Here He Lives - a writing prompt

Writing prompt:  a doctor, a car, and a blanket.  A gas station.

HERE HE LIVES

The Doctor took up his cigarette and pressed the car lighter to its tip.   He inhaled sharply and looked down the bridge of his nose as it illuminated in glorious red embers.   He deposited the lighter back into its slot, never taking his eyes off of the cigarette as he inhaled a tuft of smoke, and released it out of the free corner of his mouth.   He hadn't even twisted the key to turn the engine into starting.   He was simply alone in the dead of winter watching the small fire burn at the end of his paper.

The Doctor turned the keys then after closing his eyes and enjoying the sludge of additives that were filling his lungs.   His mother used to chastise him - when she was alive - that he should know better as a medical professional.  She would ask him if seeing all those x-rays, and scans, and deaths meant anything to him.   She wondered why that never gave him pause and he wondered right back why every other doctor hadn't picked up this habit.  He didn't understand how anyone dealt with all this shit and didn't smoke.  He inhaled and this time removing the cigarette first exhaled.   He twisted the heating nob on his console and set to defrost the lightly crystalline windshield, which was a shame because in its killing frost he saw a beautiful painting.

The Doctor rubbed his eyes with a greasy fist.   The only kind where sweat was the culprit and not edibles.   Just the stress on his human body, and the uncontrollable urge to sweat under controlled precision.  His body always betrayed that.   No matter how absorbed and orderly he seemed, his pores opened up floodgates and he kept gowns and gloves in ready supply.   After another exhale with cigarette between fingers he looked at the cracked skin over each knuckle, down each digit.   He envisioned his flesh eroding till a tenderloin of muscle stared back up at him.  Thin meat for bulky hands, and then eventually as the winds of degradation continued to skim from him his exteriors, and interiors he would be left with but a frail skeletal hand, and all brittle and hard, until it evaporated into the air like dust and nothingness.

The Doctor shifted into reverse and placed his cigarette hand on the top of his passenger seat and removed his vehicle from its place.   He moved to drive and twisted his wheel sporadically to one side with his one good hand and placed his foot to the floor.  The staff parking lot was nearly empty at that hour of night, or at least empty of people.   The cars were like gravestones waiting for their occupants.  Heavy pieces of metals sitting in silences and condolences against the loss of the occupants they had left behind to double shifts and call ins as they were almost out.

The Doctor found his way out onto the road.

The Doctor drove for some time along those early morning roads.   Where street lamps and stop lights held more use as decorations than guiding beacons.  No one was out to use them as such, most were tucked cozy upon their beds.   Most were working third shifts or on their way home from heavy drinking.  He hoped safely, if not they still were under heavy white lights on one of the ER tables, or in the morgue stuffed inside cold lockers where, well, they had no use for lights at all.

The Doctor took a glance into his rear view mirror and paused.   A cold green blanket with a picture of that mean green Hulk character twisted about it as though in floral patterns.  He quickly adjusted the mirror to its proper position as he puffed out the last drag of smoke he could from the side of his mouth.   He stubbed out the butt into the ashtray, and betrayed himself another glance into the mirror but saw in them only the pattered look of blinking cautions lights, as if synchronized into a pattern of their blinking yellows.  He didn't have to see the blanket though to know it was there.  He sympathized with its protagonists, pissed off and raging but he didn't have to see them because they were imprinted  on the back of his mind.  It was always going to be too.

The Doctor reached for his cigarette pack but knew the empty feeling that was awaiting him when now more than the past twenty hours of screaming and studying calm through sweaty palms had ever required.   He crumpled the pack in his fist and threw it against the floor.   A Mobil sign was illuminated ahead of him and he knew his poison could be found inside, and all he had to do was interact with one tired third shift attendant who was usually taking stock of the store when bastard customers came in to bother them.

The Doctor twisted his steering wheel.

The Doctor found his way to the empty space closest to the door.

The Doctor bought the cigarettes, he paid the attendant and he inhaled sharply at the lit stick.

The Doctor drove away, he would be alone at home tonight, the blanket a reminder.   It'd been back there for months, and for months his wife had left him, and for months he'd worked as much as he could.

The Fatherless can seldom reclaim that identity and nor that of Husband.  The Doctor was what he was, this was his identity, this and nothing else.   He drove back home, to some empty closet in the hospital, there was nothing waiting for him in that brick townhouse.  Nothing but the silence of loss, and the echoes of grief.   He would never face them if it wasn't necessary, he would choose instead to wallow in other peoples tears, and other peoples rage.  He would be their blankets.   His mind wandered to the child blanket, green, and mean, and he mumbled in half dead words, "Me too.  Me too."

In This Her Final Hate - A microfiction

Anita took the gun off the wall.  It was an antique hunting rifle, the sort that never had fired a shot in its entire life, and she fiddled about with its locks and trigger.   The hammers snapped down and made her jump and smile in intrigue.   She pressed its butt against her shoulder and looked down the sights and mimicked a firing motion accompanied by a very minor utterance of the word "boom."  She carried it with her down the cold, and intimidating halls of the mansion.  An estate so large that she had often found herself lost in its innumerable amounts of halls and rooms.   She held the antique tool in her arms like an assault rifle as though she could empty a multitude of shell casings upon the floor while the barrel flashed and released round after round at the imaginary ghosts in front of her.  There an old employer, there a man who had wolf whistled at her on 8th avenue while she went for her morning jog.  That was back when she was living in a studio apartment with other starving artist.  They had been for all intents and purposes more starved than artist but the old her deemed it the quality of life she deserved.  Another ghost, of her unstable father a shattered bottle in his hand where her imaginary round had fractured through and planted itself inside his ethereal body.  It wasn't too far off from the fate that had befallen him one drunken night at the tavern in midtown when she was twelve years old.  She remembered hearing the news with a cold indifference as though she knew it was going to happen, and she felt it with a vague happiness that she knew only meant that she had hoped it would.

Anita turned another hallway into the grand expanse of the foyer.  She said aloud, in little more than a whispered joke to herself the word, "foyer" and marveled at the absurdity that her house even had such a room.   Below her from the handrail she finally rested the rifle.  Sitting stock down against the marble, and she planted her fists against its flush stone, and gawked like a gangster at all that was hers.   She previewed the glass chandelier decked with fragments of cold nothings falling among the non-existent party goers below, and so she made it real.   She picked up the heavy rifle - but not so heavy as not to able to be thrown - and she hurled it with some trouble out and over the cold nothing, and it connected and broke apart.  Not all of it, only the pieces vulnerable from that angle and it did not have, she was disappointed to find, the same deafening quality its entirety possessed in the back of her mind.  As the small mementos of glass impacted against the floor along with the blunt snapping of the antique stock on the priceless artifact she sighed.   Her fists gripped the railing again and she screamed out into the echoing void and it screamed back.

When Anita threw herself from that spot, she wondered - in the way that only imminent death allows one to wonder - just what it was that made her so unhappy.   Nothing she had determined, at least nothing so awful.   She had spent her life in exhausting pursuit of happiness, of solace that she had not considered her surroundings.   When her husband a particularly well to do mogul pronounced his undying love to her, she knew it was a lie, because he would, and did die.   And with it his love.  What she was left with was an empty house, full of empty rooms, full of empty things.   There had been but several places that memories were ever made between her and the "man of her dreams" but there were so many others where she sulked that she could have done better.   The splatter pattern among the stone flooring just moments away from her skull would probably be more fitting a painting than any she had thrown together in her studio life.  She figured the drab gray could use a little more color, a little more vibrancy, that the house itself deserved more life.  She heard the snap in her neck before the end even came, and there was something sweet and tragic in that noise, but she was gone before she had time to contemplate, and contemplation was one of the greatest assets to being alive.

An Attraction of Words

Intimidated by your sheer vocabulary
I stand,
Not in utter fear but in utter wonderment
I stand,
Because to hear it pronounced I am attached,
Stricken to daydreams of the detail you have to say.
My mind is wrapped in your enigma,
Not the sort that opens up into a Pandoras box,
But otherwise,
A plethora of delighted songs,
I stand,
Because the image that I've found,
Is a personification of what it was I dreamt,
Oh, let not the fates resort of fending me off once again.
Intimidated into admiration,
I stand,
In utter wonderment, because
The leaf that falls from the tree
Or the pedal from the flower
Is another example of a scene you could have spoken
I would blink
But then I'd miss sight of you for the fractions of a second.
I will be fearful of the laws of my life
Which appear bent to break me from that which I sought.
As though the rules are written that I should not
Capture that which I admire,
But if in truth the snare is real I hope that it does not hurt,
And if it does I'll nurse the foot that was captured,
And I'll welcome the bedside manner
And note how soothing the cooing of your forgiving quality
Heals me as I heal you and we heal each other.
I stand,
In intimidation of your vocabulary
Of your knowledge and your joy,
You entertainment in entertainments,
And your skewed and perfect vision of this plane,
I stand,
Unwillingly to sulk away defeated,
Lord no,
I do not want to be defeated.

Assassins

They attack like gremlins pillaging and tattering

all the pages of this story.

They gnaw and scratch the foundation of the staggering

structures conceived only as thoughts.

And everything crumbled into an abysmal little

dedication of belief and little glory.

And it stuck out in sour bricks upon a salty earth

that already suffered through plots.

Stories of sickness spit out from the mouth of

full grown screamers, bleeding and glory.

Stories of lost woods and fractured sticks and 

twigs imitating ugly flowers in feeble pots.

These gremlins snickered all snide, and grinned in disgusting little biting smiles before they died just like the earth they had killed.

Any Arrangement

Wake up and send me the flowers
You've been sitting in your own shadows debating your very own conscience.
So, wake up and send me the flowers
You've been talking to your wallpaper and communing only with the silence.
Please, wake up and send me the flowers,
You've eventually made it as far as your door planning but not committing to a twist of your wrist.

My eyes have met your own

I've laughed at your jokes, just me and me alone

I'd go forward with you to the movie show,

My feet are dressed, ready to go.

Still, you've made excuses and made convict everything you had hoped would do.

Wake up and send me the flowers.

So, wake up and send me the flowers,

Please

You've got to get up and bring me the flowers.

The Simple Act of Breathing CHAPTER ONE (Abridged) - very basic edit.

THE SIMPLE ACT OF BREATHING (opening)

I found that I was more nervous than I thought I would be on the way to the graduation party.  A sickly feeling had flooded my stomach and I thought I’d start trembling like a scared child.   I thought my teeth would be prone to chattering in that state and I gripped my steering wheel tighter in what felt like feeble fists.  I pull into the driveway, and it went on for an infinite amount of time through a sea of pine trees.   It was the perfect place to make a blood sacrifice.

One of my classmates greets me with a gorilla sized hug and promptly spills a good amount of Natural Ice all over my hoodie.  He takes a sip from his beer without an apology and throws an arm around my shoulder to not so gently guide me into the thralls of seventeen and eighteen year olds.  It doesn’t take very long for the other graduates to spot me and most have a similar reaction to his.  You’d think I was some straight edge goodie two shoes the way they all crowd around me and congratulated me for popping my party cherry.

I keep my ears open to the pointless banter.  I retreat into myself, and drink what seems like a limitless supply of beer because when one cup is finished, someone brings me another.   

People started talking to me about classes.   Started talking to me about other parties.  They asked if I remembered obscure memories from our time in school and I was surprised to find that I had no recollection of the things they were speaking of.   I had kept my head down and my eyes glued to my papers.  I had kept my mind full of hidden judgements.  I gave my classmates attention, I listened to their troubles but it all went in one ear and out the other.   I held doors open and responded with “You’re Welcomes” when handed a “Thank You” but I never made eye contact.  I knew their names Alissa, Gabe, Morgan, Tom, Beth, Sara and Sarah with an ‘H.’    I knew that basic information and that they were sopranos, cellists, quarterbacks, and chess prodigies but I didn’t know what their favorite foods were or if their parents made them run cross country.  I didn’t know who had issues with pimples, or who slept around the most.   Was graduating the same high school, enduring the same teachers, and marching in band really enough to give you common ground?  I didn’t think so, but these people were alien to me and they appeared to believe that those simple commonalities were enough to warrant inclusion.  I was over analyzing everything, and I knew I wanted to leave.

I wouldn’t deny that their was a slight fuzziness in my vision or that I felt myself stumble over my own steps, and I wouldn’t deny that I knew I was drunk but there was an overwhelming need to remove myself from the situation.  My nervousness had been accentuated, and I did not feel a greater need to fellowship more in this most ancient of high school traditions.   No one much noticed as I made my way away from the bonfire.  I was a novelty, an anomaly of a peer and that unique quality had faded quickly.  I suppose I didn’t expect that newfound love to last, but it was somewhat nice while it was there.  Eventually though, I was sitting in my parents Subaru.

I didn’t know how to have friends, or what to say.  I didn’t know how to have fun with the stupid casual things they had fun with.    I started the engine.   My dizziness I felt had dissipated, the alcohol was relinquishing some of its hold, and I shifted into drive and found my way around the cornfield and passed the other cars.

 The long stretch home was the best.   Those empty country roads bordered by fields of corn shrouded in an absence of light.   If I had just pulled off the road I could walk on forever it seemed, and I could abandon my car, abandon industrialization, and technology.   Abandon social conventions, and feeble mortal aspirations.   I could abandon all of that and be alone with my thoughts.  The simple sounds of the car engine pushing the box of metal forward and the wheels rumbling over the concrete, it was calming, in that way that whale sounds are too people who can’t fall asleep.  I wasn’t sure if I was better for this feeling but I did know that all of those voices drove me nuts.   All of those memories, and ideas that I didn’t share in.

We lived in one of those suburban communities just on the outskirts of the city proper.  Some place between there and the country.  I turned down a side street when the country highway had turned into a four lane highway.   It wasn’t the normal route I took home but it was the sort of way to go when you wanted to take your time.  I took the next turn a little sharper than normal and I was only a few blocks away from my house.

I had come to an immediate stop.  My foot pressed against the floor as if itself braced for impact and I could hear my breathing accentuated in that silence above the whisper of the engine turning.  “Oh shit.”  I found myself saying through the purr of the motor, and I stepped out of the car.    I left the door open, my hand gliding over the inside surface as if ready to brace myself from taking anymore steps into the situation i now found myself in.   My headlights showed her there, lying on her back, her arms sprawled out to her side and one leg atop another.   She wasn’t moving.   I took simple steps forward and I already felt a fear of discovery come over me.  I looked up the road and then back over my shoulder and tried to peer up and down the other areas of the intersection.  There was nothing.   I knew she would have to cough, stand up, say ouch, or something.    Even cry.    Any sort of noise was better than this eerie silence, because in that quiet nothingness was an eruption of truths that I did not want to be involved in.   “Hey, are you okay?”  She was dressed in little smiley heart pajama pants and shirt.   The faces colored in shades of green and purple and her hair done up in a small ponytail.  It must have been two o'clock in the morning and my blame shifted around to her parents because how could they have let her come out at such an ungodly hour.   She should have been in bed by ten comfortably quaint under a blanket under the protection of a dim night light in the corner. But she was there.  I noticed the pool of blood forming under her head.  My heart sank.  I looked at the front of the car as I made those centimeter seeming steps toward her body and there were no discernable markings that she had even impacted against the hood, but my own eyes knew that it was the reality.  I had just killed this child.

I knelt down beside her and lifted her slightly and rolled her onto her side.  The blood had begun pooling in her hair and it stuck slightly as i rolled her.   It didn’t appear to be seeping out anymore but the gash in her skull was apparent and sickly.  I apologized a thousand times in my head and a hundred out loud.   I moved for my cellphone but then I looked up and down the road again, over my shoulder and to my left and right.   It was quiet, small forests of trees obscured the scene from any surrounding houses.  No one could see me or judge me.   If God was up there he was the only one watching, but why would he let this happen to me.   It was already a confirmation that I should have stayed home, that only disaster would strike if I ventured out of my house, pursued social circles, or entreated to try to do new things.   For one reason or another I curled my arms under her neck and under her knees and her hands flopped about at her side and I carried her to the Subaru and put her in the back seat.   I quickly slammed the door and sat with my frightened fists against the steering wheel, and I felt I had already come to far.   I shifted into reverse and backed out into my original street before driving forward in adjustment and back on out toward the country road.

There were only devils on my shoulders prying and primping me up with their pitchforks and spewing fire into my mind.    I could not be caught they told me, I told myself.   Think of all that work you had put into yourself.  All that work.   Wasted.  There was a dead girl laying on my backseat and I found myself worrying about degrees and perceptions.  I pictured my face plastered on television and on rag journalism that popped up on my Facebook feed.  It was petty, it was a sort of evil, and I knew it.   My heart retracted deeper into my chest cavity.  My stomach sank.   Some kind of flight instinct infected my brain and I was fast becoming some deplorable monster.   My left fist was stuck as though melded into the steering wheel and my right hand was shaking at my side so that I moved it to join its mate and hid its anxiety in a tightened grip against the leather.   There was an abnormal calm in that drive.   As the yellow lines melded in front of me at fifty-five miles per hour.  As every headlight passed over my eyes I imagined that they had telescopic eyeballs extending out of their windshields to peer at the sin I was committing.   That calm persisted, and I made sure to keep my eyes locked on the road in front of me.

It was a strange feeling not second guessing where to go to hide a body.  Where once I admired the empty spaces of the country as a place for reflection and solace I now saw them for a new awful potential.   I turned down another mirrored road out there in the middle of nowhere.  One that had far less commuters, so that it was practically none, and when I had gone a good enough distance I parked and shut off my lights but let that familiar engine hum continue.  With a turn of my key I know I would hear the chirping of crickets, and the obnoxious guttural croaks of frogs, but above all that I would hear the expulsion of my breath from my heavy heaving chest.   The keys did not turn, and the engine persisted.    I tried to stare at my reflection in the rear view but the absence of street lights made that impossible and I wasn’t about to turn on the interiors.  At that moment I was happy to be a void in the darkness.   But, I felt eyes on me, maybe of the girls ghost, maybe of God, but I could beg forgiveness later.   In those moments I was ashamed with the knowledge that I didn’t know who the hell I was anymore.   An overachieving antisocial son of a bitch it seemed, and a murderer.   

I took a deep breath and opened up the back door and collected up her body.   I expected it to be cold and stiff, but I wasn’t aware how long it took for a body to do that.   I had never had to experience such a course of action as to warrant the reward of that sort of knowledge.  Now I had it.   Like an incurable infection, and it was going to sit inside my thoughts like a cancer.   

There was a ditch at my feet when I turned around, and I made a first step to go down its steep edges.  I stepped over the reeds and they dragged against my jeans.  I took another step and the girl grew heavier in my arms.   The clouds began to part overhead so that the full moon’s light shone full and bright against her face and I locked my eyes there.   I didn’t know how I could have done this, and I thought of my sister and it sickened me that someone could possibly do this to her, but I still persisted, and took yet another step like some fucking devil, like a malicious and selfish imp.  Then her eyes opened wide as if startled by the wild, and I was taken aback in a panic and I dropped her and fell back against my ass into the wet grass.   I saw her rolling down the side of the ditch until a subtle splash rang out in my ears at a rigid volume.  And I scrambled up to my feet back up to the top of the hill.    Once there I gave a urgent stare up and down the road, and saw no one, no witnesses.  The moon was obscured as it once had been behind the clouds, and it must have been the shock playing tricks on me.   I was satisfied with that answer, but my instincts urged me down the hill, urged me to go down and fetch her out.   Planted in my place I waited for a sound of life in my ears, it did not come.   

When I pulled into my driveway later that night I could not bring myself to go inside immediately.   I knew I had made the wrong decision, because any sane good person would know that.   Yet, I made the decision I made and it was then that I was afraid of my truth, the truth of who I really was, of what evil I was capable of.  Then I cried, a deluge of tears till I knew my face had absorbed them and my skin was blotched with that salted dryness.   As if crying was enough, but crying was never enough to clear your soul and this was going to be the first day of the rest of this life, and I had no idea what to make of it.  Not anymore.

Within the Sea and Without the Sand

On the lake is a little house that somehow floats atop it

Save for the sinking feeling in their stomachs

The family is quite alright

For they stay in stasis and cater not to the whims of the land

It is not quite clear how they got there

How they fared every day from weather to weather

A storm cloud or a mushroom one

The whims of the men were not on their minds

The baited wonders that beckoned them away

They could not care enough to see

For their eyes were blinded to the outside realities

To the stupidity of mass hysteria on the other side

They waited there and continued on

Looking as though content

When they were anything but

In this way they were wrong

The could not bother it 

Not enough at least

To get along

And in that moment

They struggled with their minds

Took a dive and fell limitless into the sun

Took it up on themselves to swim upward

And seek out the eternal heavens

But it was a waste of time

It was a cataclysm

Of the inclined

Of the poor

Derelict

And

lost

But who gets to say what it is they were spinning

For the top keeps going atop that lake

As the house precures a sense of wonderment

As they chew gums of pepper-and-spearmint

It is a thought for better men than I

Because my feeble little mind

Can not see passed it

Past obscured in fog

A cloud of warfare

A doomed little

Place for the

Lost and

for the

damned

Still the house floats there, no matter how many tangents they go on

No matter how many times the floorboards quake and shiver

No matter the way that it tips and pivets

For in the mist of their midst they are missed

Colliding with the feeble

Taking down the steeple

Of the church of themselves

Delivering goods that were always evil

Delivering sad truths that did not serve them

Tickled by the fanaticism of the outside

They did not know how to oust

But they did know how to joust and pummel

All the little tunnels in their minds

Take a minute and prepare

The song is limitless

The lines are pretentious

And they try to adjust themselves back down to size but continue to run on too long

Because they cannot find the time to breathe

But here is where the family takes its leave

For despite what they wanted to present

They are each and everyone just

Just like the rest

Pitiful little

Tricksters

Lying

They

Cry

Die

one

and

... 

Marco-Polo

If you hide it in a whisper you are only keeping the truth from yourself
Because on the other side of the world they will never hear your voice
They will strain to understand just what it was you were trying to convey
But here in this vacuum when you speak so out loud
They will never know what sort of truth it was you were trying to get across
It is repetitive but they will bend down to lend their hearing
And their ears will hurt in the straining
Then you will wonder why they forgot you
But you didn't let them know you were there,
No, you didn't let them know you were there.

The Simple Act of Breathing - Dialogue Story

THE SIMPLE ACT OF BREATHING

“I call apples tomatoes sometimes.   Not when I say it out loud.  But, if I’m looking at the apple, I’ll say tomato.   In my head I said apples, but my mouth says tomato.  It’s, it's sitting right in front of me.  It is clearly an apple.   In no way does it look like a tomato.  Somehow, my mouth says tomato.   I don’t know it though.  I don’t catch it.   And there it is, out in the open.  Gotten away from me, and I can’t get it back.  Then its there.  Like that, calling birds bricks, or a car a fence.   They know then.  You know now.”   Kate said it all in what seemed like a second.   She scratched at an imaginary itch at her shoulder and tugged at the bottom of her skirt, desperate to pull it over the top of her knee.

“That’s funny,”  her date said.

“But it's not.  Its infuriating, I, I don’t try to do that.   And I stutter sometimes.   Not majorly, but I’ll, I’ll repeat things.   I probably already have.”   She lifted her wine glass up for a moment; her hand shook as it usually did.  She put it back down, and picked up a fork.

“I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean to imply what you’re going through is a joke.  I just mean out of anything that’s not so bad.  Right?”   he said with a mouth full of lettuce that he crushed between his teeth in annoying crisp bites.

“I guess.   If minor brain damage amuses you.   It’s the oxygen you see.   Oxygen didn’t get to my brain because of the crack on the back of my skull.   So now I call apples tomatoes, and I have to walk with the walker.  That’s how come I have the walker.”   Lisa parted her hair and stared a moment, “Are you enjoying your steak?”

He looked down. “It’s salad.”

“I know.  That was a joke.  On account of what I said earlier.”   She shifted again in her seat, and studied his face for a laugh, a smirk, anything.   “Do you like me?”

“I suppose I do.”

“Suppose?”

“Yeah, I mean we just met last week.  I walked into the library and there you were.”

“Yes there I was but I was sitting down.  I was concentrated on checking in books.”  She cleared her throat, and shifted again, “I’m sorry I get the impression  you’re uneasy about me.   When you picked me up you had this look.  Like you pitied me?”

“No I -”

“If that’s the case I’d appreciate it if you didn’t.  And I made a joke you see.  You were eating salad and I called it steak.  And you said it’d be funny to witness me do that.  But you didn’t laugh when I called your salad steak, you corrected me and stared me down.”

“Listen, Kate.   I just met you.  Okay.  Let’s let the judgements come afterwards.”   His eyes scanned the room and he shoved another forkful of lettuce into his mouth.

“Can you not do that,” Kate said, pointing at him with her fork, “Please, stop.”

“What?”

“You’re crushing the lettuce so loud.”   She saw his expression change, “Oh god, I’m sorry.  No, I’m not sorry.  My ears are sensitive.   On account of that accident, and my fractured skull, and the oxygen.  My breathing was shallow.  And the oxygen, I wasn’t taking in enough.  It's a lot of problems.  We need air to live, but too much, too little, it kills you.  I was dying.  It screwed me up okay, like, my ears, my ears are sensitive.   And you're chewing your lettuce, not steak,”  She attempted to feign a faux laugh but she wasn’t sure it came out, “And it's just loud and obnoxious.  I feel like you don’t care.”

“Katie, you don't know me.”

“And you don’t know me.   You saw me walking down my driveway with my walker, and you looked to your right.”

“I was clearing my passenger seat.”

“No, no, no, you were, you were looking to your passenger for help.”

“It was just me in the car.”

“Society demands your courtesy, but you wanted to speed off, and leave me there.”

“Katie, calm down.”  His eyes searched left and right, looking at the other people nervously.

She was talking loud.  She had been talking loud the entire time.  It wasn’t shouting.   “I’m not angry.   I’m trying to work it out.   I just think it's shitty the niceties people have to use to talk to one another.  To get to know one another.    You decided in your car that you didn’t want me.”

“Maybe we should leave.”

“People are staring and now you’re nervous that this is a scene.   This is why we should go.  I want to go back home.   You should have drove away.”

“My last date didn’t go very well.  I, I think I ruined his pride.”  Kate kept her palms flat on her skirt as she spoke.  There was a slight breeze in the park and she was afraid it’d catch around her legs and blow up her skirt and expose herself.

“Where did you go?”   Paul said.

“Some fancy place.   Three, three course meals and what not.   He was eating steak, and it was crunching in his teeth.”

“Crunchy steak?”

Kate laughed, “I’m sorry.  He was eating salad.   It was crunchy salad.  And my hearing is sensitive.  I had an accident.”

“Yeah you mentioned that in the car.  Someone hit you with their car?”  Paul was leaning his elbow on the back of the park bench, his eyes locked on her, and it made her slightly uncomfortable but also important.

“Yes.  I was twelve.  I was always like this.  The doctors said it's like getting cerebral palsy.  My brain forgot how to function, and it messed up the signals to my muscles and my brain does weird things.”

“Like what?”

“My brain?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I call apples tomatoes, and cars fences.  But only when I see them.   I also stutter sort of.  Like, I repeat words sometimes.”

“That doesn’t sound fun.”

She shook her head, “No it is not fun at all.   I spent a few months in the hospital.   Not enough oxygen to my brain is what they said.   When I woke up I forgot how to walk.  Well, my body forgot how to do it.  My legs forgot how to be legs, and they kind of  felt just like Jell-o beneath me.  Like a couple pieces of straw.  You could blow on me and I’d fall over.  But I’m better.  I’m better.”

“That sounds like quite the ordeal.”

“Yes, yes it was.   And I had started my period during that time.”  She turned away shyly for a minute, “I didn’t mean to share that.  That’s not important.”

“It's okay.   It's a fact of life.  I had three sisters, trust me I know all about that.”

“They called me retard.”

“Who?”

“The people at school.   The ones who forgot they knew me.   They thought I had become less intelligent because you see I slurred my words back then.   I slurred and stuttered, and I was going through puberty, and I was getting breasts, and bleeding, and growing, and no one noticed.  I was just a retard.  But i’m not, I’m not mentally challenged.  Its physical. It has no bearing on my intelligence.”

“I believe you.  It seems like  you’ve come a long way.”

“Yes, yes.  I have.  I have come a long way.”  She lifted her palms off her skirt and tried to copy his posture.  She put an elbow on the back of the bench, and laid on her palms, and smiled at him.  At least she hoped she was smiling, “Do I look happy?”

He smiled, “I think so.”

“Good.  Sometimes I can’t tell if my face is doing what I want it to.”

“Well, what is it you are trying to convey to me, Kate?”

“Longing.”  She cast her eyes down a moment.  He cupped his fingers under her chin and lifted her head up, a tear left her eye, and she felt it rolling down her cheek and she wanted to wipe it away.  She kept her eyes looking down even though her face was pointed at his, “I’m scared.   I’m scared that I like you already.   And I want you to want me.   And I want you to kiss me.  God, I want you to do that.”  She lifted her eyes up, “Even if you don’t ever love me.  I want to you kiss me while looking at me the way you are looking at me now, I want -”

His lips met hers and he suckled on her bottom one a moment, and lightly caressed them with a few sorted pecks, and then he backed up.  “Like that?”

“Mmmhmmm,”  she responded, and she hoped she was smiling.

“You look happy,”  he said.

“I think I am,” she said, “But it's been so long that I’m not exactly sure how happy should look.   They say breathing too slow can cause injury.  That’s what my accident was, my accident was a result of my breathing being labored.  Not enough oxygen.   And they called me retarded, and and I’m not.”  She knew she was crying.

“Kate.   You are an intriguing, intelligent woman.  I’m sorry that those assholes growing up didn’t see it.  I’m sorry that you’ve felt victimized because of something that is out of your control.   So you call apples tomatoes, and you can’t walk unaided.   Inside here,”  he lightly placed a finger on the side of her head, “Inside here is a brain that kept fighting.  That kept going.  And I’m not just talking about your accident.  I’m talking about your life after.   Your mind kept you alive, it kept you strong, it brought you back up from that brink of death.   You witnessed sides of life that people seldom get to witness and you are a strong woman.  I’ve liked you since the moment I met you while I toiled away for hours in the library studying my textbooks.  You don’t have to explain yourself to me.  I decided a long time ago that I was going to be with you.”

“You decided?”

“Yes.”

“You decided, a long time ago that, that, that you were going to be with a woman who calls apples tomatoes?”

“From the first time you told me I had late fees.”

Then she laughed fully for the first time in a long time.   Her shoulders settled and she relaxed into

her arm, and they spoke at length.  The people passed on by, and the sun disappeared till the pair were only

illuminated by lamp posts.   “It’s getting late,”  she said and so it was and nothing ever sounded so beautiful.

A Standing Ovation for a Stage Exit - MicroFiction

An ugly girl stepped across the stage and bowed down to her crowd.  They booed and jeered and pelted her with fruit and she kept on bowing to them.  In a long lost whisper in her mind, little more than a sound of a pin prick this young lady had lamented in private that she was not what they had envisioned.  Yet, she took it up on herself, and she gave it her all and she'd bow before them all and at first they were enthralled, but the mob turned in on itself, like  a snake, like an ouroboros, and here they were to sting her eyes with ripened tomatoes.  It was a long day for the girl.  Starting out with hollers that she wasn't fit for the part she had prepared for, her mind on the tightness of her costume gown, her eyes locked on the image of herself as she sang out loud in the mirror.   Her face contorted in strange ways and she realized they would mock the way she looked when she warbled like a crow into the crowd of patrons who paid top dollar to here the scorn of oblivion tear the eardrums till they bled out the canals and down the side of their faces.  In this exaggerated expectation she moved on with her time.  Her mind building up the horror that was herself, and the idea of seeing her performance through the minds of the denizens of the theater crowd.   She tip toed around her co-stars and she shook and trembled in her shoes and when she went to take a sip of water out of her glass the hand shook so that she spilled it all over her costume gown.   She took deep breaths, and there was further contortion in her reflection and her skin was blotchy, and her skin was fading into a rash.   It itched, her patches of skin, and she vomited into  a pail and saw that she too was pale as well.   In a moment of grave misdirection she picked up a stage pencil used for her eyes and she jabbed it into her cheek.   She stabbed in several hundred places so that she bled all over and she watched and was satisfied in her bloodied mask because it hid the hideous creature underneath.  They would never know, and she stabbed again, and the cheek flesh stuck to the tip of the pencil as she pulled it away and squired an emission of blood like the popping of a pompous pimple.  It sprawled a warning across the mirror and it dripped and ran down all over the counter top.   The people outside her room heard her graveness, heard her screams, and her crying and they pounded their frantic fists upon the dressing room door but to no avail as her abhorrent rage continued.  She washed off her face when the wounds had finally clotted and her ugliness was now real.   She opened up her door and everyone parted about her like a sea, and her face the staff.  It was time to commit to the horror of her life, for now when she cocked like the crow for every single songs moment, her face would match her disparaging facade and the people would welcome her.   But the audience did not smile, they did not laugh, they did not appreciate her committal.  They had paid top dollar, had memorized the playbill, for there had been no reason for her self destruction, but now she was as ugly on the outside as her soul had beckoned and the people were disturbed by what they'd seen.  So she worshiped them for their disconnect, for their intellects, for though the theater chairs had leaned out, their pockets she had cleaned out, and they had felt their joyous love of the theater stage had been dampened, by this monster in a costume gown with barely a face to give them.  With barely a face to give them.

Buzzards and Vultures and Ravens and You

Worn out,
Blown out,
Sworn out,
Torn down.

The cataclysm coincides with the convicting conventions
As horses jumble hurdles
And people jumble horses,
And my cause and effect and a needle and stitch
They are murdered.

Tick tock,
Tone deaf,
Medicine balls,
And Cinder blocks.

A short sighted man will teeter the totter
And shift the balance of weighted convention
He will take the convention and contort it into something else
This is why the birds fly,
And flies buzz,
And drinking men cuss.

Feeble rejections,
Premature ejaculations,
Masculine scrapings,
And feminist bitings.

They built their boats, and pushed them off to sea
With little more than a sheet
And some rowing oars, or else nothing in particular
The timid world waits on baited breath
Feeling faint and falling fast
Unable to sculpt,
Unable to paint.

Hi ho,
Cheerio,
Goodbye
T-T-F-N
Easily offend.

A man child in a buttered up coat,
Picking pickled perfumes for poor and persuasive persons
Licking the soles of a dozen feet, and tasting of rotten meat
Tickled and suckled, and fucked,

This game,
The name,
Plane and simple
Penny and dime
Let the lens' fall off
Let hindsight be a death sentence.

There Was a Point to be Made but then I Exited the Examination

It was only half a year ago that the people began to speak out.

No one really knew what it was they were saying because they only spoke in gibberish.

Like a Peanuts teacher babbling in audible but indiscernible words.


It was time to skim the pond and let the water return to fruition.

In the planted earth as a weed and a flower.

Both yellow and beautiful and spanning like a tower.

We have become the things we have despised, and despite it all I'm delighted for all.

We've picked up a fighting spirit.  We've sussed out the last hooray.

Commonplace contemplating, while the pistols at dawn segue into nothingness.

Quarter to the hour.   Half passed the time.  Its in the past, its in line.

Careful consideration should be given, before they mass their misgivings.

Its over sooner than you'd think.

Its over longer than they'd know.

But, despite, the disputes they distracted the derelict and the damned

Despite the disputes demonstrated dastardly what bastardly ways they baited brave brothers before beginning the blaming.

In a World Full of Assholes be a Quasimodo

In a World full of Assholes be a Quasimodo

Have you ever seen such a deformity?

Confined to his own morbid conformity

Crowned king of fools and hailed up high

He only saw that they loved - nigh,

Worshipped him because his ears were dry

Though underneath it they pooled toxicity

It required no explanation no specificity

As long as it was on that day for the fools

Where he wore a crown and given jewels

He felt most honored but every story unspools.

What a joy it must be to be oblivious to the hate

To have a Frollo to guide you from plate to plate

Though baited and distracted by a sour teacher

The sort of man with rod like a Sunday school preacher

Who carried contradictions as he tried to leech her.

The hunchback wasn’t even content to let it go on

Had set about quenching the hunger of the dragon

When beauty was in danger because of methodical evil serpents

When beauty herself kept reaching out for Phoebus’ fragments.

The villain is ever present to snuff out his Esmerelda

He won’t carry it out himself so don’t let him sell ya

He will incite the mob to turn in on its own

He will gather up ropes and hurl out the stone

And the good little hunchback will become emboldened

To steal away from his Frollo what it was he had stolen

For although he had no ears to hear he had eyes to see

So when injustices were done upon him well, he,

He usurped his mighty oppressor and threw him away

And found his way to his little loves mass grave that day.

Alliterating Nonsense Words

It's time,
Maybe mighty mountains make marble mushrooms melt meek monkeys
Over there is their
disgusting derelict decisive decisions
the result of hours of boorish brutish bastard boasts
all the nonsense they are against adding abhorred alterations attacked again accosting acute anterior alarms amid a mist all amount to acting atrocious with actions about altruism assholes
there we are again heaving hawing hulking hurtles heavy here and heavenward.
they stand by idly
as gross garish gods grasp greedily again, gaining grips that grope gyrating Geronimo's into the abyss
this is it, this is everything falling forever, like a forlorn forgotten fucker freakishly feeble and faking priceless feathers forgetting fake foremost forever.

Serious Participation Trophies EVERYWHERE

Acceptance is not a hate crime.

Excuse me is this thing on,

The megaphone is chimed

Spitting out a nervous rattle

Singing out a violent shrill,

So they scream again,

Acceptance is not a hate crime.

Pardon me, let me remind you again,

Seems the batteries were left in it

Overnight the machines been whizzing

Shrieking in feedback but never taking it in

So they have to scream

Acceptance is not a hate crime.

Acceptance is not persecution,

So i say don’t let them say you don’t have a name

That you are less than the whole of your parts

That on your skin you are not one and  the same,

Acceptance is not persecution.

I heard them utter the contrary before

That there crosses are somehow under attack

That their savior balks at what greeting cards say

Acceptance is not persecution

Maybe my understanding is skewered

Maybe what i saw growing up is lost

Lost in the translation

Taking offense, is not persecution

Taking offense, is not persecution.