Week 8

Thursday, May 10^th, 2012

                Wesley stood in front of the self-check-out at the library. “Out of order” was stamped onto a laminated page in large, bold, blue font.  He eyed the book tucked into his side, then eyed the librarian, an attractive young woman with whom Wesley had a class.
                Wesley started back for the shelves to return it, but hesitated. The self-check-out had been in need of maintenance for a week now. What was the chance it would be fixed before the end of the week? The essay deadline was coming up. He had no other option. He took the copy of Linda Williams’ Screening Sex and slammed it on the counter. The young woman scanned his card, scanned the book, and handed them back to him. “The book will be due back in three weeks,” she said.
                “Okay.”
                She would have turned to continue her work if she didn’t notice Wesley’s intense stare, his deeply red face, and the plank-like way he moved when he left the building. He burst into a sprint after passing the threshold.

Friday, May 11^th, 2012

                At the age of thirteen, Gerald still hadn’t grown any hair. Having been studying U.S. History, he wondered if he could make any profit off of an impersonation gig, movie, interactive museum, or anything that may require somebody to perform as J.D. Rockefeller. He began investing his time in copying everything he could find about the tycoon, from his suits to his horrendously unethical business practices.
                When at the age of seventeen, the hair began growing in, Gerald was so committed to the role that he began shaving his head. Even the look was as dishonest as the money.

Saturday, May 12^th, 2012

                It began with using your roommates’ body wash. Your reason for this was excusable. We all run out of our own hygienic products, so we borrow others. You didn’t expect to like the mixture of peach and lavender but you did.
                You used her deodorant because yours was terrible. It had a great smell but didn’t hold a candle to the downpour of sweat that sneaked on you, even at the slightest additional effort to hurry across a busy street. The smell wasn’t bad but it was nothing compared to the peach and lavender.
                God only knows why you started wearing her clothes. You were a guy who didn’t usually have a thing for cross-dressing, but her tiny brown suit would look pretty awesome on you. It did, despite the fact that it was a child’s size suit in comparison to your frame. You still figured you could pull off smaller clothes. Hell, the hipsters did it all the time. Why not jump on the bandwagon?
                Still, it’s such a shame that you walked all the way to class before you felt the shame of not being able to bend your legs to sit down, without risking the seams of the pants. You walked home in defeat, but that didn’t stop you from admiring yourself in the standing mirror as you entered your room, striking several poses before triumphantly muttering, “Hell yeah.”       

Sunday, May 13^th, 2012

                 There were some places that were even too haunted for Satan to visit. He told me the other day, standing guard at the casino ATM, how at the hedge maze on Frost Avenue stole your cell phone reception when the sun went down, the footsteps would slide quietly but audibly through the gravel even when you were alone, and how small pieces of the wall would remove themselves and alter the path. “It could trap you in there if it wanted to,” he said, tapping a man on his shoulder.
                The man withdrew another hundred and I pulled out my phone to Google Map it.
                “Don’t go! I’m telling you!” he said.
                “But you’re Satan,” I answered. “You should know that when you’re told not to do something, you’re going to do it anyway.”
                “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers,” he said, “especially if it’s dated by a thousand years, retranslated, and bound in leather and bordered gold sheen, you understand?”
                “No.”

Monday, May 14^th, 2012

                One day, an adventurer and a detective married.
                Nobody could understand what they saw in one another. The adventurer preferred the open air, the smell of the sea salt lashing up from the waves and crystalizing in the sun. The detective preferred the labyrinth of the city, the uncertainty found in the missing fingernail on a victim subjected to blunt force trauma. It was a long distance relationship for the most part, but even when they were together, holding each other close, the detective inspected the nape of the adventurer’s neck, running fingers, tongue, and mouth across the blemish. The adventurer held the detective and wished for once the detective would turn to admire the sublime beauty of the lonely seagull, the persistence of the tide, the wind growing cold over the water.
                Nothing about them was similar, yet they were drawn to one another, drawn to what could be rather than what was.

Tuesday, May 15^th, 2012


                The tablecloth caught fire on the catering company’s burner, and Raymond vowed to keep quiet about what happened.
                The truth was: nothing happened. Everything was normal. The flame suddenly spread. Raymond had only been thinking about it when it had happened, so he was going to keep his mouth shut. He didn’t want to be blamed. Not that he could be blamed, not in the long run, but he didn’t want to get in any trouble just for thinking about it, seeing the fire fueled by gas spreading its flame like two hot appendages across the length of the table, and welcoming the entire reception area into its warmth.

Wednesday, May 16^th, 2012

                Some people listen to Beethoven in the midst of a warzone. They hide underneath the stairs, or in the cellar, and sometimes below the bed while the seventh symphony thrusts its horns in the dusted air. They wait for the sound of mud-drenched boots, foreign chattering, and the feeling of the boards bending below them as the troops gather around. They close their eyes and focus on the music. Some people can listen for something beautiful through anything.
                

Week 7

Thursday, May 3^rd, 2012:

            The infant was found near a waterfall. Subjected to the noise, it was assumed to be deaf. On the contrary, it cried in the face of stillness as its new parents carried it home through the woods.
            The mother and the father took turns with certain responsibilities. When one held it, the other would collect twigs and break them, throw stones against the thick trunks of trees, and rustle the bushes that surrounded them.

Friday, May 4^th, 2012:

            I used the rice cooker, but realized after learning how to use it I did not know how to clean it. I asked my friend how to do it. She said “It’s really simple unless it’s the Aromax 9-T Model.”
            That was my rice cooker. “What makes it different?” I asked.
            She shrugged. “Usually you remove the inner pot and handwash it, but you can’t do that with this model.”
            “But what about my Aromax?”
            She shook her head. “Search me. Don’t clean it though. It won’t work.”
            “What do I do then?”
            “Leave it.”
            “What if it gets moldy?”
            “Don’t throw it out?”
            “Why not?”
            “It’s cursed.”
            I rubbed my forehead impatiently. “You could have said that from the very beginning.”
           
            The pot sits in my basement. It’s been several weeks and I got myself an older model. Occasionally I check on the new model to see if anything has developed. The mold has begun to creep out and onto the cement like flat fin-like appendages. Ever since it’s been down there, things have been falling from the shelves, the lights flicker on and off, and occasionally I hear a table saw revving in the night. “Leave it be,” my friend tells me.

            Saturday, May 5^th, 2012:

            Hours into his departure, the boy who ran away from his parents found refuge in a church. The front doors were locked, but one of the windows in the back was pried open, and so he climbed in. There was a terrifying thundering noise coming from above his head. The chorus of voices yelling back and forth at each other, arguing about what was valuable and what was not, gave the boy no indication that the outside world was any different than home.

            Sunday, May 6^th, 2012:

            In an effort to make himself more visible during Halloween, he planted L.E.D. lights into his mask. When the both of them broke on the bridge of his nose, nobody could help but laugh at what he had done to himself: two scars stuck to his face like fat red leeches.

           

Monday, May 7^th, 2012:

            Out at sea for seven years, I got your letter in Tangiers. Thought that I'd been on a boat, ‘til that single word you wrote. That single word it landlocked me, turned the masts to cedar trees and the winds to gravel roads. Idaho, oh Idaho.

            It was always easier to be taunted by the thought of a coiled snake nestled in the nook of a dune when you were still alive, and somehow it was cooler the closer we climbed to the sun. The wind blows its hardest at the top of those hot treeless hills that come into existence by pure chance.

Tuesday, May 8^th, 2012:

            Tom Waits left behind the husk of his career that leaned on perpetual intoxication, but somebody possessed the genius to dig it back up, dust off the dirt, and make it every Monday night’s reliquary at The Shakedown. Now I and the other non-smokers smoke as if the sort of sacrifice we were making was worthy of his abandoned image.

Wednesday, May 9^th, 2012:

            Being immortal skewed Zed’s perception of time. He saw those who were alive and saw their future at the same time. A corpse hung onto the shoulders of every person like gravity. The rotting double cuddled closely at their backs when they slept and even came between two of them during sex, secretly meeting the pull and thrust of every couple. The only solution, Zed decided, for this problem of witnessing people’s unawareness of duality is to take control.
            When he began murdering people, he started with handguns and, but as he became more and more desensitized, he resorted to tomahawks, hammers, his own hands, and finally to the tediously repetitive motions of a small pin, which usually took an entire day to complete.    

Week 6

Thursday, April 26^th, 2012:


                When the executioner cries out One! you begin to feel it. In the muteness of the blindfold, your sweat creeping through the threads toward your eyes, you realize that what you see now is your final memory, your last chance to take in the world before it disappears only to realize that your last chance was prior to your prison sentence and already the memory feels unclear. Two! A tugging feeling that pulls slowly from your head to your toes like silk slowly slipping away from your body. This is your soul. It’s slipping away and with your hands tied behind your back and your legs together, you have no hope of chasing after it. Three!  

Friday, April 27^th, 2012:

                What makes the man said to stalk through the woods with a low-burning lantern so unnerving is how the light source seems to move with its own volition; that is, it is not an indication of where the man can be found. It merely gestures to the vastness by which everything disappears.

Saturday, April 28^th, 2012:

                It’s strange how a short step from the train platform can alter so many ticket times, make so many phone calls to spouses, children, or academic conferences, and force the tired traveler to make due with sleeping on the divots between the chairs. My toes curl, my back sinks against the seat, and I wonder if I’ll see her here, punching moneyless numbers into a vending machine or turning the faces on the magazines around.

Sunday, April 29^th, 2012:

                Chantelle came home to the sight of a small pair of footsteps leading from the back door to the birdhouse. She found her mother in the living room alone, her feet crystallized by ice. Countless times, she had told her mother not to go outside. Her mother, however, continued to insist on the existence of a small figure beckoning her from the entrance just beyond the wooden perch. 

Monday, April 30^th, 2012:


                I unlocked the door to my suite and heard, prior to entering my room, a low buzzing alternating steadily between small differences in pitch through the wall on my roommates’ side. I stepped away and sat down on the living room couch. For a while, I figured I could wait to go in and get my textbook, but as her voice began to emanate, I began to feel like skipping class.

Tuesday, May 1^st, 2012:

                He was, for all intents and purposes, Patient Zero, the first to be diagnosed with the disease that caused distinct shapes to appear upon the skin of the person infected. By no means was it deadly, but it was incurable. Still, Patient Zero, and other patients alike, grew accustomed to the sight of familiar memories manifesting themselves on their bodies like tattoos.

Wednesday, May 2^nd, 2012:

                There’s nothing wrong with housewifery, she thought. A true breadwinner is a bread maker.
                She slipped the loaf from the oven and let it cool.