a moment of weakness. Where he lived you had to fight sometimes. Rick had fought. He might not have been the brightest guy, but he could find decent work most of the time. In between, he did riskier, sometimes stupid things. But even then he played fair with people and harmed no one. Everyone except the assholes liked Rick.

Rick went alone on his final trip. He had to make it clear where he would be so his body could be recovered and there was no problem. A friend even lent him his cabin for this. He didn't want it to be a rental, some stranger's place. That wouldn't be fair. The friend would call 911 at the appropriate time and act clueless, explain his worries about his "severely depressed friend." And then things would be taken care of by strangers who had no tender feelings for Rick. It all made sense.

Rick repeatedly talked about how his brain cancer was somehow the karmic result of the incident in the Popeyes all those years ago. It wasn't some dead girl seeking vengeance. He wasn't superstitious like that. The constant nightmares weren't like that. It was just the universal balance. It was just something he could not process away. We told him he was wrong. But he wanted to keep this belief. If it somehow gave him a sense of peace, who were we to argue with the insanity of the idea?

Except Rick's cancer wasn't a karmic balancing out. It wasn't even cancer.

We learned from Rick's brother six months after his death by self-inflicted gunshot in the woods that Rick never had inoperable brain cancer. He didn't have brain cancer or any form of cancer at all. It was true he had been spending excessive amounts of time in the hospital, but it was for the treatment of a variety of chronic ailments, none of them fatal, and severe psychiatric problems, including PTSD. None of us were following the cancer narrative that closely since Rick wouldn't allow us to "dwell on it." He had never been a liar, so everyone just believed it all.

And Rick had exhibited the sort of symptoms you expected of someone with a brain tumor. He had serious memory lapses. He was often greatly confused. He needed shepherding. Later, we learned this was probably his severe mental illness and declining state of mind, coupled with the serious battery of psychotherapeutic meds Rick was taking (and probably abusing).

His friends felt horribly hoodwinked for having taking this death trip with Rick. There had been farewell parties, sexy "going away" parties. Girls had offered their favors, some from tender hearts and some (we suspected) for more lurid reasons. Does it turn some girls on to do a guy they know will soon be six feet under? Do they feel the way those hands linger on them and how those hands seem to know those breasts are among the last breasts on earth they will ever caress?  Did Rick's tongue lap the honey with special, mortal ardor? He gave us all strange thoughts. He never made it out of his forties and that makes you think. You expect to make it out of the forties, at least. Everyone does.

You look back at a guy like that. You look back at a guy with bad luck like that.

The Popeyes is still there in the worst part of town. I'm guessing no one who works in that shithole knows a girl was dropped behind that counter. This is a whole other generation. Sometimes they'll vacate a place like that. They always do if it's a massacre. Or the curse of the memory of the deed will do the place in. But this one's still going. It's been remodeled a few times. It serves the needs of one of the poorer neighborhoods. The projects is right across the street. I'm guessing there was some discussion, but hunger and need won out. There's no grocery stores for miles. You can walk there if you don't have a car.

Actually, a man was driven right over and dragged by a car piloted by a junior congressman. less than a block from the front door of that Popeyes. This was in the middle of the night, a few years after that girl or woman was murdered. I could say her name but I won't. I don't know why I don't want to say.

There were no witnesses to that bloody dragging but the victim and the drunk congressman behind the wheel. A video camera in a downtown parking garage in the Capitol complex caught him examining and cleaning up his rental car. When he was arrested, he said he thought he had "hit a sign." The young man had been dragged twenty or thirty feet. He knew it was no sign.

I've never even been inside the Popeyes. I lost a taste for meat years ago and even when I did eat that nasty shit (I'm thinking now of hairs like pubic hairs on the skin of fried chicken) that greasy shit gave me the trots. I know people who swear by it. I"m sure people fall in love in there. They do that sort of thing everywhere. If I ever went in that place, I think I'd just leave my body. But you know they don't put a tombstone in the middle of a fried chicken shack. No, wait. Two tombstones.

Short Story

There was an oddly shaped piece of pink paper in the middle of the street. A man on his way to work walked over to examine it. He looked down from a "respectable distance," couldn't decide, and then proceeded on to the office. A young girl interrupted her skipping on her way to school to stand on the curb and scrutinize it from a safe distance. Two different cats going opposite directions sniffed at it when the sun was in two different places in the sky, but only its aura, really. Nobody could be quite sure. A squirrel hopping across the street like a cursor also stopped briefly and had a metaphysical encounter with the crumpled form. Then night came and it was left to be itself, blissful or cursed. It was pink. It was a pink slip.