J S Yingling

2009-12-03T13:07:00.001-05:00

Trying to write every day.

http://jsyingling.tumblr.com

More notes on chopping wood.

2009-11-19T15:36:00.005-05:00

Today is a few months after the night I found out about what you did with him on the flowered sheets of your bed. I grab a dull ax from the garage, where it was leaning in the corner behind taped-up cardboard boxes filled with old National Geographics and Playboys. There is a large fallen trunk in the pasture and I begin chopping where it forks from a tree so big that together our arms could barely wrap around it.

This was the trunk we had laid next to, that tired afternoon when we breathed in each others’ hair and I pulled down the neck of your dress to feel your breasts. The woodchips on my hand dug into your soft skin and you made the noise you make when cold water hits your back or you see a small bird or animal or inchworm. You held your breath and I pulled the splinters out with my teeth and kissed the small welts. Your skin tasted like onion grass.

This memory is not the reason I am in the pasture. If there was a bigger tree to chop, that is the one I would have started chopping, but this is the biggest one and there’s nothing sentimental left in me so I hit it and hit it again. I don’t save any of the woodchips so that one day I can carve small animals for our big-eyed children.

The trunk takes me longer than I thought it would to chop through it. I chop every afternoon for a week. The ax exposes wood the color of workboots. This color fades within a few days, with the seasoning wood turning a light grey-blue. I mark my progress in falling out of love with you by the thickness of the seasoned band, the lightness of the ax, and the straightness of my back when I go to bed alone.

Becca's pubic hair and right tit.

2009-11-15T20:50:00.004-05:00

The first time we did it, Mattie had just seen Sam’s older sister’s right tit while she changed into her bathing suit in the upstairs yellow linoleum bathroom of Sam’s suburban home. We were twelve and it was a few months after Mat’s mother died and we all put on suits and our fathers taught us how to tie our ties for the funeral. Mat was spending the hours after school swimming and eating afternoon snacks at Sam’s house until his dad came home from the mill, and he was still learning the limits of how much he could get away with through being suddenly motherless. In this case, it was hiding behind the door of the bathroom while Sam’s sister Becca changed. Later, it would be the weed paraphernalia going through the wash and coming home after curfew with a black eye, but at this time voyeurism in hopes of seeing some secret expanse of skin was enough. Becca caught him of course, and Mat was scolded but the pity for his motherless future saved him from anything more than a ‘you should know better but we’ll all just laugh it off because if you don’t know better by now you never will because your mother bled out, crushed beneath a steering column in a cold steady rain’.

As twelve year olds, we wanted to fuck everything that moved. There were the young girls in plaid dresses and pigtails at school, all of whom we were all too embarrassed to admit we liked. There was the jogger from Josh’s neighborhood with the big tits and fluorescent colored tank-tops. There was Miss Holtz, the student teacher who wore khaki skirts and put her hands on our head when counting us off into teams for recess. We were never much interested in the movie or pop stars–at twelve, we knew little of the fullness and emptiness of love, but we knew enough to know a tit in the flesh and blood was better than one pixelated on the tv screen or printed page. From the half dozen streets that made up our world, we populated a veritable pantheon of goddesses with schoolmates and mothers and strangers and a top them all sat Sam’s sister, Becca. She was tall and had long curly blond hair and wore earrings and denim skirts and we didn't know any better than to worship her as beautiful. She was distant but always smiled at us when no one was looking. She was at the heart of all of our innocent adolescent lust. And so, Mat’s encounter with her teenaged breast was as momentous occasion as anything since the funeral. We treated it as such, and clamored out his bedroom window onto Mat’s rooftop to hear the story in full.

We laid on the slanted shingles and tucked our sweatshirts beneath our heads will we watched the suburban moon rise. Once settled, Josh and I held our breath as Mat described, in detail, Becca’s pubic hair. I didn’t believe he really saw it, but still high-fived him and worshipped him and listened enraptured as he used elementary vocabulary to describe the soft brown curls of hair and the poetic swell of a teenage breast being tucked into a green one piece. As Mat struggled to find those first words for the feelings we’d spend the rest of our lives craving and paying for, we all hid our growing excitement, crossing and recrossing our skinny hairless legs.

The straight and narrow of it.

2009-11-12T00:38:00.008-05:00

The day we moved into the apartment above the stable, the field was all mud and roots and smelled like wet cardboard. The green stubble of spring had started littering the landscape, and I had already forgotten every promise I had made to her. I was smoking cigarettes then, only half of one at a time, and the loft apartment was a sickening sweet combination of stale smoke, hayfever, and those orange-scented candles she lit in the long evenings.

The spring passed quickly into summer. She cooked simple meals on the single burner. I chopped wood in the pasture and sold it for grocery money. We fucked each other during the evenings mostly—the loft was too hot during the day to bare the touch of the other’s skin. After the sun went down, thought, it was nice with the lit candles and the dirty dishes sitting on the floor by the mattress. Once she fell asleep, I'd listen to her breathe and the cars sigh as they passed nameless through the night.

By the time the hottest days of summer made the wood floors sweat, we didn’t have to say much to hurt each other. After fights, she would walk to the grocers to buy fruit and return with blue plastic bags and a sweat stain in the small of her back. Neither of us ate the fruit and every time I threw it rotten into the woods behind the stable, I wanted to stop loving her. Sometimes I tried to make it stop, but the grass grew tall in the field, high past the hem of that one long red dress, so the love stayed and I decided one day at a time to wait to leave.

“The leaves won't be bright colors this fall,” she said one morning, laying naked on top of the sheets.

“Oh yeah?” I said.

“Yes."

"How can you tell?"

"Not enough rain this summer and the temperature doesn't fall at night.”

“How do you know these things?” I asked but I knew the answer.

“John used to tell me.”

“How the fuck did John know them?”

“I don’t know. From being born on a farm, I guess.”

I pulled on jeans and told her John was a fucker and that the fall would be the prettiest one she’d ever seen. It wasn’t. The prettiest leaf I found was a sickly-yellow one. The tall grass fell quickly. It was golden for a single afternoon, but was grey and brown the day after and stayed that way until I left.

The sun rises, but the sun also sets.

2009-10-27T00:10:00.006-04:00

On long walks, I sort through the broken family—once real and tangible, an imagined and beautiful thought to be carefully wrapped and protected during the day and tucked beneath the cool pillow at night—and now lifeless. I pick through the tendrils of smoke left in its place, sorting through the dozens of lives we would have led. I have trouble remembering all of them now; one still stands out. She was the wife. Quiet, calm, patient, a strong mind and strong hands with the knowledge of child-raising, soup-boiling, bed-making. She was warm breasts and intuition, long hair, simple lips, her plain dresses a single pinprick of unyielding beauty in the grey landscape in which we’d grow our lives. She was mother too, and there were our children to be pictured. They would speak languages, read books, run through fields, wet their beds, find trouble, love dogs, bury dogs, paint on canvases, lose their teeth, cut their hair, work summer jobs, fall from trees, drive first cars, dive into pools, scream at Christmas, cry during movies, wear headphones, tear their jeans, learn to read, tell secrets, fall in love beneath bleachers, have the small hands of their father, look like their mother when they were upset, and do a thousand other things in which we would find pride, gratitude, and love. I was their father. I was her husband. I would have been a good man for her. My hands are small but I would have been her ax and blanket and flame and after our children were down for the night in their small beds, well-fed and warm, we would have sat in rocking chairs on our front porch and grown old as we watched the world burn.

A terrible white light.

2009-10-24T10:55:00.004-04:00

Another one—this time a car crash. It was raining, of course, and everything was wet and heavy. You were driving and there was nothing on the radio. We talked about what colors we would paint our walls. That simple shade of red, you said, just like those abandoned boxcars. You always thought desolation was romantic. After the conversation, you cracked the windows so the relentless pounding rain would drown the silence we slipped into. The violence came quickly. Terrible white lights—one for each of us. A deafening noise. The windshield just disappeared. Some bones breaking. Quiet.

The rain on my neck brought me back. The lights were gone and everything was dark. I wasn’t scared or uncomfortable but I knew this could be an ending. I said your name, but wasn’t sure if I was making noise. As the heat from the car and collision and blood washed away from the rain, I tried to cry, but couldn’t. I said your name again and still no sound. I tried to reach for you but couldn’t find my hands. When a light from another car burst from over the hill, I could see you. Your eyes were closed and your dress clung so tightly to breasts heavy with the weight of rain and blood. Your lips started moving and I heard your soft voice and nothing else. Promise me, you said. Anything, I said. Promise me you’ll paint the walls red. I told her I would and that I loved her, but I knew one of these things was a lie and the sound and lights slipped away again into the hungry rain.

The reason I do it.

2009-10-09T22:03:00.003-04:00

I decided if I ever needed a reason to do it—whatever it is, killing cheating jumping leaving or any other thing I never thought I’d do—I’d call you and ask you if you remembered that night when we found the sad little thing, all broken and dirty feathers, and you scooped it up in a torn up pizza box, and I dug a hole with a hammer next to a tree and we gently laid it down and pushed the cold earth over him and stood there, you and I, dusting off our hands and not needing to say too much to know what it all meant. If you said yes, that you remembered that night, I’d tell you about the time I went back and dug it up just so I could bury it again. If you said no—then that would be the reason I’d be able to do the thing I never thought I’d do. You would be the reason I could do it.

Notes about chopping wood.

2009-10-09T01:35:00.008-04:00

I am not going to write about that spring I spent chopping wood in the pasture behind my grandparents’ house because then I would have to admit that it was a metaphor. I would have to choose which one of us was the field mouse and which was the thin brown snake. I’d have to explain how the wood is hardest to split in the parts where the trunk forks from one to two—impossible to split with one or two swings, and most times it takes three or four or sometimes ten. If I wrote about that spring, I’d have to admit how many logs I split—the forked trunks and the straight and crooked and really, anything that wouldn’t scream from the dull blade of my grandfather’s ax. I’d have to write about how violent and hot and imperfect the whole thing is, the sound of the ax in the quiet field and the way the tall grass itches and how the wood is more dried flesh than wood. I don’t want to have to talk about all the hurt—how we hurt and hurt and we are always hurting and being hurt so that when we feel something that is healing, true actual healing like what happened that spring with the ax and the wood, it feels like hurt but we know it isn’t so we swallow it and even when it starts to feel better, this hurts too, and it is uncomfortable and foreign like some stranger’s warm glove. I am not going to write about that spring because if I write about that spring then I’ll have to write about that fall when I loaded the wood into my truck and drove it to strangers' houses and stacked it in strange little yards, and then, after waking up alone on that first true cold day in November, drove through those plastic neighborhoods and waited for smoke to rise out of the chimneys.

The sound of the quiet water.

2009-09-28T02:02:00.003-04:00

I had that dream again—the one at the pier during the grainy night. The sound of the quiet water stretching towards the horizon swallows everything and the pines on the shore are tall and invisible. I am chained to something warm, swaddled in cold iron. At first, I am not sure if it is you. The chain wraps round my neck and holds my head fixed in place, gazing away towards the ominous shores. I whisper your name into the dark, but there is no answer. I whisper other names, and still there is no answer. It must be you. I'm sure of it. The chains and limbs and quiet and darkness enveloping me are all weight and I settle into it. I grip my toes against the wood of the deck and pull myself closer to the still form. I press my chest against it. I can feel a heartbeat. The gears turn normal, turning and pumping. I count. One—badum. Two—badum. Three—badum. Four. Five—badum. The beat skips and it is you. I hear the chip in the ceramic cogs turning inside you and know it is your heart with its perfect murmur. Before I can whisper your name again, the pier turns to sand and we plunge into the water. The last thing I see are the ripples racing away from us, impossibly fast. The water is cold and wet. The darkness is immaculate in the way it consumes us. You are no longer warm and our weight pulls us down.

This silence is not pretty.

2009-09-25T01:40:00.007-04:00

What chord do you think we are she asked. I didn't know. I'm not a musician with skinny legs and cigarettes. A suspended fifth chord I said. I didn't even know what that meant. I still don't. I am a pretender. I think we're the second chord from that song she said. What song I asked. The song we listened to that one night she said. I agreed with her and smiled but I did not know. I'm not a musician. I'm not many things. I was a man in love with her once.

Sometimes it sounded okay, I think—pretty even, perhaps—her and I and any music we managed to make during our happier days. It's hard to hear much of anything when falling love, but I heard enough to know it was worth listening to. It was a pretty song.

And it played until the end. I am a pretender and she was this rapidly unwinding melody, and now, this silence. I wish she would ask me again what chord she thought we were, but I still wouldn't know. I'm no musician, but I know enough to know this silence is not pretty. This silence is not pretty at all.

She is smooth green glass.

2009-09-24T00:26:00.003-04:00

"You're not going to walk me home," she says. It comes out sweetly.

"Oh. Well I'll walk ten steps behind you then, if you like."

"I'm not walking back to my apartment, Tom," she says. "I'm going that way," she says, pointing down Fifth. We stop in the middle of the dark field beneath the Cathedral. I try to say something but don't.

"It was good to see you," she says, sweetly again.

"Yes. I enjoyed it, Sam."

"I like the beard," she says.

"Thanks."

"You okay to drive?"

"Not drunk enough to make a mistake." Her words, my mouth.

"Right."

She is smooth green glass in my hands. She is the dull throb in my head. I pause—and say something I shouldn't.

"We could find another bottle and change that."

"I have to go now, Tom. Mat locks the bar up at two-thirty."

"Ok." I'm an asshole.

"See you tomorrow?"

"Yes." I smile.

She doesn't kiss me on the cheek and walks the opposite direction. I watch until the pattern on her dress disappears and she becomes a stranger. She doesn't look as she crosses the street, puts the wine bottle in a bin out for recycling, and disappears around the corner.

The weight is bit less now. A bottle cap's less, but this morning it felt like more than I could carry and now it is not. I stand for a while longer, then walk in the direction she went. I pull the bottle from the recycling and try to feel her warmth, but it has already faded.

See you tomorrow, she said. The bottle is empty aside from a drop in the bottom, but this is enough. See you tomorrow, she said. I walk back to my truck my mind empty, smiling at the concrete cracks beneath my feet. A plastic bag blows across my feet. Another empty vessel. At her apartment, I take another guess at which curtain is hers, then put the empty bottle in the passenger seat and drive home.

There's the son she knows.

2009-09-22T23:18:00.004-04:00

The morning comes and there is her. She is there most mornings, sometimes solid and sometimes soft, but never real. I don't want to be awake but the garbage truck outside crows its terrible suburban alarm as it claws through the street.

Before I open my eyes I count the stairs to Mat's apartment through the sound her shoes made on the wet asphalt. One two three four five six open. I am in my bed with a bad taste in my mouth. I cannot recognize it but I know that it has been there before. Perhaps this is the way my parents' house tastes. Guilt, boredom, nostalgia perhaps. Definitely a strong dose of sour copper. I do not know.

This is my room. For the first time I look around. Sometime since this past Christmas my mother must have taken my posters down, which is fine. The walls are the same color and the windows are clean. My books are still on their shelves, which I am happy about. They haven't been touched. My alarm clock is still there. The hands still tick but the time lies.

I look for the time elsewhere but I left my phone in my truck. Without knowing the time I cannot find a reason to put my feet on the ground, but the strange familiarity of my old bed and old painted walls is not comfortable. I stretch and pull on my jeans with the bottoms wet and grey and gritty from the rain and the rooftop. I cuff them and put on a shirt.

In the mirror, I catch my face. I'd had no reason to shave for some time and a beard grew. A funeral is a reason to shave so I search for a razor. I find my father's in his bathroom, next to tweezers and a bottle of pills. I am going to read what's on the bottle but decide against it. The razor has my father's short hairs in between the blades. He claimed to have never had more than shadow on his face and was proud of this. Shaved every day of my adulthood he said. I wipe his grey hairs from the blade with my thumb. I lather up in my own bathroom. I need scissors to make it easier to shave but I don't want to look for them so I just hack through the hair with the razor. It hurts a bit but I manage to only cut myself twice.

In the mirror, I watch the blood pool into a drip and fall into the tangle of hairs and cream in the sink bowl. I hear my mother call my name from downstairs. I don't answer. As I am rinsing my face, I hear her come up the stairs to stand in the doorway.

"Ah, there's the son I know," she says. "I hardly recognized you with that beard."

I try to smile but I catch the way it looks in the mirror and I quickly stop it.

The dark never answered.

2009-09-12T14:13:00.001-04:00

I shake this man's hand and I want to thank him and mean it but I can't. He looks me in the eye and I know I should say something. I want to be genuine and warm but do not know if I have anything that resembles those things left inside of me. I do not know if there is anything left in me aside from blood and air and water and her. I say nothing and rub my hand as I walk away.

I get the same incapacitated feeling when I am with another body in the dark that isn't hers. Always, I'd say something anyways, anything to fill the silence—'thank you' and 'thank you' and 'thank you'—but could never even be sure I was making noise. The dark never answered and the body left by morning.

Everything unsaid, unknown.

2009-09-08T16:15:00.004-04:00

This is her apartment. She moved into it a few weeks after I left. That last night, she wrote down her new address in the corner of a paperback. She wanted me to write her, but I didn't. Every time I saw a copy of The Sun Also Rises, I just thought of how I wouldn’t know what to say.

Before I look at the street number, I know which building is hers. I’ve imagined this moment before. Many times. Every word that could be said, every word that could be left unsaid. And always, on the steps of this apartment. I sit in the truck and look at every window, trying to guess which one is hers by the curtains and potted plants. One is open with blue curtains hanging limp. Another, thin reds with dead potted plants balanced on the sill. The empty ones with torn screens or no screens at all. In every one, I imagine her, delicately balancing on a chair as she hangs the curtain rod or plucking red tomatoes from the window box for her salad, sitting on a small table in her kitchen. I know so little about her now.

Bottles in the reeds.

2009-09-07T08:44:00.002-04:00

When we reach the cemetery, Josh turns on his brights to illuminate the gravel road and the flowers left at headstones. Our headlights spear the darkness that blankets the hill. Here, darkness is peace as the dead dream in shades of black. Our lights are loud and screaming and their brightness is violent. I look at Mat’s eyes to see if the light pains him the way it pains me. They are engaged blankly forward, but I see his lashes gently shiver and I know he is my friend. The lights overexpose the silk petals attached to plastic stems and the flowers become blind white ghosts that haunt the six-foot deep wooden boxes they honor.

We stop at the crest of the hill and Josh turns off engine and lights. The moment the lights disappear, a whip of lightning flashes over the ridge to the north. Above us, a pure black sky has chased away the moon and stars, but to the north, and the sky is purple. The lightning cracks illuminate the brush strokes that paint the clouds.

I climb out of the car and lean against the hood next to Mat. Josh pulls some warm beers out of the trunk, and hands them to us. At the bottom of the hill, there’s a little pond with a granite sign beside it. When the lightning flashes, I read that it says Memorial Pond. There’s a wooden bench beside it, and as the sky continues to darken, this seems like an okay place to watch the world tear part. Mat heads toward it first, and Josh and I follow.

We drink the beers and say nothing. The wind picks up and dusts us with rain, but the storm passes us to the west, towards the glow of the city.

“I wanted the storm,” Mat says. I think he is crying. It is Josh’s job to say something, but he is silent and so am I.

As the storm moves, the purple sky shrinks and goes with it. We hear the crickets and the graves watch our backs.

“We should go somewhere,” Josh says and stands up. Mat stays seated, finishes his beer, and throws his bottle into the water. We stay like this for a few minutes, and then Josh sits back down. Once the sky is black again, and the glow from the storm has passed into the glow of the city, Mat stands.

“Okay,” he says. We walk back up the hill to the car, and we are bottles in the reeds, floating near the shore waiting to sink and be filled.

What it tastes like.

2009-09-02T11:27:00.001-04:00

Before I forget, there is Jenny.

It is not taking me long to bury the truth. It has been less than one hour and already I have hidden it in deep corners of my body. One piece, a white-warm lump of memory—this I set down gently in a narrow, vacant recess of my lungs. I have forgotten which one. Another piece, a viscous fluid inside a thin blue membrane—I cannot remember where I hid this. Behind some small organ near my stomach? In the hollow space of my pelvis?

It is easier this way. To forget these things, this truth, to bury it. There are nights of hot tears and cold beds coming and I will not let them blacken my heart. This truth does not deserve to be tarnished like that, and it does not deserve to be thrown away. And certainly, it cannot be left unwatched, roaming my mind, growing, rousing me in the night because it needs a warmer blanket or a glass of water to white wash its thirsty throat.

Faith in sad places.

2009-09-01T22:03:00.003-04:00

Across from the complex, kids played basketball in the funeral home parking lot. Every morning, sad metal cars lined up behind the foul line. In every apartment window, small faces pressed up against the glass and watched old men wipe away tears. In the kitchens, mothers smoked cigarettes and watched their ceilings stain. The walls were thin as communion wafers. No secrets were kept. Nails fell into neighbors' bedrooms. The crucifix was too heavy to hang.

Something Chabon wrote.

2009-08-29T15:43:00.004-04:00

The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within, too many terrible genetic and fiduciary secrets to dig up and bury and dig up again, too many divorces to grant, heirs to disinherit, trysts to arrange, letters to misdirect into evil hands, innocent children to slay with rheumatic fever, women to leave unfulfilled and hopeless, men to drive to adultery and theft, fires to ignite at the hearts of ancient houses. Chabon. Wonder Boys.

I can only write about boys thinking they are men and finding they are not and about boys thinking they are in love and finding they are not. I had a happy childhood and so have a good heart, meaning there is little else I know. Any anger or angst in me will not erupt from me in a moldable useable burst of ink and consequences. My skin is too finely stitched together for that kind of opportunity. Instead, just a steady leak that leaves me with a little less than the morning before, and still, nothing about which to write. I've seen nothing.

J.

Her breasts as hilltops, her voice as flame.

2009-08-28T18:23:00.005-04:00

She left me when the air was pregnant with possibility, when empty space in my bed first started meaning something. She left me when the smell of wet asphalt was just starting to remind me that I was growing up. She left me when mornings were always white with yellow burns around the edges, afternoons were a grainy sky blue, and evenings were red, long and faded.

She told me leaving me meant nothing since I was leaving already. And she was right—I was taking her with me, no matter what her last words were. I dragged her along, 349 miles, into brown-grey classrooms, through the beds of a half-dozen girls who thought that they could be the ones to swallow my sadness. None of them could. They chewed on me, ate away at the hurt, and in some moment of self-preservation, spit it up. They gave up quickly. I didn’t drag them in the mud.

But her, but her, I’ve been pulling her along for three years and perhaps she hasn’t even known. She left me, and I spent three years dragging her through my muddied clawing into adulthood, back here, back to this, back to her stoop in the rain.

I don’t hesitate to knock on the door. Out the truck door quickly, hop onto the sidewalk, two quick steps up the stairs and scan the box for her name. Samantha. Sam. What is her name now? Sam Ingrid. Still her name is Sam. I buzz the apartment and I wait. I look at my feet and there is a dead butterfly beneath the doormat. I bend closer and it is a candy wrapper, discarded, funneled here by the hollow wind through the concrete alleys of the city.

The last time I heard her voice her brown flowered blouse was unbuttoned, a field of white and yellow flowers resting on gentle hilltops. She was speaking quickly into her phone. I could do nothing but watch the water from the reservoir bounce flickering light across her bare breasts.

“Hello?” For three years her voice was burning in my head, a slowly diminishing cold flame illuminating the things I was craving to forget, and now it is here, warm and real through the static of a grey box on a brick wall.

“Sam.”

“Yes?” She hadn’t heard my voice in three years.

“It’s Ethan.”

In the pause before she answers, a moment is born and breathes and lives a lifetime of quiet happy moments enveloped within something it loves, and dies alone and broken. Still, I could wait three more years for her answer.

“Come on up. The elevator is broken,” says the voice. The voice is Sam. The last time I heard her voice, she was buttoning her shirt, said she would drive. She drove too fast out of the park, and her face was angry and pretty and scared. I knew where we were going, became more sure of it through every green light. I waited for a red light to ask her if it was him. The red light never came. The streets were dry, and I said it looked like it didn’t rain here. I said nothing else. She took the turn towards Mat’s house. She pulled the truck over a block away, and without taking the time to put it in park, she opened the door, said nothing, and didn’t hesitate before she closed it and ran out of the headlights’ gaze.

The door to the lobby unlocks, I open it, and push through the door to the stairs. The stairwell is dark aside from the glow of an exit sign somewhere far above, and before the closing door severs the light, I find the railing. The red glow above illuminates nothing, and as I climb the stairs and count the floors, it grows from dim to pale. The third floor, I feel the wall, find the door, and push.

She’s standing in her doorway, halfway down the hall. The first thing I see is the sliver of skin between her shirt and jeans, pale and warm, framed above her hips. A few steps closer, I see her wrists, her arms folded. Her breasts, small but bigger. Her shoulders. Her chin is the same. Her lips are moving.

“Hello, stranger,” she is saying.

A cliche, and I don’t care.

“Good morning,” I say.

“Still forgetting what time of the day it is?” she asks.

“Stopped trying to remember,” I say.

“Come on in.”

Something McEwan wrote.

2009-08-28T14:23:00.003-04:00

Nothing as singular or as important had happened since the day of his birth. She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty in a face which a lifetime's habit had taught her to ignore. She whispered his name with the deliberation of a child trying out the distinct sounds. When he replied with her name, it sounded like a new word—the syllables remained the same, the meaning was different. Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can ever quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same emphasis on the second word, as if she had been the one to say them first. He had no religious belief, but it was impossible not to think of an invisible presence or witness in the room, and that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract.

Dead and breathing.

2009-08-28T11:40:00.003-04:00

Sam drinks the wine. Her throat is something to see. The way it quivers with every sip. The way it sits upon those freckled collar bones, a bird upon spotted eggs. Three years, and still I remember—without ever knowing it before—the way her lips move when she swallows.

"This is nice," she says. She holds the bottle loosely between her calves, elbows upon her knees.

"Yes. Feels old and new."

She smiles. "Are you still afraid of snakes?" she asks.

"Terribly so," I say, reaching for the bottle.

"Would have guessed so," she says, then sighs. She says nothing more. This is a game we play.

"Is there more to that thought?" I play along with her, always, anything to hear her sigh or laugh.

"About what?"

"Me being afraid of snakes?"

"Oh." She takes the bottle back, smiles. "Nope."

"What?"

"What do you mean, what?"

"Fine," I say.

"Do you smoke, yet?" she asks.

"Yet?"

"Do you smoke cigarettes, yet?" she asks.

"Yes, I do."

"I knew you would start," she says.

"Smart ass. Do you?" I ask.

"No. But do you have any?"

"No."

She digs around inside her cardigan, pulls one out. "This is my only one. We have to share," she says.

She lights, drags, passes it to me. The sky is fully dark now but nothing is black. The washed out stars are too dim and too close, and the moon hangs heavy and dull. With anyone but her, the sky would feel small.

"So this woman," Sam starts. We trade lit cigarette for half empty bottle. "Lived in the penthouse upstairs. I didn't really know her. Was in the escalator with her a few times, polite small talk. Got the feeling she didn't really ever go anywhere. Which was strange. She had to be early forties. Single, I assumed. Very pretty, long legs, blond hair."

"How pretty?"

"Beautiful rack."

"Right. Thanks."

"So. Mat and I are coming back to my apartment one weekend, and she bumps into us in the lobby. She says she could use our help, and asks if we've got a few minutes." The hurt that is Sam. She makes me forget she is with Mat every time I am with her.

"Ok. Sure."

"She talks about the weather on the way up. Nothing serious. I'm thinking she needs a picture hung up or a jar opened. We get to the top floor. Her apartment is gorgeous. Fountain by the doorway, potted plants with huge maroon leaves, beautiful pottery on every shelf. On the patio, an actual zen garden, sand, rocks, the whole deal. Gorgeous apartment."

"Right. Oh this is going to be weird," I laugh.

"Oh, just wait." Sam. Beautiful mouth. "So she asks if we want any tea. Being polite, we say yes. We wait for the water to boil, she shows us around, points out a few pieces of her more extravagant pottery. Then we sit on the patio and drink tea with this woman."

"Oh this is going to be strange," I say. Sam pulls the bottle away from me, makes me wait while she drinks, drags the cigarette. I close my eyes and try to feel the wine, but can't.

"So. She talks while we drink tea. She inherited all her money, apparently, from a rich uncle or something. Or maybe it was her grandfather. Anyways. Not important. So she doesn't work. She doesn't date. Just travels the world and goes to museums. But she says she's always lonely."

"Tough life. Huge rack, lots of money."

"Right. So she says she'd been hiring a housesitter to come and water her plants, dust her pottery, and feed her anaconda."

"Wait."

"Right. She has an anaconda. So she tells us she was worried the housesitter wasn't feeding it right. Tells us the anaconda is the only thing in her life she loves."

"Strange. So she wants you two to start to take care of it while she's gone."

"No. Better. She keeps going on about how much she's worried about it. It's stomach was stretched out and it wasn't eating and she was worried it was going to die. So Mat asks where is it, is it okay, you know?"

"Right."

"She says she doesn't know if it's going to be okay. That's why she needs help. It's in her bedroom, and she needs us to help her take it to get help."

"Wait, in her bedroom?"

"Yes. Strange." She flicks the cigarette stub at the moon.

"Go on." One swig of wine left.

"She needs our help taking it to the university zoology department to get it looked at. She can't take it to the vet since it's illegal to have exotic animals, but she knows a professor that will look at it. She doesn't have a car, so she asks if we can drive her."

"Woah."

"We don't really know what to say at this point, so we say yes. She takes us into her bedroom, and there's a glass terrarium beneath the window, but no snake in it. At least none we can see. So Mat and I are standing there a little nervous, looking around, thinking this woman is insane while she starts putting things in her purse. Then she asks if we can help her move it. Mat says sure, where is it. She walks to the corner of her bed, beautiful red sheets—I've never seen such pretty sheets in my whole life—and pulls them back, and fuck, there, right in the middle of the bed, is a fucking big snake."

"No way."

"She asks if Mat will help her carry it. Well, Mat's not afraid of snakes, but this thing is a fucking anaconda. Like fifteen feet and as big as my thigh around." I glance down at the hem of her skirt. "Mat asks where the cage is, she says there is none. No way we're going to take this thing in Mat's car without a cage, so this woman says, okay, we'll wrap it up in the sheet. We wrap this thing up in a big red fitted sheet, and basically drag it into the escalator it's so heavy. Mat, me, this woman, and a gigantic snake wrapped up in a red sack."

"Wait, so how was she moving it around if it was this heavy."

Sam ignores me. "We pull it through the lobby, get to the curb, and now it's me and this woman and a gigantic snake wrapped up in a red fitted sheet while Mat goes and gets the car. She goes back to talking about museums and the weather in the car, her hand resting on the snake beside her. We drop them off, the professor meets us in the parking lot with a grad student and a dolly, and takes this woman and her anaconda into the building."

"Woah."

"Mat and I are basically in a daze, finally get back to my apartment. It's almost two by now, and I have to get to the hospital for my shift. Mat drops me off, I work ten hours, really not even having time to truly process low strange it all was. I call Mat on the bus ride home to see if he wants to come over, but no answer. I get home, my door's unlocked, and Mat's standing by the sink in the kitchen, and this woman is sitting at my kitchen table, tears streaming down her cheeks, eyes red, her beautiful rack bouncing while she is dry heaving."

I tilt my head back and open my mouth in shock. Suddenly I feel the wine.

"Ethan."

"Sam. What happened? Why was she there?"

"So this woman. Single, beautiful, rich."

"Right."

"This snake was all she cared about."

"Right."

"It had become too heavy to move in and out of its cage."

"Right."

"So she was letting it sleep with her."

I'm really feeling the wine now.

"She'd been sleeping with it for about twelve months, had stopped traveling. It never left her bedroom."

The stars feel even closer.

"And the reason why the snake looked sick—"

A snake the size of her thigh.

"—was that it was stretching its stomach—"

Her legs.

"—in preparation of eating her."

I am here, girl. Whatever it is—this thing you have left in me that has been ten extra pounds in the morning, forty at night, and a thousand when I hear your name—it is here. It was born, wet and wild, a heavy thing, and its lungs have yet to fill with air even after three years. It was killed the day of Mat's father's funeral and its heart still beats even these three long years later. It's been a black snake in my sheets, stealing my warmth and growing thick off of my hair and dust. I am here, girl, and here it is.

You shouldn't have left. I'm a good man, and I was a good man, and I've always been this tall. I have anchor and sail in my chest, and rope and waves and compass, and this we could have been. You shouldn't have done what you did, but I am here now.

She passes me the wine. There's not enough left to allow either of us to make a mistake, but I kiss her anyways. She's quiet and still, but still her breathing matches mine and I can feel her fingers come to rest slightly on my shoulder. This is a kiss that has an ending, and it ends.

The sun yawned after the rain.

2009-05-21T22:57:00.005-04:00

The skies had been dark all day, clouds of wet grey cotton clinging to the roof of the world. When I left my apartment to mail the letter, there was so much rain that those nights I spent alone after she left me seemed dry. The rain came selfish and inconsiderate and wet. Everything in this town was tired of it—the overturned plastic patio furniture, the quarter newsstand with the cracked window, the drunken spit water that pooled in every uneven corner of the sidewalk—and still, there was rain. I crossed the street, yawning, and still, there was rain. The skin beneath my fingernails was wet. And then, I saw her. The sun split the clouds. Ten minutes later, we were in my apartment, on my couch. The rain on our skin turned into sweat and as the clouds pulled back, we filled with blood.

Isn't it pretty to think so?

2009-05-04T22:31:00.003-04:00

The streets between our houses. No lights, but those washed out stars and always, the moon. An unlocked door. The floor creaks. Long lashes by lamplight, and the way they throw a shadow on her pretty mouth. On most nights, a sweet dream.

The trees. The quiet.

2009-04-28T23:13:00.004-04:00

On the way into the forest, the road folds on itself, again and again, a mobeus strip that smells of earth and tastes of wind. There's no direction here and the only thing the boy is sure of are the two pieces of asphalt beneath his feet. Even then, reality leases him that space for a moment's breath, and for a moment's breath only. But that's enough. One exhale is as long as the boy can stand still; he's already signing his name on a lease for a new plot of land, just inches in front of the other. Heavy lidded, light footed. He walks as tall as crickets. He steps as loud as pine needles. Everything here owns its place. Everything here is here.

Something Hemingway said.

2009-04-28T18:58:00.000-04:00

The best writing is certainly when you are in love. You have started [writing] at six in the morning, say, and may go until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through. Hemingway.

Isn't it pretty to think so?

In her hands I felt clean.

2009-04-22T10:26:00.002-04:00

A thousand things in this city, and she is the only one. The glow of the city bleaches the slivers of sky that leak between the concrete buildings. The stars scrubbed out by greasy light from fishbowl headlamps, by tall iron poles spearing dirty yellow boxes of light standing guard over empty parking lots, lit lonely windows that harbor the silhouette of late office workers choosing the fluorescent comfort of their cubicles to the soft glow of bedside lamps and little wives. Not these things. The small mountainscapes of dirty rags and the thinnest blankets with a sad empty face peeking through on a concrete pillow, a gray woman who is forgetting the simplest of words, the ones that tumble easily off the tongues of the rest of us—duvet cover, leather interior, gas bill—she clutches a cold fistful of leftover nickels she earned from an office workers' guilt, enough to fill her stomach the morning after, but not enough to replenish whatever organ produces dreams. Away from the sad corners of the city, away from the dust and the shit plastered to the sidewalk and light poles, into the glass and steel buildings polished by privilege. Everywhere, something reflecting something else. Everywhere, hearts grown small and tired by stress and medicated by storefront windows and newspapers that package the hurt of others into convenient grey columns to be consumed and forgotten with ink that you can feel on your hands, you can rub it between fingers, but it always washes off if you scrub hard enough. A quick rinse from a steel faucet with water cleaned and purified and sucked from the rivers and pumped through whatever earth remains beneath the concrete slabs. But this city—it's never clean. It can never be clean. I don't miss it. I don't miss these things. Only her.

You are she, the only thing.

2009-04-19T19:44:00.003-04:00

Sam, I have words for you. I don’t know anything about a lot of things, but I know something about this thing, and this thing was love, once. I know it. I know this. It was love. I could feel it when I was alone in a room and a light bulb burnt out. I could feel it when you said my name—it’s the way you said it. The way you held it in your mouth, beneath your tongue before easing it gently out. You said my name and it was like you released a small grey bird you'd been holding in the warmth of your hands for days, feeding, caring for it, coaxing, whispering into its feathers the strangeness of the wind. You said my name and I felt safe.

“Sam.”

“Yes?” you say. Your mouth. It is the prettiest mouth.

“I'm in love with you.” You are the only thing. You are she.

She says nothing. Looks at her hands, turns her head and looks out the window. It's not raining anymore, but the windshield wipers don't know it. They sweep across the glass eleven times before she turns to me. I want there to be tears in her eyes.

But there are none.

“Why?”

“Why do I love you?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“Why do you tell me?”

“Because when a boy loves a—because when a man loves a woman, it's not fair to anybody for both of them not to know. I think of you. I think of you every night. I wake up and I think of you. Tonight. At the hospital. The walls were that ugly mint green they paint hospital walls, and there was this stain on the wall, near the ceiling. Like bleach or something. I looked at it and I thought of you. Mat was dying and there was a stain on the wall and—”

“You thought of me—then.”

“I'm telling you because I think you should know.”

“And now I know.”

And then she knew. And I knew. And I drove her back to her apartment. She kissed my cheek and I wanted there to be tears in her eyes but there weren't. She didn't say anything and there was nothing I could say. She ran up the sidewalk, up the stairs, and turned off the porch light before she shut the door. The door closed.

I forgot about her for nearly a whole day, once. It was a Monday, and I had things to do that I pretended were important—a stop at the post office, the library, a few walks down grocery aisles. Nothing reminded me of her that day. Not on the walk home to my empty room. Not in the evening, when I pulled off my socks and stepped into the shower's embrace. But—when I turned the water off, in the first moment of silence without the flat pounding of water on flesh and linoleum, I remembered her name. The water drained from the tub, and I remembered the way she would unlace her shoes. I stood steaming, naked with empty hands and I remembered that I love her still. My skin was clean, and wet, and warm, and I remembered her.

There are things I could have done to forget her. I could have taken down the picture of us from my wall—the one where her and I are barefoot, sitting on the edge of the tub in her mother's bathroom, cleaning off the green stain of the backyard from our feet. The floor is moss green tile and at our feet there's one white little sock. My hands are on her knees, and her fingertips—this is the reason the photo stays—are resting lightly on my wrist. I barely ever remember her touching me when we were younger; at least not until we were fifteen, sixteen, when she found out it made me nervous. But there, in this photograph, she's touching me. I must have known then. I must have known that she would hurt me (oh god, I could have never guessed how much). I knew I would feel pain and I loved her still. I loved her for nine more years, until the hot water ran out, and the light bulb flickered off.

We were young, as young as I ever was.

2009-04-11T15:58:00.003-04:00

Nothing.

2009-04-11T15:56:00.000-04:00

I still don’t know what love is, but I think I’ve loved four girls. The first was blonde and would get sunburnt where she parted her hair. She kissed me on a snowy street in Cleveland and told me she needed me but I left. The second girl—I’m not allowed to think about her, or talk about her, or look at her, or think about whether or not I would have been happy with her. I didn’t think I’d ever fall in love again, but then one night I started painting things red, and what was wet with fear dried in love. I met the third girl nineteen days later and she wore turquoise and smoked cigarettes. She left me on a Saturday morning and my mind broke. Broken, I was found by the fourth. And broken, I was left.

The big black dog.

2009-03-28T01:15:00.000-04:00

Costello was a part of that house as much as the headlights from Oakland Bridge beaming into the living room, as much as the empty cans cluttering the coffee table alongside the tv remote and photograph of Mat's family—the whole one. The real one, not this one that Alison Hunter had left on a Saturday evening on the way home from a trip to the pharmacy to fill her husband's prescription for cholesterol medication. Mat's dad named Costello after his wife, back when Alison wasn't dead, and Mat was young and Mat's dad decided his boy needed a companion so he wouldn't seek bad company. Mat's dad loved that line from that Elvis Costello song, fingers lying in the wedding cake. And he loved that song because he loved his wife and a man must love a song that share it's name with the love of his life. Alison, I know this world is killing you. Costello grew up faster than expected, and by the time Mat was out in the back alley killing baby birds and setting off firecrackers with me and Josh, Costello was already wearing a stain into the green carpet beside Tom Hunter's arm chair.

The end of a story.

2009-03-02T01:30:00.000-05:00

The walk home is fast and my mind is empty. My door is unlocked. The bed is unmade. There’s two drops of blood in a field of blue and yellow paisley flowers. I pull myself into bed, and I’ve never really hurt like this before. I sleep for a few hours and wake up alone. The light outside is too bright and my lungs ache like my heart has been pounding into them for too hard for too long. I’m scared and I don’t want to be scared. I’ve been scared my whole life and I never knew why until this morning. I strip off my clothes, shower, and I don’t think about her. But—when I turned the water off, in the first moment of silence without the flat pounding of water on flesh and linoleum, I remember the burning car. I close my eyes and listen to the water drain from the tub.

Something Neruda wrote.

2009-03-02T01:28:00.001-05:00

Between the lips and the voice something goes dying.
Something with the wings of a bird, something of anguish and oblivion.
The way nets cannot hold water.
My toy doll, only a few drops are left trembling.
Even so, something sings in these fugitive words.
Something sings, something climbs to my ravenous mouth.
Oh to be able to celebrate you with all the words of joy.

Love is when your name feels safe in their mouth.

2009-01-26T02:40:00.004-05:00

I don’t know anything about a lot of things, but I know something about this thing, and this thing was love, once. I know it. I know this. It was love. I could feel it when I came home to her, and sat on the couch and unlaced my shoes. I could feel it when I was alone in a room and a light bulb burnt out. I could feel it when she said my name—it’s the way she said it. The way she held it in her mouth, beneath her tongue before easing it gently out. She said my name and it was like she released a small grey bird she’d been holding in the warmth of her hands for days, feeding, caring for it, coaxing, whispering into its feathers the ways of the wind. She said my name and I felt safe.

The thing we used to do on the roof.

2009-01-26T02:35:00.006-05:00

Nine years ago Josh and Mat and me did this thing. We’d be in Mat’s room, talking about girls and tits and pussies and all kinds of dirty stuff we didn’t know anything about, all trying to talk hard and smart while crossing and recrossing our skinny hairless twelve-year old legs to hide our growing excitement. When we ran out of ways to express our adolescence with boasts and tales of skin flicks and the blooming figures of our girl classmates, there’d always be that silence.

Mat would be the one to kick off his Chucks and sneak out of the room to check to see if Mat’s dad had passed out yet in his blue armchair, empties scattered around his big sleeping dog. Then when we were sure he was out, we’d all climb out out the bathroom window, out onto the roof where the power line tangled with the big oak tree. If we had any, we’d smoke cigarettes we hid in a ziplock back beneath a loose shingle. Then the conversation would run dry, and the wind would change direction and scrape branches across a window, and we would know it was time. Mat was always in the middle, me on his left, and Josh on his right. We’d pull our pants around our ankles, and do the thing that all boys do. There’d be conversations sometimes, but never about what our hands were doing, about why our ankles and knees were awkwardly squirming. And we never looked at each other. I don’t know what it meant to me then, because I don’t know what it means to me now. But I know it was real. I know that we all had scrapes on the smalls of our backs from the rough slate roof and that this bonded us closer than any blood, any trial, any other thing that we pin our friendships to. And sometimes, when the wind was blowing just the right way, and the tv in the neighbor’s bedroom was just loud enough, I could feel myself growing up.

We didn’t know how soft a girl’s skin was, how heavy and light and full and entirely empty your heart can feel falling asleep in the dark next to a girl that blushes when you call her pretty. But we learned humility on that roof. And pride, and friendship, and patience, and all the other things our fathers had forgotten to teach us.

The flat pounding of water on flesh and linoleum.

2009-01-26T02:04:00.007-05:00

I forgot about you for nearly a whole day, once. It was a Monday, and I had things to do that I pretended were important—a stop at the post office, the library, a few walks down grocery aisles. Nothing reminded me of you that day. Not even on the walk home to my empty room. Not even in the evening, when I pulled off my socks and stepped into the shower's embrace. But——when I turned the water off, in the first moment of silence without the flat pounding of water on flesh and linoleum, I remembered your name. The water drained from the tub, and I remember the way you would dry your hair. I stood steaming, naked with empty hands and I remembered that I love you still. I remembered you when my skin was clean, and wet, and warm, like the time my mother first held me and told me my name.

There are things I could have done to forget you. I could have taken down the picture of us from my fridge—the one where you and I are barefoot, sitting on the edge of the tub in your mother's bathroom, cleaning off the green stain of the backyard from our feet. The floor is moss green tile and at our feet there's one white little sock. My hands are on my knees, and your fingertips—this is the reason the photo stays—are resting lightly on my wrist. I barely ever remember you touching me when we were younger; at least not until we were fifteen, sixteen, when you found out it made me nervous. But there, in this photograph, you're touching me. I must have known then. I must have known that you would hurt me (oh god, I could have never guessed how much). I knew I would feel pain and I loved you still. I loved you for nine more years, until the hot water ran out, and the light bulb flickered off.

Something Miller said.

2008-12-26T01:37:00.004-05:00

A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in. Henry Miller.

This is a terrible thing, but the truth is terrible, and to deny a terrible truth is to fear the truth, and to fear the truth is to lose. I do not know if this terrible thing is true because I am not a great man, I have not written or felt or held great things. I know I can be a great man one day, but I am scared to be, because I fear Henry Miller is right.

Is writing fear?

J.

When even the moths have gone.

2008-12-21T03:22:00.006-05:00

That night, after we'd emptied ourselves into each other, quietly, quickly; after you'd fell asleep, I found myself on the wet street, alone with the moths. There were dull sounds from the home across the street and light sliced through the slits of the garage door. I wish you would have reached for me in your sleep, awoke with an empty hand, come down to join me and my thoughts. You wouldn't have said anything, just stood beside me with your grey buttoned peacoat over one of my t-shirts, lit a cigarette, held your hip beneath your coat. You'd have let your cigarette dangle from a finger, like glowing jewelery, and we'd watch the smoke curl up the brick like ivy. We would have stood there, you and I, and listened to the sounds across the street. You'd have been there to see the lights go out, heard the door close, then we'd have been alone together. You'd have finished your cigarette, then kissed my cheek and gone back upstairs and been asleep when I got there.

Then the next morning, as I pulled on jeans and and listened to the garage door open, I'd have forgot all about it, not even noticing your peacoat wasn't in the same place as when I'd pulled it off you while kissing your neck.

I'd have forgotten about it until now, when even the moths have gone and I'm alone alone, and the air is clear and you're not here.

Other things that are white.

2008-11-03T01:41:00.007-05:00

The eggs are. And the plate, too. The milk in the glass is white. The face of the clock is white, as is the front of the refrigerator. The noise the television makes is white, but the television itself is not. The television's glass front is not white either, but the pixels behind it, some of them at least, are white. Then those same pixels aren't white, but others are, and then they are again and the others aren't. Then those same pixels are refracted onto the ceiling, and up there they are white as well, although you can't tell. Ceilings are often white, and this one is no different. The tile on the counter is white too, and it matches the tile on the floor. Her shoes are white, but dirty from city dust, and her apron is white and clean. The pocket of the apron is white, and the inside of that pocket is white, and also the envelope resting inside of that. The letter inside of the envelope is also white, but the ink on the letter is black. The hand that wrote it is flesh-colored, with red, red blood inside it. The red, red blood goes to a boy's heart, and in the heart, there rests this truth, and this truth is white, and it is warm, and it is old, and strong, but also young, and delicate, like trying to crack an egg in the palm of your hand, squeezing, clutching, knowing you can't break it because you've tried this trick before, yet you still squeeze with all the power in your arms, but the life inside the egg doesn't crack because it only cares about the warmth it steals from your hand, so full of blood, the egg wants warmth and it gets warmth, so it doesn't care about the strength in your arms, the strength of your hands that you learned when your father taught you to shake hands with a firmness, with a look straight in the eye, with your heart open and your collar starched and white.

The time Costello wasn't actually high.

2008-10-13T12:25:00.006-04:00

“Your mom’s casserole?” Mat gestures towards the tinfoil.

“Yes. I think she assumes you’ve starved the last two years.” My mother wants to know how he’s doing every Saturday when I call her. I don't tell her I’d only talked to Mat twice. Twice in two years.

“Who says I haven’t been?” Mat unwraps the pan.

“At least I don’t have to hear you suck up to her.” Always, Mat, flirting with my mom. Eating anything she’d put in front of him, bringing her chocolates on Mother’s Day, copies of school pictures, sharing test grades, mock humping behind her back all the while. My mom missed him more than me.

Pointing at the cold mess he’d pushed onto a plate, Mat says, “I’m gonna have to call her about this.” Then into the microwave. The stale smell of the kitchen mixes with peppers and onions. In the drone of the microwave, a silence builds quicker than I’d expected.

This is when I have to say it. On the way here, I’d been thinking about the best way to bring it up, but now I’ve forgotten what it was. I just say it.

“I’m sorry I didn’t make it back for your dad.”

He grabs a knife and a fork from the sink, rinses them off. “Don’t worry about it. You knew him, he wouldn’t have wanted you to waste money to come back. Save your money for good times, he would have said.”

“My mom said the funeral was nice.”

“Yeah." Mat’s dad died last February. His mom left when he was three. Mat still looked so young to be missing two parents.

“I’m sorry, Mat.

“It’s ok. Everything's ok.”

Things go quiet, and then the microwave beeps and we are good again.

“You know, I thought you might have Costello here now,” I said. A big black dog, the biggest, and probably the thing that Mat’s dad gave a shit about aside from Mat.

Mat’s at the table with the casserole, the fork in hand. “Nope.” He pauses a moment, then begins eating.

“Remember the time Costello got high?” I think I see Mat smile between forkfuls. “I’ll never forget that.”

Our very first weed sac, bought it from Jimmy Kern's older brother for twenty bucks of saved up lunch money. Took it up to Mat’s room, and while we were trying to roll our first joint, Costello just ate the bag, swallowed it plastic, weed and all. We stayed up all night, in sleeping bags, having one of the best and worst nights of our life, terrified Costello was either going to fall over and die, or get up and start talking. We thought the dog had to be high, but when he shit the bag out two days later during his evening walk with Mat's dad, all the weed was still inside.

“I still swear that dog was high. No way he wasn’t,” Mat says with his mouth full. The plate is empty already, and Mat shovels out more of the casserole onto it. This time he doesn’t bother heating it.

Like the name of that one album.

2008-10-12T21:45:00.003-04:00

My truck hits the darkness of the tunnel hard. The air sucks through the open windows, and the steering wheel shakes. This is a small truck, a good one, and she is mine. No air conditioning, a broken taillight, and speakers that sound like they're full of dust. And she's certainly not fast anymore, not that she ever was, but on a drive like this, where I have something behind me and something ahead, with nothing but hot asphalt beneath me, she lets me drive her hard, my foot pushing, and that road pulling, always pulling. The windows are wound down, the cab rattles loud, and when the radio turns to static a few breaths into the tunnel, I barely hear it change.

It's the roar of noise that makes me think of her. Sam's the only girl from home I still think of. She was the one that named my truck Cecilia. The day she christened her, her hair was down, and it was a Sunday, a few miles out of the city.

It just reminds me of that song, she told me. Why, I asked. Drive faster, she said. Why, I asked. So I can show you why, she said. I drove fast, faster, until the road ripped through the floor, climbed in between us, and yelled at the top of his lungs. The breaks in the cement tore at the tires in steady rhythm, an even duh-thu duh-thu duh-thu. A bit faster, she yelled. I took her as fast as I could. There, she yelled, and then she was banging on the dashboard in cadence with the road. Duh-thu slap duh-thu slap duh-thu slap. She looked at me, smiled, yelled in my ear 'percussion!' and then she was singing—Cecilia, you're breaking my heart, you're shaking my confidence daily, oh Cecilia, I'm down on my knees, I'm begging you please to come home. Duh-thu slap duh-thu slap. Jubilation, she loves me again, I fall on the floor and I laughing. She sang the whole song while I laughed. She finished, I slowed down, and she grabbed my knee. Cecilia it is, I said.

I've wanted to do that every time we drive in this truck, she said. Later, when we were in the bed of the truck, before the rain started falling and after she'd kissed my mouth, she said it again.

The radio returns as the tunnel ends and light explodes through the dirty windshield. I pull my visor down and the bridge comes into focus, then the river beneath it, then the dirty city behind it. Beyond that, the sun is hard and mean and coming up fast. It sags in the sky, a big white disk with a rusted rim, pulling up a polluted dawn behind it. A sky like curtains soaked in alcohol, burning. Glowing oranges, and yellows too, red cobwebs latticing through it like slit wrists over a bowl of sugared orange soda.

This is the city where I am from, and it's only when it's behind me that the truck can go as fast as Sam and I took it that Sunday. But now it's in front of me, steel and glass and concrete. It's a good city, it's my home, but for everything I've found here, I've lost a bit more. I try and remember the name of the album Cecilia is on. It's something obtuse, I think. Some kind of cliché. Two turns after the bridge and I'm at the place I left three years ago, back when I had something to run from.

Before they knew they must love each other.

2008-10-11T17:21:00.002-04:00

The rain falls hungry for the street while they make silhouettes in a space between shadows. The wind stills and allows her to hear a few heartbeats and in the quiet she thinks they can be nothing but together, and together they are beautiful. But the storm quits stopping for breaths, and they are empty of thoughts and full of blood. She bites his shoulder when the lightning flashes and the thunder tells him when to come.

Curtains soaked in alcohol, burning.

2008-10-10T03:51:00.001-04:00

The sun was hard and mean and coming down fast. It sagged in the sky, a big white wavering disk with a rusted rim, pulling down a polluted sunset behind it. A sky like curtains soaked in alcohol, burning. Glowing oranges, and yellows too, cobwebs of red latticed through it like slit wrists over a bowl of sugared orange soda.

Another untold story, and agony too.

2008-10-09T20:13:00.001-04:00

And then on your birthday, when you were at school, and I had to be in another city with my family I hadn't told about you yet, this city of glass and dust, this is where I see a middle-aged woman, older and slender and dark and gentle, she's with her husband, I'm there and I'm seeing them walking outside in the shadow of the big buildings of arts and histories and sculpture gardens and wild animals posed and filled with stuffing, seeing this couple walking, happy—seeing them and thinking of you, seeing them and finding a thought inside me I didn't know I had, this thought that I could be that with you, that I could do that with you, that I could walk with you for a long while, with no one but you, having that thought that if I had you, that ending up like them wouldn't be so bad.

Before we'd seen blood.

2008-10-08T20:11:00.001-04:00

It is a blood red, dark thing and we are young enough to hate it, but old enough to do something about it. We are boys, with all the appropriate inadequacies and maturities of our youth. We have the confidence of men and the insecurities of children. We are fearless, and scared of the fact we are. We are boys, so we will tear this blood red thing down.

The damned hurt bites.

2008-10-07T19:53:00.000-04:00

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Angelou.

"Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it—don't cheat with it." Hemingway to Fitzgerald.

So. The damned hurt. The untold story. It is unfair to wake up every morning and think of a girl and not let her know. Our tongues do not belong between our teeth, but she does not belong to me.

The way a tongue can taste.

2008-10-06T19:46:00.001-04:00

And I hated girls who smoked. The smell on their coats, and always the prettiest coats with nice, thick fabric collars you could just hold onto. I hated that. But then, her. She smoked and I didn’t hate her. Always, outside I’d see her, standing with her ankles pressed together, holding her elbows, she had such nice elbows, such nice long hands, always a cigarette hanging off a finger like jewelry. Her, beautiful even through the haze, tall, dark, slender, that fucking smile and that fucking smoke. I’d of spent eighty years with her in that smokey room, but I guess she thought seventy’d be enough.

Something Hemingway said.

2008-10-05T19:39:00.000-04:00

"That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best—make it all up—but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way." Hemingway.

I have done this. This is what I have done. And now forward.

S.

This is more than enough.

2008-10-01T00:37:00.000-04:00

First and foremost, I am a boy.
Last and lately, I am a man.
I believe that the universe
is made up of only love and fear.
I choose love.