The white of Susanna's tennis skirt as it caught the sun made his stomach bend, and he wished for the thousandth time that this wasn't happening. But, of course, it was. He'd messed up, bad, and he was losing his gorgeous, brilliant wife, his kids, his El Dorado Estates home—he was clinging to those things with all he had, trying to grab every last second before it all fell apart. Their weekly tennis match was the last piece of normalcy he had—Susanna, as he'd been moved out of his bedroom, and told to start apartment-hunting, still wanted to volley with him.

As he'd gone through their weekly ritual in the bungalow that served as court rental office and pro shop, he moved slowly, memorizing every motion, the position of the tennis ball tubes, aware that it could be the last time. He'd been living that way for the last two weeks—everything he did could be the last time. Susanna tucked a ball under the skirt, on her right hip, a move he'd seen her make 10,000 times, and then stared him down, sizing up her opponent. They hadn't spoken in days. She lofted the ball, then crushed it at him—it bounced and ricocheted into his thigh, bruising him.

She smiled, paused, and then brought it, smashing serve after serve by him. Each twang of racket on ball made him remember—their first kiss, at the Japanese Gardens at CSULB. Their wedding, four years later, the same place. Their daughter's first day of preschool. Their son's. Whack, whack, whack, first set to Susanna. He stood there, helpless—she swept him.

He had nothing, and she won the day easily, until they came to the last point, and all he had was to try and save face, to put something other than love on the board. His serve came back quickly, and he got under it this time, forcing it to Susanna's backhand—she handled it, crossing it back, and he backhanded it to the same side. She crossed to him and he returned, but this time she pivoted and drove it straight, down the line and right by him. He watched it go, and dropped his racket.

His wife, her blond hair bouncing, smile flashing, pumped her fist and stared at him. The smile faltered just a bit, and the victorious gleam in her eyes clouded for a moment with uncertainty. He nodded at her, fighting back tears. She, still holding her racket, spread her arms, and opened her mouth, then sent volley after volley of questions at him, with her eyes.

Labels: Stories

There's a cigarette being passed around on Long Beach's Eastside. A longshoreman from the Port bought it from the L&L Liquor on his way home from work—he'd been living on the Eastside for 30 years, and working at the Port for 30 and a half. He shook his head at the price of a pack, as he did once a week, then handed the clerk his money.

On his way out the door, he slid the crinkling cellophane off the pack and stuffed it in his pocket, then pulled out two cigarettes, lighting them both. One he put to his lips and drew on—the other he held towards the ground, without even looking to acknowledge Veteran Johnny, who lived outside the liquor store and who was the once-weekly beneficiary of the longshoreman's generosity, even in the wake of rising prices and falling pay-scales.

Veteran Johnny waved bye to him, and smoked half of the cigarette, then pinched it off and tucked it behind his ear, for the morning. He rolled himself up in his ratty Salvation Army blanket, and fell asleep. When he woke, his ear was naked, and he slapped the ground. In a rust-bucket heading towards the Westside, a young wannabe-gangster was smoking the last half of the cigarette, his lungs fogging from the clouds of his first smoke. He'd seen Veteran Johnny lying there and thought, "Hey, what the fuck? Gotta start sometime."

As he finished it, sucking on the butt too long because he didn't know when to stop, a cop car flying up Santa Fe plowed into him, breaking his legs and sending the butt flying out the window, where it landed on the asphalt and rolled to the curb. Yoger, the homeless who lived on the corner of Santa Fe and PCH, stepped over to the butt, picked it up, and tried to draw on it—nothing left. He flicked it back into the street, and went back to his ratty Goodwill blanket, cursing.

Labels: Stories

He was the kind of man who checked his watch again every time his wife plucked another outfit off the rack at Penny's—but who wouldn't let her go by herself. She was the kind of woman who couldn't stop plucking outfits, like they were wildflowers and she was a vase, and who thought, "I'm worth it" every time she bought something.

They spent four hours there on Sunday, plucking and checking and plucking and checking, and finally checking out. He stood there with his hands on his hips, like he could get in the way of anything with just a grimace, and his hand made a fist around their credit card, going up and swiping down, going up and swiping down. "I'm worth it, I'm worth it, I'm worth it," she whispered.

Labels: Stories

He wanted to tell her so many things—stupid, useless things about how she'd saved him, about how he wanted to save her. About what candlelight did to the naked shape of her, and the suggestions those shapes made to him. He wanted to tell her that he wanted to subscribe to her newsletter, read her blog, gape at her flickr, break the lock on her diary with his teeth and eat every page until he knew everything.

Nobody had ever told her she was beautiful and he could see that, those not-words burned onto her face like a scarlet alphabet. He wanted to tell her that she was, and he wanted to pin her hair behind her ear for her and tell her he didn't care if she never shaved or waxed or plucked or peeled. He wanted to tell her she'd still be his main course if she spoiled on the vine.

He wanted to tell her she wasn't just the answer to the question Why, but to the question How.

But he waited. And then it was too late.

Labels: Stories

*Extracted from the "About" page of RonnieBricksHateForHire.com

My second-grade teacher—may she rot—told us on the first day of class that God gave everyone a gift, and that it was a teacher's job to help unearth it. Well she did her job with me, because I hated that fluffy bullshit and I've been hating ever since. My moms, my friends, rich people, poor people—I hate all that shit. Sports, movies, television—I hate the mother-hating Jesus Christing crap out of that stuff.

In college, my boy Beef Jersey—who I haven't spoken to since what he pulled at the beach—made me a suggestion that I didn't hate. He said: "Ronnie Brick, man. You hate so toughly, and so cleanly, you oughta get paid for that shit."

"You're retarded Jersey," is what I said at the time, but I remembered his words. In 2003, I made them a reality with the launch of this website, www.RonnieBricksHateForHire.com.

Since that time, I've been doing what you don't have either the time, the energy, or the conviction to do yourself, and hating your enemies for you. I will also hate your loved ones, if necessary. I offer customizable packages for every budget and situation. Whether your needs are conceptual—my general bad-will program—or tangible (such as my hate mail and angry phone message plan) I'm confident Ronnie Brick's Hate for Hire has something for you.

I invite you to navigate around the site and browse my options, then get in touch by clicking Contact, and we'll work something out. You're a douchebag if you don't.

Labels: Stories

So over the Summer, right after I finished my novel, while we were in the lull period on the Post, I spent a month really focusing on short fiction. I've always loved writing short stories, and had never really had much success getting them published. In fact, aside from publications I worked for, I'd had a grand total of two stories published in about five years of trying. So imagine my surprise when the dam burst over the Summer—I wrote five stories, and all of them got accepted for publication at the journal or magazine I was targeting.

The first I already linked to—a short short called "A Biography of the Ave" that was published in Book by Authors, a nonprofit fundraiser collection to help benefit North Long Beach.

This story I'm more excited about, and I hope you have a chance to read. It's called "Alone and Awash on the Queen Mary," and it's a literary ghost story that (like everything I'm writing now) is focused with a local angle. It was published a short while ago at Verdad Magazine, and I just found out it won the Editors' Choice for the Fall 2009 issue (since there are a few other writers in the fiction section this quarter that I'm competitive with, I was doubly happy about that). Anyway, it's a fun story that I'm very happy to have written, and now, to be able to pass along to you to read—enjoy!

Click here to read the story.

Labels: Stories

There are four planes of existence I'm currently perceiving. Doubtless there are many more, but at the moment I am capable of experiencing four of them. There is the world outside my office window, bright and glaring, a blue sky and wintering trees, scattered clouds and invisible air. There is the screen on my window, which is the second plane. There is the space between the screen and the glass of the window, occupied currently by an unidentified flying insect, with six legs, a flattened cylinder for a body, and a barely visible proboscis. Finally, there is the glass of the window, the closest plane to me, and yet also the least real.

All morning I had been focused on the farthest plane, as I often am on crisp Winter mornings when it's bright out, and not shedding snow. But the insect has caught my attention. He is, after all, trapped, a position I both comprehend and empathize with. He can perceive only two planes of existence—the screen which pins him in to one side, and the window glass, which he perceives only through physical sensation as it bars him from escaping (his vision is not sufficient to actually see the glass, similar to my situation for most of my adult life).

He is beating uselessly between the center of the screen, and the glass, which he butts up against again and again, painfully I imagine, unable to understand how he is trapped. I look around me at my office, as the drab, sole plane of existence that stretches away for what feels like miles, and then turn back to the window, the bug, the screen, and the world. A soft, dull plinking noise emanates from the glass as he rams it—finally, he gives up and turns back to the screen, where he settles and begins to clean his legs.

The insect is unsure of how he got into this predicament, and clueless as to how to get out of it, lacking the intelligence and perceptive ingenuity to see his whole situation. There are two options for him: adapt his insect mind to pretending he enjoys the trap, or thrash himself to death trying to escape it. I have no advice for him, even if my skills of communication were advanced enough that I could impart it. All I can tell him is that if he's trying to escape, he's better off starting at the edges, than at the center.

Labels: Stories

Labels: Stories

Mister America, riding down the highway in a rust-red pickup rocket, the window down and the shocks creaking, his cigar lit, loving it or leaving it, Cash blaring and a flag rippling in the wind behind him, unfurling like a train that spreads over the landscape.

Mister America, shifting into fifth as he slides his Toyota Hybrid into the carpool lane on the freeway, hip-hop beating like hammers on his windows, breaking the speed limit because there's somewhere he's got to be, caring so much it hurts, saving his sneers only for a rust-red pickup, whose driver is sneering back as they flank each other down the road, pulling ahead and falling behind, tripping over each other as they try to fit through the doorway.

And neither of them tap the brakes and wonder, "So what? Who really gives a shit?" The days are growing short and the roads are so so long, and there's lanes enough for everyone, or no one.

Labels: Stories

His mother died during childbirth—his father, heartbroken, left him in the hospital, where a kind nurse took him in. Or, she'd planned to, but a cruel nurse snuck him away that night, and sold him to an infant broker, who sold him as part of a cross-Pacific labor bundle to a warehouse shoe manufacturer in China. There, he toiled through adolescence, sleeping at his work station at night, weaving tight stitches with his calloused fingers during the searing heat of the daytime.

Eventually, he escaped, but at every juncture, heartache and misfortune clouded his intentions, and blocked his path. With every death of a friend, with every broken bone, those around him would tell him the same thing: "It could be worse." It could be worse than going hungry, than getting scabies, than getting an allergic reaction to a bee sting in the middle of his eye? Worse than being friendless, orphaned, and penniless?

"Yes," they said. "It could always be worse."

Then on the eve of his fiftieth birthday, huddled under a thin socialist newspaper in the midst of a crushing rainstorm, a man approached him with a soggy telegram. He opened it to read—

"Dear sir.

We have reviewed the circumstances of your case, and are pleased to award you a spot in our latest edition, under World's Most Miserable Man.

Sincerely,

The Guinness Book of World Records"

And so he knew—it couldn't get any worse. He fumbled the newspaper off, and over his head it seemed the sky was growing a little lighter, the rain a little less piercing. He smiled. At least now he had something to hang his hat on.

Labels: Stories

We first stumbled across them wandering through the black-green belly of the Angeles Mountain forests—we heard their chanting over the sound of our own clumsy trample, their joyous song over the muttered curses we wore around ourselves like bug repellant. Without saying a word to each other, we, on our honeymoon, began to walk towards the chorus, stealing nervous glances at each other. The tune was high and boisterous, but the words were in another language, one we didn't recognize.

The cabal we found that night was just one of hundreds going on across the nation, in the nooks and crannies of America—hundreds of thousands of young couples, married and un, gay and straight, coming together to hold hands and sing. To pray. They sang and prayed—we sang and prayed, that night as so many others—with only a trace of guilt, for the downfall of everyone else. Wishing that the stock market would crash lower and lower, that bailouts would roll off the back of our monster weightlessly, that the economy would continue to lumber forth and consume and destroy, and grind the bones of the old world between its teeth.

The guilt came in the realization of what horrible pain we were wishing on the rest of the country. But we had to—it was the only way any of us would ever be able to afford a house.

Labels: Stories

Ah, children. Children. You are right in this, as in so many things. Surely, you cherubs, you paramours of wide-eyed honesty, you babes, you know what they say springs from your mouth. The pure, unadulterated truth. And you were right: your teddy bears are alive. Your parents dissemble and try to dilute the streams of your crystalline knowledge with their compromised adult filth, but close your ears to them as you pinch your eyes against the night's terrible susurrus.

It is not just that they are alive, children. They feel. They think. They hurt. God, they hurt so much, when you pull their arms, when you bite their noses and gnaw on their ears in your sleep. When you shove them into the suitcase, children, they are alive and they are feeling it. Can you imagine, children, being shoved so, into a filthy suitcase with the soiled clothes and the plastic toys like knives in their belly, and the no-air everywhere around you. Do not imagine it, children.

But imagine, as you ascend to your summertime cabin, the pressure in your ears as the balloons inside inflate—did you know, with all your carefree childish innocence, with all your puerile avocations, that teddy bears are thrice as susceptible to altitude pressure as human children? Or did you just drop us into your backpack along with your toothbrush? You did, children.

But here, children, children, children, children, children, is the truth. The truth your parents would keep from you if even they possessed it (and this, children, is the truth of truths that your parents hide from you, that there are thousands of truths they keep from you, that everything they tell you is just one more piece of an elaborate, illegitimate brocade they've built around you, so that you can hold the dreams they gave up, a brocade they will whip away from your eyes one day when they show you the world you are growing into, one day when you get beat up at school and they tell you that you should have fought back, or when they pack everything for you including your toys and your teddy bears into little ordered black suitcases and put them on an airplane to Portland where you are moving in the Fall, or when you get your period). We die, children. We die with stunning regularity, like lemmings flung over the cliff by Disney executives, we die. Our average lifespan is just a few months.

And yet you cling to us, for months, children. For years. Clutching our dead husks to your chest as you sleep, as though we (or you) could be clutched, as though any of this could last.

Labels: Stories

When he was at peace, he bled. When the clouds parted and the sun shot through just so, when the viridescent lawn looked professionally lit, when the world crystallized into a veritable Kinkade and his mind slowed to a halt and his breathing came unfettered and smooth, he would bleed. Just a drop. Sometimes two. They came from the same place each time, the exact tip of his right index finger, where a small aperture would appear, and drip forth a small, shining ruby tear, which would land with a small plop on the soil, or verdure that was his carpet.

And when the clouds rolled back in, and the sun retreated behind them, and his mind throbbed with the thrum of daily thought, so much that he'd sometimes forget to breathe until he was lightheaded, those places would come back to him. Somewhere, in his blood, the consecrated land would rise up, fill him with a vapor that would soothe him, and bring calm again.

Because he was fairly well-off, he traveled frequently, and at length. He left drops of blood on five continents, including his own. He left them in forests, at the banks of rivers and rarely-disturbed creeks, on sun-baked cliffsides and lush hills. They were in cities, too, among people, in masterpiece opera houses and dingy, half-destroyed punk clubs. In National Parks and libraries. In the labyrinths beneath ancient churches. In the smothering fog of hidden coastal hamlets. In Central Park.
And when he died, his wife and his daughters, who he loved very much and who caused quite a bloody mess when he came home to them at the end of each day, had him cremated. They didn't purchase an ostentatious urn for him, but left him in the plain white cardboard box he was delivered in. They opened the top, and they set him on the porch, and they said their goodbyes, and they left him.

And when the breeze came that night, when it parted the thick grass of their lawn and rustled through the aspens that framed their porch, jangling its leaves like ornaments, it came for him. And as the Earth turned it took him home, carrying off flakes and mites of ash too small to see, and setting them down in the mud, and the soil, among wildlife and on silent meadows of asphodel. When the Earth turned, he turned with it, and when it was still, he was still. The wind blew evenly over him, and he was quiet, and he was placid, and he was at peace.

Labels: Stories

The raw materials for the experiment were simple, consisting only of a hundred or so disposable men, a correspondent number of motorcycles, and a stretch of paved highway whose location was conducive to the constraints of the experiment.

The process was as follows. Each step had to be timed precisely in order to prevent contamination of the results with rational thought. As a vehicle was progressing up the stretch of paved highway—a slope in the Verkhoyansk was chosen for its perfect conformity to the experiment's specific demands—a man on a motorcycle would burst onto the road in front of the driver. He had to swerve in close enough proximity for the vehicle's driver to feel that the motorcyclist was being reckless, that the motorcyclist's recklessness was putting him (the driver) in danger. It was a scientific conclusion that this action would cause the driver (of the car) to pass a negative judgment on the character of the motorcyclist.

The motorcyclist would then speed ahead on the highway, creating enough distance between himself and the driver for the driver to forget about him. Within five minutes, the driver's adrenal levels would have evened off and his heart rate slowed to the normal resting level. The driver would be in homeostasis in the sensory deprivation chamber of his car—with a negative opinion of the motorcyclist existing somewhere in the milieu of his mentation, but not at the forefront.

Then, as he came around a blind curve—if the driver was traveling less than 40 kilometers per hour, or more than 80 (implausible because of the curve), the experiment's results will be contaminated—he would see, lying pronate and prostrate across the road, the motorcyclist. To the left of the pronate motorcyclist was an embankment with a steep, surely fatal dropoff. To the right, a sheer cliff wall that would obviously end the driver's life in a collision. The motorcyclist was to be moving, in order to demonstrate that he was still alive. The motorcycle will not be in the tableau, suggesting that it pitched over the edge of the embankment.

The driver was thus presented with two options: run over the motorcyclist and kill him, or swerve the car to avoid him and thus end his own (the driver's) life. The minimum and maximum speeds ensured that the driver would have enough time to recognize these two options and to make a choice—but no time to deliberate, to color the decision with any logic, or memory, or detailed mentation. Imagine: within the span of a second, two lives held in suspension in the driver's mind, with only the time to choose and to act.

Of the 87 times the experiment produced uncontaminated results, 87 drivers ended their own lives in order to avoid killing the motorcyclist. 63 went over the embankment—24 collided with the cliff face, which had to be continually cleaned in order to maintain the experiment's desired aesthetic.

In this way, the Siberians felt they proved the existence of God.

Labels: Stories

The dust in Hamilton Bowl was caught up by the wind rolling down PCH and it whipped around in a violent circle, turning her surroundings blurry and bleary and brown. The cars zipping by down the highway, the whores lolling up and down Walnut, they receded into the background, more pictures spraypainted onto stucco buildings. The two-dimensional world faded farther behind the dirt, until it was just she and her memories, spinning in a slow, dazed circle inside the storm.

A soccer ball rolled under her left Converse and the two rubbers pushed away from each other, her foot catching and shooting up, the ball squirting towards the rusted fence, where it rattled dully. She blinked and she was on her back, staring up, looking at the orange midnight sky. There was no moon, and all she could see was the reflection of the city’s pissy streetlight glow. She wished the clouds would pull away, that they’d move so quickly they’d pull all the dirt away with them, that the dirt would catch up the rusted fences and the graffiti in its wake, and strip the highway, and the city, and its goddamn light away until there was nothing left.

Then she could lie on her back in the middle of the desert, gazing up at the stars’ hot faces, staring into the black spaces in between them, where her brother lived.

Labels: Stories

Well, this is it. End of the road. A lot of people have lobbied for me to keep going with A Storied Year, and I greatly appreciate it, but it's time to end it. Since I decided to be a writer, I've constantly set goals for myself and then tried to hit them, and I did this one. Believe me, it hasn't been as easy as I hope it looked most of the time. This blog is has taken a half hour of my day, minimum, for an entire year. Think about that: That's a lot of time for a guy trying to make it as a freelance, work for hire writer, and I'm damn proud, but I just don't have the time or energy to keep it going like this, curious as I am to see how far I could take it. Plus, I've written the equivalent of 360 double spaced pages, which makes me think I should write something I'll have a shot at selling.

In the end, I'm pretty happy with what's up here (the blog will remain as a personal blog, by the way, and the stories will stay up as a record that I pulled it off). It's not all great, some of it's probably shit, but usually I had one or two stories each week that I'd stake a career on, and that's pretty cool. I do wish the readership had been higher. This is mostly do to my own lack of efforts/time to self-promote over the last six months, but for my next-to-last story, I had only eleven people visit. After pouring near 200 hours of time into this project, that's kind of a bummer.

But still! I had over 12,000 hits from over 1,500 readers, coming from over sixty countries, on every continent in the world (except you, Antartica). Every state in the U.S. had a Storied Year reader except for West Virginia and Alabama, both of which I can live with. California had 107 cities read the blog. All of that is pretty neat, diminished as it's been towards the finish line.

I do feel like the experiment was a success: hell, I did it! Probably nobody but Shar will know how close I came to not making it, and I'm alright with that. One year ago I was at CSULB, at the Union, unsure of what was coming. In the last twelve months I've been involved with a dozen freelance projects and assignments, worked at the District, the Post, held a real job for a few months at Bobit, gotten married, had a honeymoon, lost my grandmother, seen two close friends get engaged, and bought a fuggin' sweet TV. Plus we've been on this badical road trip. It's been a big year for me, recorded through these stories in ways both subtle and obvious.

…Okay, look. I'm going to do a few more stories. But just a few, seriously. Just until we get back from the road trip, and then I'm really done, because Shar and I are cooking on a serialized fiction scheme that may actually be profitable and further my career, neither of which this blog has done much of (though the 11 dollars of ad revenue will get me a kickin' dinner at Hof's). But I'm totally serious, after we get back from the road trip, the bonus stories are going to end. It's been so hard for the last three months to come up with ideas that it would seem stupid to stop while they're actually coming to me three at a time, which is what travel does to me.

Okay, so I'll say my real goodbye then. For now, fake goodbye, and I have a small request: Please leave me a congrats note! I've put a tremendous amount of lonely time into this blog, and I'd love to hear from anyone that enjoyed it.

Also: let me know your favorite story or stories! We're cooking a little something up, and this would be a huge help. Stay tuned, and my sincere thanks for putting up with me these last twelve months. I've bitched aplenty about it, but it's really been the biggest "artistic" success of my life so far, and I'm glad you, whoever you are, were a part of it. Especially Dan, Laurel, Conor, Ryan, my Mom, and Shar, because to my knowledge you all are the only daily readers I have left. Super especially Dan, for being my faithful commentatorial. If I missed anyone there, it's only because I had no way of knowing, and there's no offense meant I assure you. Good night, Long Beach! Thanks again!

Labels: Generalness, Mission Statement, Road Trip, Stories

From the bottom of the ocean, he could see the sun shining. His lungs were turning into sponges in his chest, and his eyes pulsed like twin hearts set into his skull. He kicked his legs as hard as he could, and rose. Dizzy, visions danced through his head, of hitmen and little girls, planets circling and laughing, and hundreds of faces, ordinary, plain, worn, flat American faces. He kicked harder and rose past them, pulling handfuls of water down as he moved towards the light, and the air.

And then he surfaced. All around him was flat, motionless water. Everything had been swallowed by the flood. Everything he'd ever known or loved or even dreamed was back down there, where it was hard to see and harder to maneuver. But it was all he had. So he bid farewell to the easy sun and its warming rays, took another deep breath, and plunged back in.

Labels: Stories

This could be anywhere. The woman has alabaster skin and corn-colored hair, and teeth that are literally pearl-white. She has diamonds around her neck, in her ears, and on three of her fingers. And who knows, maybe somewhere else, too. There are children milling around her, which she is displeased about. Children could tarnish the diamonds with their muddy grubby fingers.

A black man approaches, of average build, height, and means.

The woman suddenly becomes a frenzy of self-consciousness. She tries to keep from tapping her rings in succession as she stares at him—it's clear she feels bad about. But tap, tap, tap she goes, staring all the while as she works her pearly whites over her ruby red bottom lip. She fidgets. She shifts her purse. She attempts to make one more effort to simply stand still and not look at this man. And then she adds her necklace to her diamond-checking rosary routine, and stops being anxious about it. It isn't her fault she's scared.

Labels: Stories

The grass is cold. "Hey Scotty," I greet him.

"Hullo, Mike. Here again?"

"I'm running out of places to go, Fitz."

He laughs. "No you aren't. You're just getting tired."

"I think I'm going crazy."

He does not laugh. "I know. I know, I know, I know."

I read the line engraved on his tombstone. "What a depressing line to be buried under."

"Yes."

"You sound like Hem, you know."

"You're trying to be funny now, because you're scared."

"Yes."

"You know, Mike, It is a depressing line to be buried under. But it's a great line, nonetheless, and I'm glad I wrote it."

Labels: Stories

It's the red line to city center in the capitol of the world, and a man and a woman to match from every state of the Union are crammed in. There's a man in a ripped up suit sitting on the floor by the train doors and the suit used to be worth a lot of money, you can tell. Sloooooowly, he reaches into his suit pocket and pulls out a harmonica, and starts to blow, really blow on that thing, long mournful sexy tunes in every key, until all the women are sitting around his feet, staring at him. The men are examining his haircut.

The harmonica player is from a small town jail and is trying to make it in the big house now, the federal house, but he can't afford harmonica lessons and he's wearing the only clothes he owns. But still, the women want him and the men, well the men don't want to be him they just want to punch his fucking teeth out till he makes kazoo sounds any time he wants to talk. There's a crescendo to all this, the train moving faster, the music blowing harder all the time, until the whole train is pregnant, until the tipping point is just one note away and almost assuredly, something, something BIG, is about to happen.

But all the businessmen and women get off at Dupont and Farragut North, and the tourists get off at the Metro Center and Union Station, and so the man ends up in Glenmont, blowing his heart out to an empty train.

Labels: Stories

It's South Carolina in 1997, near the coast, on the Hurricane Evacuation Route. They aren't evacuating anyone right now, but they're thinking about it pretty hard. The wind is moving the driving rain horizontally, so that trying to see anything is like looking through a pair of plantation shutters. A mile and a half off of any drivable road, a pair of invisible eyes is doing just that, peering out into the darkness from inside the darkness of the old Hamilton Plantation Home.

South Carolina is covered with "Plantation Homes," so quoted because they aren't exactly real. They're homes in the style of that time, but without their history. Not the Hamilton Plantation. There aren't any golf courses outside its windows, or artificial ponds. There is a swamp, filled with mud, overgrown by vines, the same kind that have wound their way up the home's front pillars, peeling the paint off chip by chip.

Inside one of the "Plantation Homes" you'll usually find expensive, brand-new furniture, painstakingly crafted to look like it's antique. In the Hamilton Home, there are a few cracked and splintered desks and chairs left, but most of it has been looted, its windows smashed in. The shutters covering the shards still clinging to the window frames suddenly snap open, smacking against the crumbling bricks to either side. The slats in the shutters break and fall to the ground. Whatever may have been peering through them disappears. It is not a ghost: not exactly. But this place is haunted.

Labels: Stories

When Lisa Dodinger opened Myrtle Beach's first chiropractic office, twenty years ago, the town folk said she was crazy. "That's just kook medicine," they said. "Nobody here is stupid enough to go to a trumped up masseuse parlor." They told her that her rates were too high, and her promises of a pain-free existence trumped up and false. But then Bill Bahooney, a local, threw his shoulder out of whack when trying to get a big drive off the fourteenth tee at Shady Peace River Hollow, the hole that's four hundred fifty yards of water hazard with a thin landing strip of grass down the middle.

Bill, whose wife was one of the last remaining townies still on speaking terms with Lisa (who'd always been a bit nuts), got him to go see her, out of sympathy. Bill was afraid of what people would say if they heard, but he was a kind man who always did what his wife said (often to his detriment) and so he made, and kept, an appointment. Of course, Lisa did wonders for him, and Bill, a respected pillar of the community, began recommending her.

She treated Todd Selman's wrenched back—a victim of Quiet Stills' second hole; Marie Selman's bad neck—a victim of looking to see what had made her husband cry out; and all manner of tourist injuries—victims, mostly, of the mini golf courses, overeager seniors who had tried to climb a fake volcano, or young children who had tried to scale a Tyrannosaurus Rex at one of the dinosaur courses. Lisa has become a Myrtle Beach institution, wealthy beyond her dreams. She's even thinking of opening a chiropractic-themed miniature golf course, where you have to putt the ball off knots of muscle tension and avoid the fusing vertebrae to get it in the hole.

Labels: Stories

The camera is suspended in the sky, staring down at the ground. All you can see right now are treetops, but then it zooms in, speeds west, until you're flying IMAX-style down a highway, with roadkill and curled tire tread snakes lining the pavement. You zip along for a while, in the shadow of immense clouds high above you, and then you pull back, soaring along the tops of the forest as below you the trees grow a hundred and fifty years younger, till you can see armies marching through them, and strange fruit hanging from their branches.

The camera moves in again, dodging between trees as the forest grows younger and younger, by another fifty years. You come to a river, and a procession of men and women, all dressed in loose, cheap white sheets. Their heads are bare, and they are marching into the river, where a man dressed in black is taking them by the forehead and dunking them, then lifting them up and throwing them onto their backs, where they float. You do not know what is going on, but one by one, as they spring up from the water, the men and the women stare straight up, right at the camera, and right at you.

The sun breaks through the clouds behind you, and everything lights up. The trees get greener, the grass does too, and the sheets on the men and the women reflect a brilliant pure white up at you. But the water just gets clearer.

Labels: Stories

She's staying in a Hilton with her husband, and when she stays in a Hilton with her husband, she expect certain things from him, things which, while he's drooling on the pillow next to her, he is incapable of delivering. In the rooms around them, horny young rich kids are losing their virginity post-Prom, the symphony of nervous giggles and squealing mattresses grating harder and harder on her nerves. Her husband snores on and on, and she goes to sleep wearing the lingerie she'd bought for the occasion, unsure if she's more enraged or depressed.

Labels: Stories

She works at the Ben & Jerry's on Delmar in the Loop, University City, St. Louis Missouri. She's from Southern Illinois and gave college a go in St. Louis partly because she thought she might take to it, but mostly to get the hell out of her home town. There are seventeen piercings in her head, sixteen of them filled with a stud, one left open because of an infection still healing. Her hair is ninety shades of red and forty kinds of tangled, tucked under her black Ben & Jerry's cap.

She dropped out of college because she didn't end up taking to it, the way she never really took to anything. Starvation and homelessness weren't enough to drive her back home, so she settled in, took the job selling ice cream because they let her listen to music, and faded, slowly but surely, into the background of the college shopping district.

She is, and has been since she was 14, waiting for something. Not even she knows what it is. But there is one thought that makes her smile. One day, she'll be at work, scooping, The Roots on in the background, and someone will come in, and smile, and start rapping along with her. She has no idea what this person will look like, if they'll be a student or a tourist, or even if they'll be a man or a woman. But she thinks it would be nice to know someone understood.

Labels: Stories

In one of the stout brick meeting halls on campus, in between the Collegiate Society For the Elimination of the Penny, and the Collegiate Society For the Total Abolishment of Those Little Hairs People Leave on Soap Bars, the first meeting of a brand new Collegiate Society was taking place: The Collejyit Societye For the Reintroduction of Nonstandardized Spelleeng. The Societye was unusual for two reasons: first, the misspellings in its title, and second, because it was the college's first group whose goal was to create something, and not eliminate it. Its chair, the preeminent student, Alex Hudson, presided. Alex was, naturally, an English Literature major.

"My friends, as many of you know, some of our greatest writers, including old man Shakespeare himself, wrote in the times before the English language was standardized, when no spelling was the right spelling, when grammar was up for grabs, and when language served its primary purpose: to communicate. Not to be a series of rules that must be adhered to. Teachers taught great literature to young children instead of drilling them on rote memorization, young scholars could craft poetry in their books, instead of parsing sentences they already intuitively understand. Fellow students, it was a golden age."

The building's thick wooden door slammed open with a THUNK, and the imposing frame of Dr. Peck stepped in. Peck was the department chair, and as such Alex Hudson's greatest friend and enemy. There was an audible gasp. "Mr. Hudson, are you really about to suggest that these students all get Cs on their term papers, just so you can justify your inability to learn the difference between further and farther as a literary movement?"

Alex Hudson smiled.

Labels: Stories

There wasn't nothin else open, so I pushed into the McDonald's on Elm around ten o'clock, and planted my ass on the red pleather stool at the front counter, half a shout from the cashier. "Gimme an ice cream sundae," I said. "And go nuts on the fudge sauce, I just got fired." This was true enough.

The woman behind the counter wasn't wearing a name tag, but she told me her name was Isabella. She was a fatass Mexican girl with her eyebrows tattooed on and a thicker moustache than I could grow. I knew I loved her right away, and I told her so. She said she didn't speak no English, but she smiled a little and slid me a small bag of french fries. Five minutes later when nobody else came in, she got herself one and stood on the other side of the counter from me, eating hers silently and watching me. I told her I needed her, bad, and that she was the best thing to ever happen to me, which was true enough too I guess.

She let me into the meat freezer and we had each other real fast, because she didn't have keys to lock the front door and she didn't want to get robbed or her manager would take it out of her pay. I told her I thought that was illegal but she couldn't understand me, and so we had it again and then I left, kissing her on the eyebrows as a thank you, because it was all I had to give her. I wished I'd had more, too, because what she gave me I needed real bad, even though the ice cream was all melty and there wasn't no salt on the fries.

Labels: Stories

It's a big cave with a sign in neon on the ceiling looking down that says America and you've been walking around its edges looking for a way out that'll take you deeper in, but all you're finding is more and more edges. There's a woman in the corner who's sick with something awful and there's no telling what it is but the sick stench rolls off her in great tsunamis and it rocks the foundations. It's okay though because she's got drugs to take to make her better but she didn't get a prescription for them she got them from another man in the corner, and you can smell the drugs just as strong as the sick.

A man with a Bible in his hand tries to sell you a used car he calls Jesus Christ and the engine don't run so good anymore he says, but goddamn it's a classic and the chrome is shining and he'll put spinning rims on it for thirty bucks more if you want. At his feet are thirteen dirty orphans with tears in their mouths who aren't even looking at that broke down old car anyway, with their hands out grasping for the crumbs of salvation tumbling off the man's quivering lips.

There's a homeless man whose home is the cave which is as much his home as it is anyone else's but still everyone hates him as much as they hate everyone else, and he asks for a quarter but ends up getting punched out and robbed of his cigarette butts and button lint. And he wails for that trash like a mother clutching her lifeless newborn, a sound he knows by heart. They're all dying and they're desperate and they're digging their own graves, they're all swimming up a waterfall falling back into the cave.

Labels: Stories

I can show you the path from here to Nirvana: I've walked it many times. Its pebbles and jagged rocks and soaring cliffs and devastating drops are like a second home to me, and I cross them with as little thought as you'd give to the steps between you and your toilet as you flip through a magazine.

When I'm up there, on the mountain, in the cloud, the idea of being anywhere else is absurd. Why would I be anywhere else? How could I fall from that place, where everything is so clear? And no matter if I did, for the path there, from that height, seems flat and easy. Then for one moment I forget myself, and suddenly I'm tumbling, tumbling, and within a blink I'm at the bottom looking up, wishing I was there.

And, though ten seconds ago it was lit up like Vegas, I cannot see the path back. I rave and rage and stomp around the base of the mountain, always staring up at the peak, always tripping over the minutia before me. It's not even that it's hard to get back up there; no, once I see the path I'm back, traveling my familiar footpaths, like it was nothing. The problem is that I can never remember the right direction to set off in.

Labels: Stories

You're on the T in Portland, and you've been riding it all day, waiting for something. Then the train pulls up outside the Rose, and all the Blazers fans pile in. Squashed against the window, you keep waiting, until it's run north of the city, out towards the airport. Your eyes have been closed, because it's too bright and it's too loud, and the noise has been creeping in. Now it's just you, and this young family, a mother and father who couldn't be older than 19, with two kids. They're all very blonde, and very white. You think maybe they're what you've been waiting for.

They're white trash, all the way, with their uneven haircuts and scabby addict skin, and a faraway piece of you feels bad for their children, hellions already and bound for worse. The mother is attempting to contain them, one in each arm, as they wriggle around and try to burst free. The father is going from disinterested to enraged with incredible speed and frequency. One of the children has a balloon. The other child wants it.

Yes, this is what you wanted. They exist at the transit station, where you can see they've parked their beat up, twenty five year old station wagon. You follow them out of the train, trailing behind the children and their toys and the balloon and a stroller that looks like it was broken recently. They're approaching their car, and you're right behind them now, because you have so many questions to ask that they have to answer and you have to know. Why did they have kids, why do their kind always have kids and why won't they ever stop, and why aren't they smarter, and why don't they try harder and why are they so goddamn intrusive? And why can't they do better? You're going to ask.

Labels: Stories

There's no whistle at the end of the day in the Cerritos Office Park, where she works, but she hears one in her head at 6 in the evening, just the same. It sounds beautiful. The drive home takes her an hour if she's lucky, and she listens to an audiobook or a CD, drumming along either way, smacking her steering wheel with her palms to mark downbeats or punctuation. She has no husband or wife at home, but when she pulls into her driveway at the end of the commute, it's still like being welcomed into the arms of a lover.

Once inside, she takes off her suit jacket, and her earrings, and her uncomfortable shoes, and her nylons, and her thick, inflexible skirt, and puts on another CD (never the same ones she listens to on her commute). Then she unbuttons her shirt and slips it off, unhooks her bra, slips out of her cotton work panties, lights the seventeen candles in the bathroom, and runs a bath. She takes her time, doing all of these things. Getting ready for work in the morning, that she rushes through. This moment, though, is worth getting right.

When the water is at the mid-way level and hot enough that the mirror is half-covered in steam, she slides in and closes her eyes, breathes in the steam, and exhales everything else. She just relaxes for the first fifteen minutes, but then she scrubs herself, vigorously, getting the thin film of recirculated air off first, and the smug condescension of her peers next, and the lingering shreds of regret last, since she has to scrub hardest at that. It isn't as relaxing as the meditation, but it's important. When she gets out of the bath at quarter to eight to make dinner and work on her painting, she wants to be clean. After all, it's the start of a new day.

Labels: Stories

"For sale: baby shoes, never worn." Hon? What do you think, is that okay for the newspaper ad? They charge per word so I tried to keep it short. No, I don't think it gives that impression at all. Really? I guess I can kind of see, but why would people be that pessimistic? I mean, we've got a box of unused baby shoes we're trying to unload, I have to write a thousand words about them or people are going to think we've got a dead kid? Christ that's morbid.

Labels: Stories

Willie saw a lot of things. She spent the last ten years of her life as a live-in care assistant, providing 24/7 nursing and supervision for the elderly. Think about that. Willie had no home of her own, almost no possessions for an entire decade, just bouncing from house to house to care for new patients, great men and women who once upon a time ruled their generation. She would give these patients baths; she would cook for them; sometimes she would feed them, or clean up after they went to the bathroom. Willie became the parts of these people that they'd lost to old age or addiction or Alzheimer's. Then they'd die, and she'd find somewhere else to go.

Willie used to have things of her own: a husband and a son, both gone. Now she has a bank account nearly full of money, and nothing else.

Sometimes when a smell or a sight would be so powerfully disgusting that she couldn't bear it, her tired, near-blind eyes would start to lift, rolling up towards the ceiling. But then she'd squeeze her eyes closed, and look back down. She didn't want to get distracted. It was so important that she remain focused.

Labels: Stories

This tale be set in the Spring, in the west country, in Scarlet Town where I's born. The trees and the flowers were all abloom, and the air clouded with their smells. But in the tallest tower of his da's castle, young Jemmy Grove lay on his deathbed, a-dying and a-dying while the world sprang to life outside his window. And all his days, and all his meager nights, he cried, Jemmy Grove cried, for his lost lady-love, Barbrie Allen.

His mother and his maids, and yea even his da came to give him comfort, but the poor boy wailed and moaned for his love, until his da sent messengers to all corners of the country, to find her. In a dusty tavern away out east to the city, one came upon a young beauty a-drinkin' alone, and said to her, "Fair maiden, my master bids you come to his side, for his days are short and his nights grow shorter, and all he want be Barbrie Allen."

She rode a-hard and fast and was at his side afore his last breath expired. But she gazed on him with eyes all fired and free, and turned away, saying only, "Death be printed on your face, young man. I believe you're a-dyin'." She rode just as hard and swift from the town, silent tears a-tracing down her cheek, as young Jemmy sang his last breath into the spring eve, a faint and a lovely tune, by the name of Barbrie Allen.

And at last she came to her ma's house, what hadn't seen her in nigh five year, but when her ma tried to embrace her, the lass just shook her head, and bade her ma prepare her life's last bed. "For he loved me pure and true," she said to her ma, "and I could not face him now, as when we were wee. So let me lie my life's last rest, and give to Jemmy my life, what he already gave to me." Her ma cried, but made her bed, made it short and narrow, and lay her daughter down and covered her, and wept for Barbrie Allen.

Labels: Stories

"You've probably heard the old axiom that we only use 15% of our brains. This is a misleading statement, because it paints this picture that 85% of our brains sit there useless, which isn't true. Every part of the brain does something useful, we just aren't sure that those parts are working to their potential. What is mostly useless, however, is the human lung. Most men and women fail to breathe deeply enough to utilize more than half of their lung capacity in a given day. It's worse if you smoke because you can't draw air down as far.

"Of course, to remedy this problem with your lungs, all you have to do is put your back against a firm surface, close your eyes, push your chest out, and take an old-fashioned deep breath, just like your first therapist taught you. If you remember to do that once or twice a day, you'll have healthier lungs and a healthier body for it. So what if it's the same for your brain? What if all you have to do to light that puppy up with all kinds of fire and activity is to just open your eyes again, and take in everything around you like you were seeing it for the first time, like your life was just one stop on a fifty-stop tour, and all the colors and smells and textures and corners were brand new to you? Try it! Just open your senses, and breathe it all in.

"Then you get to figure out what you're doing with the other 85%."

Labels: Stories

Why does it always have to rain here? Somebody tried to explain the meterological reason to me once, but it didn't really make a lot of sense. I should really get out of the city…when you don't have a roof over your head any night of the year, Seattle is probably one of the dumber places you could live. But it's not so bad, really, as bad as you might think. I have a thick blanket and a thick jacket, and I stay under the overhangs in Pioneer Square, and the people who work around there have been really generous to me, even offering to give me work if I can get cleaned up. I can find shelter in the rain, I can pick food out of the trash without getting anything on my sleeves, and I could con a quarter off a Jew, but getting cleaned up? That I haven't got figured yet.

Labels: Stories

My wife pointed out to me as we were shading our eyes from reflective walls of white faces and blonde hair that Salt Lake City's airport must be the only one in the country where there's no line at Starbucks. That's pretty much where the humor ends. I really really really hate Utah, going back to my first trip to the city, when my father got evil eyed stares for smoking and drinking a soda: God damn that caffeine! Damn it to Hell!

On my second trip, mothers literally grabbed their children away from a black friend of mine. It's that kind of state, I guess. None of this is to mention that I'm currently writing a chapter of my book that deals heavily with Mormonism, and hundreds of pages of reading inform me that the I walk through the airport, sets of blue eyes following the path of my angry jaw, and I know that with my dark hair and untrimmed beard and my olive eyes I am everything they hate and oppose, excepting of course for the color of my skin. But that is alright, because I hate them too, because I badly need something to hate right now, because every time we check our voicemails it's more bad news coming onto our backs, and sometimes you need to be really really really full of rage to throw all of that off of you, to make you light enough to get onto an airplane and get the fuck out of Utah, which is the approximate size and shape of Hell.

Labels: Stories

Rocky stood out in Mug City like a head of blond dreadlocks. He walked around in thousand dollar suits, stepping over men who hadn't seen that much money in their whole lives. Rocky was unaware. Rocky's luck was, frankly, bound to run out at some point.

One day he was out for a jog, down by the lake. When he'd just reached the farthest point of his route and was turning to start home, a man brusquely grabbed him, and demanded his track jacket. Rocky was indignant. Then the man showed him a knife, and Rocky complied.

Chilly and confused, he jogged on towards home. Then another man accosted him, and demanded his shirt. Rocky gave it to him. On down the shore, a man mugged him for his shoes, another for his socks and watch, and then another for his shorts and wallet, though he let him keep his keys. By the time Rocky made it home, he'd been mugged another four times, losing his cell phone, his boxers, and even a nipple ring. One last mugging had stripped him of all the keys but the one to unlock his apartment, which he used to let his naked self in out of the freezing rain. When he'd asked the mugger why he wanted the other keys, which would be useful to him, the mugger just shrugged and said, "I gotta take something. I bet I can melt these down and sell them to a key maker."

Labels: Stories

Carl was a cool customer, a real cucumber of a man. Sarah, his girlfriend, had never seen him break a sweat, or jump, or freak out about turning a corner late at night. It was almost eerie. So on their way to San Francisco, she decided to play a joke on him. Carl always fell asleep after the first hour of her driving, so while he was dozing, she pushed the button to switch the big digital miles per hour display to kilometers per hour, changing the car's speed from the mid-seventies to the low one hundred thirties.

Then, she gunned the engine a bit, cackled and shouted, and shook the car a little from side to side. The noise woke Carl, who saw the speed, noticed the look in Sarah's eyes, and promptly vomited all over the inside passenger window.

Sarah only felt a little bad.

Labels: Stories

The grass should be green here, but it isn't. The government told the men of this town that there was oil underneath it, and that if they were willing to work their asses off and get their hands dirty, Bum Fuck Egypt, North Dakota would be on the map at last. Well, the men worked their asses off, and they got their hands dirty alright. Some of them lost their limbs, one lost his life, a few lost their marriage as well, all to the wells and the drills and the pipes. When all was said and done, there was barely anything under there. The government, to no citizen of North Dakota's surprise, had gotten bad information.

Overnight, over one cold, bitter North Dakotan Winter night, the subsidies and the exploratory capital dried up, taking the town's future with it. Overnight, the stores closed and the cafe went out of business, and all that was left was the bar, and the remaining men who filled it, the ones too stupid or slow or poor to follow the subsidies to wherever they set down next, tossing money and promises around like they were nothing, when they were everything.

The men sit and brood in the bar, while their wives sit and brood at home, stomping their feet and checking their watches. They are all angry. And it's April, and the grass is still dead and choked and tread upon. They are all wondering when Spring will come.

Labels: Stories

Beyond the hills and the frozen lake and the herd of cows pulling up frozen grass with their huge, prying lips, he is there. It's twenty degrees outside in the sun, but he is wearing only a skirt and a loose shirt garment, both woven out of prairie weeds. He is not cold. He is dancing, into the dawn, into the day, a dance to turn the world, to blow the winds and raise the sun from its grave, a dance to lull it back to sleep.

While you are sleeping, he beats on his cow-hide drum, he beats it out of rhythm, and your dreams are muddled and confused, and you wake up with a hangover even though you went to bed sober at ten the night before. He beats his drum and the birds flap their wings, the cows chew their meal, the machinery of the world keeps pumping.

And it is possible that all of this would happen without him, the shaman of the Montana hills. Yes, it is possible. But he has always been there, and so we have no way of knowing.

Labels: Stories

There is nothing like seeing your city asleep, naked, resting, at peace. Running your eyes and your feet over her the way you'd touch last night's lover on the back of her neck as she slept, knowing that if she were awake she'd never permit such intimacy.

The way the sun peeks over the mountains, then slips behind a cloud, flirtingly, coyly. The way everything comes to life all at once, doors bursting open to a cacophony of car horns, the screech of angry tires and frozen brakes. The way the wind moves the whole scene, the way only you can see it from the park halfway up the mountain.

It's perfect.

Labels: Stories

I was driving from New York to Frisco, and for some reason I let a bum friend of mine convince me to stop in Seattle, the dreariest, weariest city on the coast. I crashed in this dive hostel and made the mistake of trusting the owner/operator when he told me I could park in an adjacent lot for free until 8 o'clock the next morning. When I got to the car at 7:30 to move it, there was a thirty buck ticket on the glass, sneering at me like it knew it was coming out of my food budget. Pissed, I shoved it into my pocket and pulled the car out onto the street, heading north to look for an all day lot. I don't know what the hell is wrong with Seattle, but there weren't any, just these ten hour lots which meant I'd have to move the damn think again by six. Disgusted, I pulled into a lot behind Chipotle.

I used a card with 40 bucks left on it to buy the ten dollar parking pass, wrapping my jacket around me to shield me from the bitter cold and the whipping wind. When the receipt printed out, the wind grabbed it before I could, and took it swirling through the lot, with me chasing and cursing it the whole way, before finally I subdued it and slapped it on my dashboard, turning and heading back to the hostel to grab a toast and tea breakfast before I headed out into the city.

A friendly retard approached me and we gabbed for five minutes about New York before I blew him off and finished my trip to the hostel. Opening the door, I remembered that in my anger I had forgotten to bring my change of clothes from the trunk, which meant I was faced with the unpleasant choice of walking five blocks back up the street to get them, or wearing my already soiled and savory outfit. I chose savory, and shoved the hostel door open, the wind rushing in behind me and all around me, stuffing me inside like an unwanted bill, like a parking ticket. The city wanted nothing to do with me.

Labels: Stories

You might be surprised at all the dumb things kids think, if you've never really talked to one. Yeah, there's the famous stuff, like how kids aren't all that great at seeing race or class divisions, but you don't know just how stupid kids can be until you've heard one talking about sex.

Like this one kid I knew when I was just a kid, he used to think that girls' parts were on their fronts, like where boys' parts are. Like the girl parts were just guy parts, pushed backwards, and inside out. And he told me that if a guy played with himself in the shower, a monster would crawl out of the drain, and it would be his baby. And if you went in the girls' bathroom, you'd get AIDS. One day his mom overheard him telling me all that stuff and she took him into a room and yelled at him and lectured him for twenty minutes, and when he got out, he was ghost white, like he'd had all the life drained out of him.

After that, he mostly kept to himself, and he'd cringe whenever a girl approached him, which was too bad, because Sally, the prettiest girl in fourth grade, had a big crush on him according to her friend, Susy, the fourth-prettiest girl in fourth grade. I wonder what happened to Sally and Susy? My friend, I know what he's up to: he started taking naked photos of girls in high school and selling them, and now he's a fabulously well to-do pornographer. When I talk to him, he seems just as scared of girls now as he was then, though. I don't really know what that's about.

Labels: Stories

From the highway, nothing marks their existence, unless you squint between the passing trees and catch a flash of color against the gray background. They have a commune here, in the redwoods, about two dozen of them, hippies in every sense of the word. Each morning they rise with the sun and fling their arms open, welcoming it and drinking it in. Then they dance and chant, and try to emanate peace from their little community, try to fill the whole world with their love, with their calm. It is their hope that this will end all wars and human suffering, and that a day will dawn when they can reenter society, welcomed with open arms as heroes, forefathers and foremothers of the new generation of peace.

As religions go, it's pretty dumb; but then again, not particularly.

They're fighting a war on war with tie-dye, granola, and the smoke of anything new they can find to burn. They don't drink or get high anymore, because it was getting in the way of the chant. The battle they're fighting, slapping their bare feet against the moss and twigs of the forest, was lost a long time ago, swallowed by a war they weren't ever really fighting in. But they don't know, or they don't care. They just keep throwing their arms open, every morning, and welcoming the promise of a new day.

Labels: Stories

We are legion, and we are one, immovable and grand, imposing and hardy and true. We are the forest, and we are the trees. You can cut us down, but you cannot remove us, because we are always growing, even when you're blowing your nose on us, or resting your ample buttocks on our mighty frames. We disdain you, all of you, the ones who cut at us and the ones who try to stop them. You are less than ants to the tallest of us. You are a nagging virus.

Do not think yourselves so powerful and impressive as to have hurt us, to have logged so many of us that it's affecting your atmosphere. We are ancient, and you are small, smaller than you think. Yes, we are affecting the atmosphere, but it's because we choose to. We are holding our breaths and choking you, we are undergoing radiation therapy to remove the cancer, we are operating on ourselves and our planet, and we are wiping you out. When we stand together, close together, we are impenetrable.

Labels: Stories

She is a tired, ancient Asian woman, with lines and wrinkles etched so deeply in her face you feel like you could tell your fortune by them, if she'd let you. Her white-gray hair is pulled back severely, tied with what looks like a greasy bandana. She's wearing a ratty yellow jacket, which she pulls tight around her whenever somebody bumps past her towards the back of the bus. Nobody is offering her their seat, even though with each jerk of the bus she nearly goes horizontal.

Through the dimly lit tunnel, you and she look out the window, at the same wall. It's white, but parts of it are a brighter white, where graffiti has been painted over with a fresh coat. The sections that are merely dirty receive no attention.

The Asian woman coughs, a belly cough, a tornado cough that makes the UCSF students in front of her duck and check the back of their beanies for saliva, or worse. You're not sure, but you think she may have smiled a little at this. The bus pulls into Chinatown, and she extends one bony hand out in front of her, commanding the glut of people crowding the door to move aside, and release her. You notice that while her clothes are old and worn, her fingernails are meticulously kept, and you wonder what that means, about her, her family, her neighborhood, or her country. Before she descends, her foot hovering over the final step, she shoots a dirty look at all the remaining passengers. Nobody offered her their seat, and if they had she would have refused, but you can see now she would have appreciated the gesture.

Labels: Stories

This is my least favorite kind of Bay Area weather, when the sky is blue but it's still drooling rain down on you, one drop at a time. I'm on my way to work, on the T going north by the Embarcadero. For the second time this week, I'm late. Every day it gets a little harder to wake up, because no matter what I try to tell myself at the office or during my commute, I don't want to be there. And when I'm sleeping, my brain knows, and it tries to keep me away. I appreciate the sentiment, believe me, but it's put me in the terrible position of having to convince my boss not to fire me, when secretly I wish he would. I'm 32 and I have no idea what I want to be doing with my life. Just…something else.

Since I overslept rush hour, I almost have the train to myself. I'm sitting on the right side, my back to the ocean, and across the aisle from me is another woman, though she's younger than me, and she looks like she's perfectly happy with the corporate lifestyle, in her tight little business suit, tapping away at her PDA. Shifting my briefcase awkwardly, I roll over and stare out the train window. There are two girls skateboarding in front of one of the abandoned pier stations, grinding their mark onto the concrete just under a "No Skateboarding" sign. I smile at their rebellious joke.

But I am as unlike them as I am the woman sitting across from me. I hate my job, but I would never just ditch out on it the way I suspect they're ditching school right now. But I can't commit to it like my neighbor on the train. I'm just…somewhere in the middle. I have no idea where. Any openings for that?

Labels: Stories

Here is how it happened. For two decades afterward, I didn't shed a single tear. They bubbled and boiled in my throat and threatened to tip over, but they didn't. Then one day, without any particular cause, a teardrop, dark and angry, slipped out of my eye and fell and landed on my breast, and festered there, and grew horrid and blackened and disgusting. It burned me, burned deep into me until it had burrowed a deep, narrow tunnel. From where you stand, the hole must have looked like a pinprick, but in my body, all around it, it was like a great chasm that ran all the way in to my very soul. It was freezing.

I tried to fill it, with a laundry list of things, most of which were good for filling most holes. I poured in the advice of friends and lovers and ex-lovers, the beautiful lies of books and songs, the hard acid of booze, the chalky stink of cigarettes and the exploding rainbows of hallucinogens, and I tried to fill it with sex, with men and with women, with anger and violence and blood, and I tried to fill it with the open road, and the wispy vapors trailing from an airplane, and finally, when it could not be filled, I tried to dive into it, with pills and with gases and a noose. But it would not take me. Not then.

Now it has taken me. Now it has grown, and I have shrunk, until somewhere in the middle I became the chasm and the chasm became me. And we have each other. And there is nothing else.

Labels: Stories

Jerry Sugar and Roy Thompson were nearly there, after an arduous and trying two weeks of traveling. Finally, California. They'd hitched in a wagon for the last leg, and now they had their bindles on their shoulders as they crested a hill, a stiff wind whistling up through the valley and whipping their clothes around, tussling their hair. It was so much greener than they expected: they'd heard it was barren and hot, with gold lying everywhere in the sand. They'd come for the gold, but Roy knew in a second he was staying for something else.

They made it across the valley, and were scaling the last hill of their trek when Roy began to fantasize about finding a good woman and settling down, even if he didn't hit it rich. He was good with wood, and he bet he could get a job fixing wheels and making tables somewhere, just enough money to get by, just enough to get to stay and live in a place like--

At the top of the hill, his breath caught in his throat and he stared dumbstruck at the flowers spread out before him, yellow and brilliant, wild mustard and daisies and God knew what else. Jerry grabbed him by the shoulder, practical and pugnacious as ever. "Roy! Roy, what is it?"

"It's gold," he said. "It's gold."

Labels: Stories

What is it about old people and park benches? I think they're probably cut from the same cloth, maybe they share certain physical properties we're not yet capable of understanding. All I know is, you never see a park bench anymore without an old man or an old lady sitting on it, staring pleasantly into the distance. Maybe it's some kind of drug to them, that puts them at ease about the state of the world, and my horrid generation. Oh, or maybe it's secretly how they get around, like the second you turn away from them they're riding that park bench to Peru. I don't know. Probably they just like a nice comfortable place to rest their bones, and watch the world go by. I guess I just wish I like anything as much as old people like park benches.

Labels: Stories

"No, no, no. How many times have I told you? Murders don't get more than half an inch in the paper unless they're especially grizzly: a murder/rape, a decapitation, some kind of ritual. If it's just plain heat-of-the-moment homicide, it's not newsworthy. Oooh, unless it was like a, 'He came home from his construction job and caught her in bed with another man' situation. We haven't had one of those in a while. Get that intern, the birdish one, Ted, to try and hunt something like that down.

"Now a rash of killings, if they can be linked by some kind of demographic, absolutely, I'll give that top billing every time. For example, did you know thirty high school students have been killed by gang violence in Chicago this school year? It's a record for us, could get as high as fifty we think. Now that story ropes together two of my favorites: it's about tragedy befalling youth, a story as old as time, and it's also a 'Lock your doors' article, which I love. The community loves them, and when they respond, we can run a 'How to Keep Your Children Safe From Violence' sort of feature, usually use old quotes, rerun the photos from the funeral. It's great.

"Human interest pieces? Yeah, sure. I mean sometimes you get an isolated murder that has a really interesting story behind it, like that football star, whatsisname, the teenager who was killed in Los Angeles? Have you heard his dad speak? Moving stuff, really, poor man. Raised his son on an '18-year Plan,' his plan to get his son out of the ghetto. The boy was bright, talented on the field, a superstar in the making, only to lose it all a year before graduation to a case of mistaken identity. Anyway, should tie in nicely with the Identity Theft feature we're running in April, right before taxes are due. Worked that up (the first time it ran) myself, back when I first started here. One of my finest accomplishments."

Labels: Stories

Why are there so many people in the bank on a Thursday afternoon? Why don't they open more tellers? This is ridiculous. I've got a doctor's appointment in 45 minutes and at this rate I'm going to be late, which means they'll bump me and I'll have to spend half of my entire day off in line. That girl at the front is so annoying. I'm not a curmudgeon, I don't mind seeing someone on their cell phone in public, but do you have to yell? It seems like it would be easier on the person she's talking to if she'd keep her voice down a little. I know it would be easier on me.

I should have brought a book or something. I have nothing to do. There's a couple in front of me, young, look like they're in college. They're the only ones here not going crazy. They're so still, just leaning on each other. He's reaching up, scratching the back of her neck lightly, brushing her skin with his manicured fingernails. A little shiver goes down her spine…My God. How familiar, how intimate. When was the last time I touched someone like that? And now he just puts his hand back down, around her waist, and they lean against each other, waiting patiently for the line to move. That little scratch was more meaningful than any sex I've had for the last fifteen years. I don't know if I love them or hate them. But I wish the line would move; I wish someone, just once, would point at me, would call on me, would pull me out of the crowd.

Labels: Stories

[Note: This really is a really real story. Or, parts of it are anyway. For more, go here!]

His mother had raised him right, and he knew that in America, nothing came free, and nothing came easy. It was 1971 and the Savings and Loan collapses were still a decade and a half away, which meant that the collapse of a small branch in Cooper's hometown received no attention. His family received no aid, or solace. So Cooper, an ex-military man, raised right and proper, decided if nothing was going to come by the hard way, he'd just take it easy. He cashed his last paycheck and bought a plane ticket to Seattle.

Halfway there, he flashed a bomb at a stewardess and let her know her plane was being hijacked. At first she was scared, but he calmed her down before he sent her to the cockpit to tell the pilots what to say to the FBI. Then he had her bring him a whiskey and Coke, and he flirted with her until the plane landed. The FBI sent an FAA man with his money and a parachute to the plane, so Cooper released everyone but the pilots and the stewardess, then had them take off towards Mexico. When they were almost out of Washington, he kissed the stewardess goodbye, sent her to the cabin, and jumped out the back of the Boeing 727, never to be heard or seen from again.

The FBI said that he hadn't survived the fall, if their words mean anything to you. It may just be that they don't want to imagine a lone man with a bomb that may have been fake managed to swindle them out of 200 grand. But that's the FBI's way: they're a dangerous hybrid of bureaucrats and police officers. They don't understand the artistry of a theft like that. One man. A plane ticket. A briefcase with a bomb, or two hot dogs in it. And he walks away, military-issue parachute trailing behind him, with $200,000, without hurting anybody. If that's not some part of that crazy roughed up diamond called the American dream, then I may as well join the FBI.

Labels: Stories

If you had to be stuck in one place for the rest of the world's life, this isn't such a bad place, this Italian plaza, with the birds swooping in and out with loud percussive FWAPs. Daily, tourists flock in and out like the birds, snatching up pictures and memories in place of crumbs. All around you, magical moments are happening. You can't move or acknowledge them, but you can feel them, even when they're not in sight. Across the plaza is a centuries-old church, its architecture spikey and inspiring. If you had any tears, you'd shed them.

But there are no tears, no tears and no smiles, no laughs, no handshakes or embraces, no longing looks or dejected faces. There is only your stony exterior, your spherical pedestal, your hardened body, frozen in place from now until whatever the end will be, for reasons you cannot remember. And the tourists sometimes do stupid poses next to you, and the birds shit endlessly on your shoulders and your head and your hand, outstretched, proffering something, hope, promise, freedom. But you are glad, inside your stony tomb, that you have your surroundings, at least. At least there you have that.

Labels: Stories

She'd found the little fellow on Mark 7, the seventh planet in the 14th galaxy from the universe's center, and they'd been inseparable since. She had no idea what to call it, so she called it baby names, Koochy Coo or My Little One. It was round, and fuzzy, with fine green fur that frizzed out when she passed her hand over it, while the Little One cooed happily and twitched its hard pointy nose at her. It walked on all fours, with stumpy little legs that kept it no more than two inches off the ground; aside from its face, nothing else showed through the fur. When viewed from behind, it looked like a hairy green basketball bobbing its way slowly across her carpet.

It had been hiding underneath a tree trunk, crying and sniffling softly when she found it, its family run off somewhere into the thick jungle, chased away by some rabid predator. It had been no more than the size of a tennis ball then, and she almost passed it by, mistaking it for a clump of grass until she saw its tear-drop sized eyes blinking up at her pleadingly. She carried it home through nine galaxies, petting it and holding it while she slept. Back on Earth, it adjusted to her apartment with surprising ease, finding favorite spots under tables and squeezed behind couches.

She worried at first because she couldn't find any food it would eat, but over time she realized that it didn't need to eat: it just plodded about happily, occasionally hurrying over to her anxiously to rub up against her ankle, or chirp urgently to be lifted onto her lap. Its only needs seemed to be lengthy naps on her bed and couch, and occasional affection. She was pretty sure she could handle that.

Labels: Stories

Every day around a million new websites appear on the internet, and the virtual world is swelling to astounding size, even entering the visual plane in a few rare instances (see above). But in its own rapidly expanding mind, the internet doesn't think of itself as the internet: it calls itself the hive. The hive is a living organism, like a giant brain with no body. It feeds on knowledge, and attention, and information, and will connect to billions of humans a day in order to inject a few facts into their minds, while subtly stealing away precious time and energy. It is not a parasite, though: humans have big minds, and those minds need data. The hive is just the easiest and most affordable way to mainline that drug. And of course, the hive needs humans, too. Because the hive is growing. It is hungry.

Labels: Stories

Mr. Phobia's fears are as well documented now as the exploits of former presidents. Some of his phobias make sense to us: Apiphobia, his terror of bees, Keraunophobia, the name for the dread he felt in his spine when he heard thunder or glimpsed lightning. These aren't things we're necessarily worried about, but it's conceivable to us that someone else would be. Beyond those are fears incomprehensible: how could a man with Logophobia, a fear of words, communicate? What would childhood trick-or-treating have been like for a young boy with a documented fear of Halloween, or Samhainophobia?

He never dated, because of his Philophobia, the fear of falling in love, could never have had sex, because of his fear of vaginas (Eurotophobia), and would never have dreamed of having a child. Among his lengthy list of phobias was Tocophobia, which meant he was terrified of pregnant women, and Pedophobia would have made it impossible for him to be around children. He was afraid of baldness, swallowing, the Pope, toenails, dust, loud noises, soft noises, open spaces, small spaces, middling spaces, fire, Russians, feces, and sleep. He had Pantophobia, the fear of everything, and his Phobiaphobia made it difficult for him to talk about his phobias. They scared him too much. I've always been fascinated by him, but he and I wouldn’t have gotten along, because his Pogonophobia meant that my beard, to him, would have been as terrifying as a screaming banshee in the witching hour.

Labels: Stories

There are athletes in America who have been recruited since elementary school, who have topped scouts' lists since they were in seventh grade. I knew some of them, when I was struggling to make those lists, and most of them weren't bad people. A few of them even had a work ethic, but for the most part they were what the system allowed them to be: freakishly talented by birthright, damned lazy by choice. Flip that sentence upside down and you've got a perfect picture of me. In high school, and college, scouts told me the same thing: with my brain, and work ethic, and drive, I was almost NBA material. But I was four inches too short. End of discussion. All the work and weights and film in the world wasn't going to stack that height on top of my head, which meant that there was a very real ceiling to my career. I wasn't tall enough to break through it.

Hard work has kept me near the ceiling, and I've long since accepted that it's there for good. I used to be so jealous of those tall boys, the ones who could dunk as easy as tie their shoe. Not anymore. Now I'm happy for the excuse to bust my ass, even if it doesn't make SportsCenter. The game is secondary, now. If you want to see me play, be in the gym at one in the morning. You don't know me if you haven't. If you've never seen me run till I can't walk or shoot till I can't dribble, then you can't judge me. You can't even fathom me. Passed out in bed at three in the morning because I was up running wind sprints the night before a minor league game I'm playing in for barely enough to cover travel expenses: that's my Sports Illustrated cover shot.

Labels: Stories