Short Story: Part 6

Back in my dark apartment. Whole body tired from staying up too late too many nights in a row. I tossed some of my dirty clothes that piled up at the foot of my bed onto the floor. I lay awake for some time thinking about a theater. I was inside. The lights were low, but it was empty. It was easy, I thought—it’s meaning too readily apparent. “When are the peak hours” the instructor said, and the class repeated, “when are the peak hours.” From generation to generation we pass along our most sacred tropes. Yet we, in our awakened state, reject the tropes; we attack them like our bodies do foreign elements—though, they are not foreign—on the contrary, they are essentially us. We attack them—no. Few of us attack them while the bulk dead, regnant among us, live and relive their most obvious and voluptuous hinges, transitions, states of change—never the same at the point of crossing…

Short Story: Part 5

“Their leaves have the appearance of dark-green frosted glass near the street lamps.” (516)

“‘The old Gothic cloaca still cynically showed its jaws.’” (524)

Back in my dark apartment.

“A desperately clear consciousness of gathering crisis is something chronic in humanity.” (846)

The heroic gambler; he is in the very beginning—starting—stark and staring—on page 489, bound for Avernus, arm in arm with the first prostitute who slinks over to his whistle. In those “eyes whose steady calm is frightening” an element of the demonic visage, imp-like wantonness of Poe’s man of the crowd—who we assume is a criminal, convict, madman—he was after all hiding a glimmer, a sliver of the moon, the pimp’s blade bled the Irish playwright. And his eyes call to the moons—two moons—one referent and two telescopic senses—the moon always hanging out, idling in the second act, latecomer, lagging culpably and superbly, as only that milk muddied crinoline can. And pigeons, parrots, and the like in the skeletal structure supporting all those ruffles—which are history—which is basic.

--Quotations from Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin.

Short Story: Part 4

Another night in my small office. Storm clouds rolled in and got some of my envelopes wet, so I closed my window the last 2” it was open and picked at a few of the off-white paint strips that didn’t immediately fall off as a result of the vibrations. I was acutely sensitive to the sound of the clock now, suspecting that it made clicking sounds before its hands turned, and it did. But, so it seemed, only in the 9:00 hour, with 9:14 being the loudest. Almost every minute the clock would sound and I’d look up just in time to see the hand move—click, move…click, move.

9:14, loud click, and the phone rang—so quiet was my office and so meditatively tuned to the clock that I jumped at the alien sound of the phone. It rang again—this time more muffled or so it seemed to my ears. “Yes” I said, receiver pressed to my ear, though what I was thinking of saying was ‘hello’. A man’s voice began at headlong speed—the cadence of a salesman—I’d quickly recognized. “No, sir. This is an office building.” He apologized and I set the receiver back on its black base.

In between 9:55 and 9:56, click, silence, the phone rang again, and again it sounded muffled. “Yes…um…yes, hello.” It was a woman’s voice, familiar and close. My heart rose and sank, even deeper. I listened to her words without interrupting, making sounds of acknowledgement here and there. Then she hung up without saying goodbye. I sat in the office for several minutes just staring and not thinking a thing. Only later did it occur to me that for those moments, I didn’t hear the sound of the clock.

Short Story: Part 3

My night out so I slept in late and spent the evening wandering around the square and gardens downtown. I drank several cups of coffee and buzzed around the music stores looking for a Doubting Thomas cd and not finding one just looking idly. I read the names of so many bands and djs I’d never heard of thinking mostly that they were heavy handed or kitschy—one stood out and made me smile, almost laugh aloud: Brat Lunch

Short Story: Part 2

Back in my apartment I walked around in the dark; setting my bag and keys down, getting a cup of water to wash out my mouth. I turned the tv on to bring a sense of occupancy to my living room—small and irregularly shaped. I sat down waiting for the sound to fill the room, but it more than anything washed over it leaving it as it was with now an added layer of noise; that is, somehow the sound ran at right angles to the space of the room, not filling it in but stretching out in a new, unoccupied dimension.

I opened my junk mail and even halfheartedly read some of it thinking that that was more than most people did and feeling for some reason noble about it—like it was almost, almost, less of a waste of the paper that it amused me for a few moments, provided a diversion; and it did, so it was. There was a shoebox on the couch next to me. The night before I was cleaning out my closet and throwing away everything that reminded me of her—there wasn’t much. In fact, this box was the bulk of it and, well, I didn’t throw it away. I left it for myself knowing that I wouldn’t be able to resist sorting through it and feeling bad enough to cry. I’d left myself an assignment so to speak, an emotional one—like as if I’d thought it would help if I got it out of my system—but now I felt that my former self, the me of yesterday night, was cruel (he after all didn’t read them). So I took my prescription and began opening the folded sheets of paper like clams; a bucket full of clams each holding a little memory potently balled up and preserved. I began to laugh and cry, and in a feverish state I stayed up most the night reading and rereading the clams, with the feeling of overwhelming joy that I sometimes mistake for despair. There were anecdotes lived and inside jokes referenced, and I got them all, took them all as little tributes to me; to all the considerate moments paid—to every one it felt—there was a letter addressed as reply. Every one but one, and that one was the last one; extended with full knowledge that it would never be repaid, so that it didn’t make me melancholy, and there wasn’t a moment of regret all night.

Short Story: Part 1

I watched the light recede from the stacks of letters on my desk, out the paint chipped window and down the grey-gritty brick wall of my office building. I’d nothing else to do, so I stayed until the night was in full black, while I folded the leaflets, stuffed and sealed the envelopes, and rolled the stamps across the tiny water wheel. I’d filled several boxes by the time the plain clock on the wall stuck 9:14. I knew the exact time, for as the minute hand lurched forward I heard a loud click, for some reason louder than the others—it was the clock, but I didn’t think so at first; so, a bit startled, I suddenly looked up just in time to see the hand move and stop in a manner according to the shape of the sound I’d heard. Hmm. I didn’t think it was odd then, but, now, if I remember it right, the click sounded, then the hand moved. I’d filled several boxes by then, and, though not tired, I felt a heaviness in my head, and the emptiness of the building started to get to me. Mostly it made me feel empty inside, sterilized, but I thought of the empty apartment I had to go home to and found the will to stay for another hour or so, until the feeling turned to sadness and began to eat away at me.

I took the stairs down to the lobby, feeling at every moment that I might start running, leaping down the steps, terrified of I don’t know what. The lobby was empty and poorly lit with a yellow glow that somehow looked cheap.

The doors locked behind me—it was cold outside and misting—already I felt better, calmer, if not peaceful. I’d walk home, I thought and drew in a deep breath of the misty air. I made it only to the corner with this attitude, whereupon I spotted a small brown coat. It was tattered, lacerated along the sleeve, with some of the stuffing protruding out. No. It wasn’t a coat, but a dog. My mouth went dry and my eyes grew hot. I was crying; it was the breaking point for my swelling sadness, which just moments before I’d thought I’d managed to swallow. I threw up. A real mess, I thought, wiped my mouth on my sleeve and hailed a cab.

oh...well

Maumee OH: Crabgrass chokes the parking lots and all the stores and houses look deserted but they’re not. The mole people who live here collect dioramas. Visitors wonder how they ended up here—the mole people—but what they don’t know is that the mole people are wondering the same thing.

everything's in what you throw away

Dustbin: cleave, foreshortened, talking in my sheep portend, but meant to say potion. Dream of dying mother keeps returning to my thoughts, asking her for father’s correspondence doesn’t help, nor does Lazarre telling me that it’s all pain and suffering and absurdity. He’s a fan of Beckett—sure he is. “Don’t call it the ball thing; call it pure being.” Dirty roommate. Hanger on. Saying the worst helps, how can it get any? Saying that helps too. Eliding makes it pungent, or I might just let the parts of the letters that hang down into the next line determine however irregularly or inconsistently what I’m placing on the page the lambda, no, the gamma, that hangs down, no the zeta that hangs down from my ‘y’. It’s all there, all already there, or here though now I’m arrested by what I’d meant to be a liberating title “Dustbin,” the garbage that makes way for the rest to come, my best work after all.

loss and aura

Freud, melancholy, to each item a memory. They are our artifacts to which we’ve placed auras. When someone dies we touch them and a single memory is released: it need not seem important: I stood in the basement staring at a pile of broken boxes a month after you left. I’d see you again in a few days but that didn’t seem to matter. There was a lonely month on one end and it made me feel very far away—there were years after all, during which you were years away and I sat and I read quietly and waited for you because that’s what I thought you would do. We are always thinking alike. Me in my room you yours years away. Me wishing I could pare down the language like [x] you wishing you didn’t have to. Then I set the object down feeling some indefinite time had passed and the memory was still there but cold now. They need only be warm while you’re around. For friends I keep a memory hot plate. Touch, dim, aura, dim—like some abandoned philosopheme the French forgot about and leaped upon it like they were just now discovering it for the first time, after having mocked us for our earnest efforts to produce it. Touch, dim, aura.