You had your gang of dharma headed misfits who ran after life
skinny fingers reaching and clawing for pleasure
demented thoughts crisscrossing over teletype paper
Poets, authors, painters, thieves, murderers
ramblers, rovers, drinkers and thinkers
crowded in dimly lit flats under foggy tasting skies
You Howl for the sake of being, for the sake of you
for the sake of every self deluded tadpole
that swam into your murky pond
tiny tails whipping and bulging eyes rolling
yelping, yodeling, preaching and teaching
we Howled with you, in you, for you
Howl man, Howl loud, Howl proud, let the Devil hear you sing.
I had a dream last night that a man walked up to me (I think it was God)
He had a big book in his hands, leather bound and glowing gold
He told me it contained His Word, that I should read it and Believe
I opened it and looked inside at white and empty pages
I tried to pretend I could see the words, but he saw right through my lie
I woke up that morning to a bright and beautiful day
The sun was shining, the weather was perfect and my spirits were high
I opened my mouth to thank the powers that be, but I couldn’t speak
I had no one to thank.
What a horrible day.
Abe was glued to the bank of windows that lined the front of his family’s quiet New Hampshire home. He was staring off toward the road, his eyes desperately searching for a glint of steel in the pale winter sun. His small nose was crushed against the unyielding frozen glass and his irregular, quick breathing was destroying his view with opaque fog. He took his head away from the window, and wiped it down with the sleeve of his green wool sweater. Once it was cleared he peered out into the frost, his eyes fixated on where he was convinced the car would appear, like a rabbit out of a magician’s hat. He began moving his head from side to side slowly, letting his nose wipe against the glass as it slowly began to lose feeling.
His mother called from the kitchen, her voice stern with the promise of a command. “Abraham, come away from the window please. I just washed them today and now you’re getting your little boy gunk all over them.” He sighed and pretended not to hear her. She wasn’t fooled. “Abraham I know you can hear me.” She clicked her tongue and marched across the room, motherly annoyance in her stride. She grabbed his shoulder and spun him around, bending over to look him in the eye. “Abe I know you’re excited to see Todd, but watching the road until your eyes rot away isn’t going to get him here any faster.” Abe lips began to pout and he crossed his arms. He added a manly grunt for dramatic effect. She smiled at his show and kissed him on the forehead. “Oh look at you Mr. Gruff. All tough and mighty.” Abe felt himself smiling, but he tried to remain as serious as possible. He couldn’t hold it back however, and the dam broke. “There’s my son, I would recognize that smile anywhere.” He wrapped his arms around her and breathed in the smell of her hair. He let her go and she stood up. She looked at him very seriously and asked him what he was planning on doing when Todd got here. He pointed outside towards the woods and fields that surround his fortress. “Oh,” she said, her forehead creased with mock concern and business. “Off to fight the dragons of the snowy wood?” He shook his head and bit his bottom lip. “Well what is it then?” He looked up at her, his deep brown eyes betraying his mirth. “I’m gonna be a cowboy and he’s gonna be a badguy trying to get away.” She smiled now. “And is Todd going to want to play that?” Abe nodded his blonde head and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Yep. He makes a real good badguy.” “Really good sweetie, not real.” Abe nodded his head again and turned back to the window. She heard his breath catch in his voice as he saw a car making it’s way up their old dirt road. It rocked merrily over the potholes and turned into their driveway. Todd’s feet were on the ground the minute the car stopped, his slender frame wrapped in a long black scarf and a bright red downy coat. She watched as her son ran out to great his friend. She noticed that in his rush he had neglected to put on his own shoes, opting instead for his father’s large slippers. She went to the door and waved to Todd’s mother, who apparently was refusing to budge from the warm shell of her SUV. She stepped to the side to let the boys in. Abe set in at once at putting on his snow gear, a process that she remembered despising. She looked up to see if Todd’s mother had made it out of the driveway alright and saw that she had already left. She shut the door and turned to smile at Todd.
Todd was, in looks alone, the opposite of her son. While her son was smaller, frail and blonde with brown eyes, Todd was tall for his age, athletic and strong and possessed the haunting characteristics of black hair with ice blue eyes. He had a gap tooth and freckles; making him one of the cutest, if not spookiest kids she had ever seen. He was smiling up at her, his gap tooth proudly displayed and his hair plastered down from the skull cap he had just taken off. “Hello Mrs. Cody!” She smiled down at the little boy. “Hello there Master Callahan, I do hope your passage into this land was safe.” He giggled as only little boys can. “You’re funny Mrs. C.” She ruffled his head and turned to her son, struggling to get on his left boot. “Have fun out there boys. You know the rules. Be safe. When you get too cold, come on in and I’ll have two big steaming mugs of hot cocoa waiting for you, alright?” The boy’s smiled and with a thud Abe’s foot found its way to the bottom of his boot. He stood up and crammed his mittens onto his small hands. They ran out the door, leaving the door open and letting the heat out. She shut it and shook her head. She felt a spark left behind from the boy’s light inside her stomach and spread throughout her body.
She smiled to herself and moved into the living room picking up a paperback novel on her way to the couch. She had been reading it for a year and was only halfway through thanks to the wonderful distraction that was her family. She was happy on her raft in the stream of time, fortunate enough to have a husband who loved her, a healthy child, and another one on the way. With this thought she laid her hand on her stomach. She wasn’t sporting a balloon of a stomach yet, but even in such an early stage she could feel the life inside of her. They hadn’t told Abe yet, not because they were afraid of how he would react, but because the time just hadn’t seemed right. Soon though, she thought, opening the book to a page she had read a thousand times.
The hands of a clock move faster when something interesting is happening, and when she finally happened to glance at her watch she saw that an entire hour and a half had gone by. She knew from experience that the boys would be coming in soon, their small faces red and their noses running. She marked her page, stood up and coasted into the kitchen, still riding the spark the boys had left her with. She put a saucepan on the stove and filled it with milk, just like her mother had done for her when she was a girl. While it warmed gently on the stove, she took out three mugs, hot cocoa mix and a bag of marshmallows. It didn’t take long to reach a suitable heat, and soon three mugs, each with one marshmallow where sitting on the counter. There was still no sign from the boys, so she took hers and walked back to her book and the couch, determined to finish the chapter.
Two pulpy chapters later and still the two mugs sat on the counter, untouched. Her mug was empty and a thread of concern had sewn itself deep within her stomach. She got up and walked to the door. She was greeted by a blast of cold air that took her breath away. She shouted, quietly for a shout, for the boys. She heard only the dusty shuffle of dry snow moved by a touch of wind. She called again, this time louder. This time not even the wind answered as calm arose seemingly from nowhere.
Then it began to snow.
She turned from the door and grabbed her coat from the rack by the door. She found her gloves and hat inside the pockets. Her boots were also conveniently by the door, however they need to be laced up, and so she sat down on the floor, just as Abe had. For a minute she felt nostalgic, and she closed her eyes to remember, just for a second, the smell of her childhood home in Vermont. She shook the memories away and walked out into the freshly falling snow.
She found their footprints easily enough. They veered sharply away from the house and into the woods, their play kingdom of choice. She walked to the edge of the forest and peered in through the trees. Branches curled down like fingers from ancient golems, their bony touch spreading every which way in a pattern across the wood. She called again and waited, her eyes closed and her ears ready. A tree groaned in the distance.
She started into the woods, the cold beginning to soak through her skinny jeans. She hadn’t thought to wear anything warmer on her legs and she was beginning to regret this lapse in judgment the further she trudged into the woods. It was snowing harder now, and the slate gray skies above were created a dim halflite that made you miss the dark. She followed the long trench marks deeper into the hands of her golems, all the while calling out for Abe and Todd. She was beginning to get concerned and she hoped sincerely that this was just a cruel joke that little boys sometimes make to scare their parents. She could hear a creek that ran through their property in the distance, and she realized that this was farther out than Abe had ever been on his own. He had often said how scared he was of the creek and the ravine that led down into it. One night at dinner he had told his father that he had heard dead voices coming up from the. Her husband had laughed, had told his son that it was all in his head, but the question had chilled her. She knew that Abe would never go this far on his own, he wasn’t nearly brave enough. She made it to the edge of the steep ravine and looked down. She saw the creek snaking its way through the soft earth, large rocks lining it like so many stone men guarding a liquid dream. Her eyes rolled over the scene following the current of the water, searching for some sign of the boys. For awhile there was nothing. And then, red.
Her eyes played over the scene far below. She saw her son sitting cross legged by the creek and staring at a small huddled shape in the snow, wrapped in a red coat. Panic seized her and she ran down the slippery steep slope, arms akimbo. She was near him now, close enough to reach out and grab him. Her hand was on his shoulder and she spun him to face her. He looked surprised.
“Abe, what happened?”
“Huh? I g-got him,” he said through clacking teeth. She turned towards the child that lay just beyond her son. He was sitting up now, a smile spread across his pale face.
“He got me real good Mrs. Cody.” Abe ran over to Todd and tackled him awkwardly into the snow. “It’s really Todd, not real. Right Ma?” he smiled towards her and then turned his attention back to the boy pinned beneath him. “I’m cold, wanna go inside?” Todd nodded and Abe released him. They tumbled up the embankment and disappeared over the ridge, their laughter carrying down the ravine and into the creek. She sat there, the snow falling all around her and looked up towards the gray New Hampshire sky.
I can remember his face if I meditate long enough. I see him sitting at a tattered wooden desk, his piercing blue eyes staring into mine and his brown, ashen hair falling clumsily off his head in awkward curls. He has taken a smile out and is displaying it proudly across his face, his single dimple revealing itself only then. We’re in the middle of our eighth grade history class and old Mr. Beauchamin has his backed turned to us, so naturally we aren’t paying attention. We make faces of contorted demons and backwater sprites at each other, hoping to drive the other into unrelenting giggle fits and half stifled chortles. He leans in closely to me and begins to speak. It comes out in a garbled whisper and I fall out of my head and back into my cinderblock dormitory. I’m by myself and outside the sun is going down. I am fully numb and slightly hungry, and so leave my room and travel to the dining hall, where I ate alone and mostly gone. On the way back to my room in the dark, I try to remember his voice, but all my memories are silent and slowly fading to black and white. I realize that I have forgotten his voice.
That night someone gets cheap beer and we arrange ourselves quietly in our room, trying to be as quiet as cockroaches in the closet least we reveal our clandestine activities to the powers that be. My friend’s sit, liquor in hand and laughter pouring out of their mouths and I watch, mimicking heartfelt presence and genuine attention. My thoughts drift away from the four walls of the room and back into eighth grade. He is nervous, his smile more forced than usual. He speaks to me in silent whispers and I’m leaning forward to take in every syllable. The word pot falls out of his mouth and lands on my desk in sticky block print. I sit there listening to his silent story as he tells me, words erupting from his lips in cartoonish bubbles. He worries that everyone knows, that his parents will find out, that he’ll end up disgraced and alone on the streets. I smile a nervous smile at him and whisper reassurances. No one knows, it’s ok, I tell him with hidden uncertainty. He smiles back at me and he thanks me, forever mute and trapped in my head.
I’m back in the booze room and someone is sloppy drunk. We worry about someone catching us, so we try and contain their good time as best we can. We begin dropping like flies, falling into drunken fits, writing nonsense poetics on our arms and rolling around the room in drunken bliss. I join in, detached and rambling. I try to picture him there with us, but he remains the hazy, mute outline of a fourteen year old boy that I have kept with me all these years.
I climb up into my bed, my body still humming, my body teeming with false emotions. I lie there and listen to the gentle breathing of my roommates as they drift away into whatever hollow husk of a dream they make their home at night. I drift off slowly, my last thoughts images of him, on the last day I saw him alive.
It’s graduation and I’m surrounded by family and fast fading acquaintances. High school is approaching quickly, and nerves are just beginning to sink their teeth into my flesh. My classmates and I gather outside after the ceremony is complete. We pose for a picture; clothes pressed and ironed, our smiles hopeful. I look around at faces that will slowly fade away into the white noise that is a constant hum in my memories. I am going my way, and the rest are heading theirs, and with the flash of a bulb we a captured forever in our final moments as innocents, our relationships intact and our psyche mostly sane. I look over at him. He is red faced and beaming in the June sun and he looks back at me, a look of pain slowly spreading. His smile melts away and gives way to a troubled frown. I watch as our friends turn to ash and are blown away on the rising wind. Walls spring up around us, and he yells to me, mute as always. His eyes and face are reflecting the fire that is consuming his family. I try to move towards him, but I have become part of the woodwork, rooted and helpless. He continues to stare, his body slowly decaying into thick acrid smoke. He is gone and I stay as the house burns and burns and soon I can feel the fire creeping up towards me and I’m choking on smoke and I can feel the fires sharp fingers dig into my clothes and my skin and I’m on fire and screaming and screaming as I’m consumed in the inferno and the house is crumbling and a woman is screaming and I want to be away far away from the smoke and the death and the fire and I want it to end I want the pain to stop but it isn’t it just keeps burning and screaming and tearing and eating and I’m screaming screaming screaming-
I’m awake, safe in my bed with my sheets twisted into great ropelike knots. My body dripping with fear and sweat and my head is buzzing. It’s three A.M and my roommates breathe quietly and slow, lost in their own dreamscapes. I look towards their sleeping forms and feel envy creep past the sleep deprived fog and into my emotional core. I take a deep breath and smell beer hanging heavily in the air. I feel like I’m going to be sick, but I push it back and lay in my bed, until finally exhaustion sets in and carries me away into a black, empty sleep.
I wake in the morning to silence and an empty room. My roommates have left to continue their lives and I am left in their tumultuous wake in the form of an exhausted and mostly incomplete individual. I go about my usual routine of bathing and set myself down to meditate and read when I am interrupted by vibrations in my pocket. She wants to get together for a late lunch, and I begrudgingly set down my book, abandoned my plans of enlightenment and set off to meet her.
It’s cold outside and the snow is a crystalline white. I pull my thin coat closer to my body and tuck my already frozen fingers into my pockets. The sight of the snow and the feel of the frost drag me back from reality and into mist.
I’m home, a freshman in high school. He is dead now, and I’m looking at the still smoldering remains of his life. The snow around the charred remains is gone and a truck lies melted to their short gravel driveway. Smoke curls up from the torched ground and disappears among the green evergreens that hang above like eternal giants leering down from on high. I close my eyes and try to grab hold of his voice, but it’s gone, lost somewhere in the dark. I do not feel sad staring at the remains of his life, only numb detachment. He had been with me in life, sometimes hiding in the back and sometimes on the front lines beside me. He was gone now, his memory curling up with the smoke and disappearing somewhere far overhead.
She didn’t show up. I eat lunch alone, adrift in a sea of strangers. I watch as the faces drift by, each one melting into the next. I watch them and wonder what it would be like to talk to them, to connect, to create memories and stories to call upon late at night when no one is around and the room is perfectly hush. I watch them and wonder what it would be like to feel that bond, but the devil grabs my ear and whispers that All Bonds Are Temporary and that Everything Vanishes. Then the devil turns my face and flashes that photograph from graduation, and I see my specter staring at me, his one dimple showing, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t remember his voice.
The yellow number four pencil hung limply in the thin pale lips of Glenn Maher. He chewed on the eraser, trying to coax brilliance from its slender core. There was an electric connection between the dull tip and his crystalline consciousness, and a beautiful, simple plot entered his minds eye. He closed his ideas and let his creativity leap down his arm and onto the thin, ink stained paper that lay on a mostly destroyed desk. The graphite connected and a story was born.
From the Desk of G. Maher
In the dingy bowels of Eastern New York City there is a nondescript building of ill repute and character; a storehouse of female stock, gathered from the darkest corners of the world. In the eyes of lonely married men it was a temple of escape and of most holy fornication. In the eyes of embittered women however, it was a sinkhole that stole away their husbands and made their little boys grown men before their time.
Countless women had called this particular brothel their home over the years, and countless men had made use of the services they offered. Violence echoed down the dimly lit hallways, forever embedding its scent in the carpet, the ceiling, and in the memories of everyone caught in its quiet breeze. For years it had been picking up speed, collecting the debris and flotsam of mistakes made and of time wasted. It was no wonder that on a quiet December night in 1948, that little breeze would transform into a hurricane force gale a sweep a young unsuspecting man into madness.
Willard Cromwell was, according to his overbearing mother, was quite and frail, more mouse than man. He had plain, dust colored brown hair and brown eyes that stare with the intensity of a dying vole. He worked at a butcher’s shop one block away from the apartment he shared with his mother, Helen. He didn’t make much sweeping up after the coming and goings of everyday carnivores, but he stayed out of the way and for that Mr. Green, the proprietor of Green’s Meat, was thankful.
Willard was invisible to the inhabitants of the city, and as a result became privy to the everyday dark secrets spilled by construction workers, stock brokers and neglected wives. He had heard of affairs, of no good children, of dogs that lived three apartments over that never seemed to shut up. One day a pair of less that favorable looking, and smelling, men walked into the store with their shirts ruffled and their hats filthy. They ordered a pound of pastrami, and rested against the countertop. Willard listened in as they bragged about their conquests from the previous night and he felt inside of him a sense of longing. That day marked a change in Willard’s life, and he began gathering his assets for a hopefully wonderful night. When the night finally came and the time felt just right, Willard grabbed his coat, filled his pockets with a random assortment of bills and told his mother he was going off to the movies. He walked out onto the cold streets and walked away from his boyhood and into the arms of a stranger.
Willard entered the smoky house and picked himself out a young girl with peroxide hair and a femme fatale smile. He paid for a night and she led him into a small room with a bed, a desk and a rickety old chair. She undressed and Willard approached her prone figure, love in his eyes and forever on his lips.
Glenn set down his pencil. He smiled gently to himself and gazed down at his work. He felt a sense of pride as he picked up the story and folded it into a neat square. He stood up and tucked it into his pants pocket. He left the pencil on the desk where he had laid it. His coat had fallen off the back of his chair, and he bent down to pick it up. It was loose around the shoulders. It smelled like cigars and sweat and he wondered if he should get a new one. He turned to face the center of the room and gazed upon her sleeping form. A chain of blood crawled slowly from her neck and soaked into the white linen sheets. A long thin knife lay on the bed beside her, shining in the electric light, almost innocent in its smile.
Glenn sighed the sigh of a man with a light heart and ran his fingers through his dust colored hair. The door opened and closed with a whisper.
Poe
Was insane
Kerouac
Was drunk
Salinger
Was alone
Hemingway
Was lost
Thompson
Was high
I
Am sane
I
Am sober
I
Am surrounded
I
Am found
I
Am grounded
I
Am average
How can
A normal mind
Mimic insanity?
A girl smoking with pale white skin and a devil in her chest looks at me from her quiet home on my faux wooden desk. Wires snake out from behind her, encircling my electric domain. I’m tied down, and my eyes are lost in the blinding white of the computer screen. The keys click and letters come into existence, forming words attempting to form thoughts and worlds. Melodrama runs rampant and insecurities flair as entire paragraphs are translated from gray to black, then deleted by the twitch of a finger. My stories are hiding tonight, my poems are refusing to be written and my characters are on strike. There is a big wall of steel and lead in front of me, hopelessly tall and miles thick. I’ll put my head down and sprint straight ahead, teeth barred like a mad dog, and pray to Jesus, Buddha, and Marilyn Monroe that my stubborn dream addled head is strong enough to break through.
She runs out onto the rain slicked field
as the sun dies on the horizon and
the moon claws up from the other side of the world
like creosote rivulets running thick down
factory compressed oil smelling wood
of the crushing abyss hanging overhead as
a sigh rises in her throat and grinds past her teeth
The night is calm and quiet and
forever
He staggers out of a dead end bar with a bottle of cheap booze and a black eye. Feeling as beaten as a drum, his feet slap the pavement, car horns blaring and lights flashing along to the beat. He slams into a dumpster and yesterday’s lunch seeps down into the used Chinese fortunes and empty milk cartons. In a window across the street a fat woman in a Salvation Army floral patterned dress beats her pervert of a son for watching his sister bathe.
He slides to the street and feels the bottle of booze break. He closes his glassy, bloodshot eyes and listens to a baby screaming. A no account waitress isn’t getting much sleep tonight as her baby boy wails like a burning cat.
He picks himself off the ground, his pants covered in the marinade of the city, and starts down the street. He is horribly drunk and dangerously happy. He jay walks across the street, an imaginary jazz tune clicking along to the beat of his snapping fingers. He passes a hooker on the corner of 56th and Vine and the upbeat jazz swings into a burlesque rumba. Running his fingers through his hair and clearing his foghorn of a throat, he walks up to find the hooker is a derelict telephone booth plastered in social activist stickers and poorly drawn graffiti. He laughs at his own drunkenness, and the sharp smell of his own breath burns his nose. He heads for his flat, his liver on fire from a long night.
Shortly after four in the morning, he managed to find his way home, his clothes torn and dirty and his wallet dead from starvation. He slinks down the alley like a badly beaten dog, sobriety slowly overcoming his delusional bliss. He somehow found and hoisted himself up his rusting fire escape, the first signs of a painful hangover still a nonexistent promise. Slipping on the fifth rung, he swears loudly. Under normal circumstances the stairs would have been fine to use, but the landlady had a strict no drinking policy, and in a past life she had been a bloodhound. With all the noise he was making it was a wonder she didn’t fly out into the night, bringing fire and damnation down upon his head.
When he reached his window, he jammed it open and fell inside, breaking a lamp on the way down. He crawled through the broken ceramic pieces to his mattress. He climbed in and let exhaustion overcome him. He was dreading his inevitable hangover, so his hand dropped to the floor, his fingers searching for a lonely bottle of aspirin. He found it nestled in a forest of dust bunnies and single socks. He popped three and passed out. He dreamt of nothing, and woke up feeling restless, an unknown feeling tearing at his gut.
He made it out of his apartment for the last time around eight. He was dressed in a flannel short, a beaten pair of factory made shoes, a dirty cap and a haggard coat. He carried on his back a canvas pack, filled with a blanket and a horde of books, their covers printed in names long forgotten. His pockets carried some stray bills and lint. As he walked down the streets past the drones in suits with gold in their eyes, he felt out of place, a soul born three decades two late. While people his age ran around in designer suits, their eyes glued to the shimmering glass buildings above, his lay planted on the ground, digging through burned out cigarette butts and patent leather shoes. Their young ambition was visible in their bright teeth and youthful smiles, while his dry cynicism and ancient hopelessness was far too old for his young frame. He walked slouched and dejected, a stray dog the pound ignored. His stomach growled, so he headed off searching for something to eat.
Squeezed in between a hardware store and a thrift shop there is a small diner run by an elderly couple. From the outside they seem like an ordinarily happy husband and wife, and that is probably what they were, but he found this idea rather boring and uninventive, so he made up his own back story.
They had met back when they were young and hopeful enough to have dreams. They had loved each other at one point, but after years of failure and shattered dreams, just looking at each other in the morning became a headache. After a foolish investment in the stock market, they had taken the last of their savings and put it into running a twenty four hour neon lit diner. It was an attempt to stay sane, and, for awhile at least, it had worked. They had managed to create a balance between lies and the truth. Everything had been shattered though, when the wife caught the husband with a thirteen year old prostitute. Since then her illusion of a happy life has never returned, and the only thing she has to look forward to in the morning is the thought that maybe, it will be the day she dies.
He ordered an omelet and some coffee, paid the bill and walked out.
Where do you find love?
Stuck way down in a bottle?
Cry. Drown it brother.
-Stephen Goodrow
Where do you find time
To write such pitiful stuff?
Alcoholic dunce.
-Matthew R. Laurion
Clever little tyke
Leave genius to the big boys.
Contemptible cur.
-Stephen Goodrow
Watch where you meddle;
Sheep do not lie with lions here.
Know your place, poet.
-Matthew R. Laurion
Aye my poet king
Your wit is biting and cold.
Just like your mother.
-Stephen Goodrow
Aye your parents fling
Has left you spiting and bold-
A bastard I fear.
-Matthew R. Laurion
My emotions soar
Whilst gazing upon garbage.
Oh joy! Oh rapture!
-Stephen Goodrow
Sarcasm is food
For the emaciated.
Des’prets feast on it.
-Matthew R. Laurion
A dictionary!
Please, someone lend him Webster!
Teh boi canknot spel!
-Stephen Goodrow
Goodrow proper noun.
1. Poor excuse for a scribe.
2. Dirt at one’s heel.
-Matthew R. Laurion
Every year on April 21st for the past four we would hike out into the hills surrounding Gainsville, pitch a tent near a creek and stay out there for three days and nights or until our low quality cans of beans and jerky ran out. It started out as just another casual idea tossed out from our adolescent minds, but it caught fire and in the spring of our first year of high school we threw ourselves out into the brambles and briars and lasted one night in the imposing wilderness. We fancied ourselves skilled woodsman, on the same level as Paul Bunyan and our huntsman ancestors. The pedestal we had built ourselves on was swiftly knocked out from underneath our scrawny feet when we found that we couldn’t keep a fire going long enough to cook the can of baked beans I had lifted from my family’s pantry. We resigned ourselves to sloppy cold beans that night straight from the tin. Our tent was in shambles so we spread out our sleeping bags and hung the tent above us like an idiots canopy, strung out between two trees and barely wide enough to cover us from the tiniest threat of rain. When it got dark we lay there together, staring up at the stars and listening to the sounds of nocturnal creatures that came out to start their lives. We didn’t say anything as we lay there flat on our backs, still bundled up in our workpants and winter fleeces. He had smuggled a bit of rum from his dad’s liquor cabinet in a plastic water bottle, and we passed it back and forth in silence. I hated the taste, so I just sipped it. I could tell he felt the same way, and after a bit he sat up and dug a hole in the loose sand and poured it down. “For the worms.”
We woke the next morning with the sun creeping up over the trees, so we stretched, ate another cold can of beans, packed up the tent and sleeping bags and went home. We went back the next year to the exact same place. We had a fire going just long enough to cook our food the first night, and then not at all the second. We had brought fishing poles this time in hopes that maybe running through that little trickle of a stream there would be some sort of fish. After four hours of sitting with the pole in my hand and my nose in a book I gave up. We didn’t know how to gut a fish anyway.
The next two years were the best we had out by the creek. We had a fire every night and only once did it rain, but not enough to make us want to pack off. We went once before we graduated, and stayed out for a full four days before the food ran out. We promised each other we would keep the tradition alive, that we would come back every year for as long as we could stand the taste of beans.
We’re older now, off at college and away from home. He called me the other day and told me he was leaving America. I wished him the best of luck and asked him if he could still stand the taste of beans. He laughed and we said goodbye. I left my room and walked outside, a small bottle full of rum nestled in my coat pocket. I wandered by moonlight to the creek that snakes its way through campus and dug a hole in the cold ground. I poured it out, all of it. “For the worms.”
I’m flying somewhere over the Midwest and the sun has set and below me there are thousands of human bug crawlers on their way home to the hive and I’m way up in the middle of the air coasting along on a jetliner going five million miles an hour as we slam through clouds and right beyond the frame of the plane is 30,000 feet to death and sometimes when the cabin shakes I can feel that faraway feeling of doom creep its way past my eyes and down my spine and I think ‘Man all I want to do is land and become one of those bugs down there again and leave the flying up to people with real dreams and real lives so maybe they can be close enough to taste the intangible’ but there’s still two hours left on the flight so I tighten my belt and sink way way down into my seat and close my eyes and think of terra firma and gravity and simplicity but then the turbulence jerks me out of my halfwit delirium and back into shell of a metal bird zooming and zooming and falling and falling and I’m grabbing the armrests and closing my eyes and waiting for my curtain to close but then it’s over and the bird levels out and my heart starts again and I’m somewhere over the Midwest and the sun has set.
Ever had one of those days
Where everything floats by
Coated in a dull gray fog
And no matter how hard you try
To swat away the gathering storm
The clouds just get thicker
Until rain pours down
In a bright shower
Of furious anticlimax
I was out of my head with jealousy and booze as I walked out of my mind and into a cave filled with translucent lullabies being chanted by ancient druids in rusting lead lined helmets as they sacrificed a virgin to the god of the harvest and to Hades all the while hoping for rebirth and destruction in the contradicting sacrificial ritual being carried out through the aid of a thin edged long necked knife that casually sliced through her velvet flesh and stained her tattered beige blouse with brilliant crimson blood that ran down the cold stone table that they had lashed her to and my eyes followed the crimson river down a hole in the ground and into a gutter that I saw myself lying in so I climbed inside my head again and dragged myself out of the muck and grime from the daily rat race and kept walking ahead towards where I knew there would be women in revealing clothing with loose morals who would do anything to make a couple of bucks but when I got there the only one that looked appetizing seemed as if she might be a carrier of some sort of venereal disease so I decided a strip bar was more appropriate so I kept walking until I got to a bawdy bar where the girls had piercings in sensitive areas and where if you knew how to ask right you could drink whiskey off their body but after an hour I was lowdown and feeling like scum so I left slightly hunched and met up with my friend Harry at his apartment and he met me outside with a fresh bottle of brandy and Benzedrine that we broke used and abused so we decided that it was time for mischief and mayhem and utter destruction of consecrated grounds so we rushed over to a graveyard where we tipped over three gravestones including a child’s who had flowers underneath it that Harry stole and threw into a trash can we found nearby and then we heard yelling from the grounds keeper saying that he had called the cops and we started running from the old man in tweed when we saw those lights and the heard the siren go beeeewooop that made your body shiver with fear and your legs move faster with adrenaline but they caught us easily enough, them being sober and all, so we found ourselves handcuffed in the backseat of a cop car that smelled like an overdose waiting to happen and as we were being hauled off to jail I stared out the window towards passing lemon yellow lights and I wished I had never thrown those flowers away.
I grew up in a backwater smear of a town in New England with two loving parents, a Dalmatian named Norfolk and, for eight years, a brother named Arlo. He was older than me by six years, but in those days it might as well have been twenty. I idolized him. On rainy days I would follow him around wearing one of his big button down shirts, in a comical attempt to match the way he strutted about the house. He had an old soul feeling about him, like he had just stepped out of an antique photo and into modern life with dust clinging to his edges.
He had jet black hair that he kept long and wild, and bright blue eyes that always seemed to be looking past you. He was beautiful to me, and at night when I was alone in my room I would close my eyes as tight as they could go and pray that in the morning my brown curls would have descended into blackness. One morning after waking to the grim reality of a brown haired existence, I snuck into my father’s office and stole a bottle of India ink from his desk. I slipped quietly into the bathroom and held the unscrewed bottle high over my head. I watched myself in the mirror as my hair changed from a silky brown into clotted tendrils of dripping ink. I dunked my head into the sink and turned on the water. It was cold and it stole my breath away. I scrubbed at my hair with my hands, staining them black. I looked up into the mirror and gazed at the crying, ink stained wreck that I had become.
Arlo found me in the bathroom, my head deep in the sink with black water streaming over the sides. He laughed his bright laugh and scooped me into his arms. Some of the ink fell from my hair onto his shirt, staining his shirt, but he didn’t care. Smiling, he plopped me down onto the toilet seat and grabbed a towel from the rack on the door. The towel was warm on my cold head, and as he dried me off, he asked what I had been thinking. I was still crying as I told him how I wished every night for black hair.
“Just like yours,” I said through clacking teeth.
He laughed and cupped my face in his hands. “Abby, I’m surprised. Why would you want my plain old black hair when you have gorgeous brown like that? Why, if anything, I should be the one wishing for your hair, not the other way around.” He hugged me then, like only a brother can, and I burrowed my stained hair deep into arms.
Arlo and I used to play outside every day during our summers together. Tag was always my favorite game, and no matter what we were playing, it would always evolve into tag. I loved being “it”. I would always run as hard as I could with fire in my lungs, my eyes fixed on a fleeing Arlo. I was fast, but Arlo was always a little bit faster. He would lead me on a winding chase, through our backyards, into brambles and, inevitably into our neighbor’s expansive overgrown field. He wouldn’t let me catch him, not until my legs felt as if they were about to fall off from exhaustion. When it looked as if I had reached the end of my energy stores, he would feign a trip and fall, or he would slow down enough so that I could get a handful of cotton. We would tumble to the ground and lay there, staring up at the clouds and picking out shapes as they floated by.
The day my brother died I was up in my room playing with a porcelain doll Arlo had given me on my eight birthday two months before. She had light brown hair that came down to her shoulders, just like mine, and she would close her eyes if you tilted her just right. When I heard the screen door bang, I assumed it was Arlo coming back from a trip he had made into town for milk, but the footsteps were too heavy and the voice was too deep. The stranger’s voice slithered up the stairs and into my room in sloppy bits and pieces.
“An accident…never saw him…I’m sorry.”
I heard a sob catch in my mother’s throat as she fell to the floor. The next couple of days were a blur. My mother told me later that I didn’t cry when I heard about his passing. She told me that I had been too young to understand. I’m older now, old enough where it is hard to remember his face anymore. I see him sometimes, in my dreams, his slender body cutting a path through the tall grass as I chase him; arms outstretched in front of me, trying to get a hold on something, anything. He never slows down and he never stops, not even after my legs have carried me as far as they can go. I watch him disappear into the grass, his black hair bouncing in time with his steps until he’s gone.
Sometimes when I close my eyes I see
Nothing
No pictures, no words, no fantasy
Nothing
Sometimes when I close my eyes
There is no escape
Into some world of creativity
Into some marvelous pit
I’ve never explored before
Sometimes all I have is
Nothing
Sometimes all I can do is wait
Hoping that maybe
When I’m not looking
Nothing
Will become
Something
It was one of those real hot sticky bastards outside the day after my birthday and I remember feeling real happy to not be jammed into some tiny wooden desk with rock hard gum stuck underneath, and to not be surrounded by a gang of coughing, wheezing, and sweating schmucks writing down Latin conjugations. I hadn’t done anything all that day besides waking up and deciding it was too hot to be productive or anything like that, so I was just sitting around on my ass eating whatever nonsense I could find in the pantry. Around noon my mom got on my case…or maybe it was around two...Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Point is, Ma got on my case about how my dad asked me the night before to mow the lawn or some nonsense, and so I told her I’d get right on it even though I knew full well I wasn’t going to. I wanted to get away from her nagging and the heat for awhile, so I went up into my room and looked through some old comic books with weird names like Strange Love and Detective Comics. I was enjoying myself until she started in on me again about mowing the damn lawn so I started in on her and we got in a tiff and I took off to the park to cool my head. I went to the park because I figured no one would be there to bother me and because I could walk there and not have to go to my crabapple of a mother and give in to her demands just for a ride to the movies or Danny’s or some nonsense like that just for her to say no. The park wasn’t that long of a walk but remember it’s disgustingly hot outside and I’m dripping sweat and feeling like a human puddle, so the walk might as well have taken forever. About halfway there I started to feel bad about yelling at my ma like that and not having mowed the lawn like my dad asked. I mean, it’s not like they are bad parents or anything like that, it’s just that sometimes I want to be left alone, ya know? But anyway, I’m walking to the park and it’s really hot and I’m feeling really down and out and I want to turn around but I feel like I can’t, just out of principle. And I mean hell; I was already halfway there so why turn around?
So I get to the park and it’s like something out of one of those campy little New England summertime brochures with birds chirping and the sun shining. There was a group of kids playing in the shade of some big old oak trees. One of them was eating a vanilla cone and I felt a powerful craving for ice cream and I set my mind on getting a Popsicle or something from one of those pushcarts they wheel around the park for people to buy water and ice cream. I saw one off in the distance and started walking towards it, but then I remembered that I was flat broke and couldn’t afford to even look in the cart. I was feeling pretty down by this point so I decide to find some place in the shade to mope around and think but the only bench I can find is taken up by some old man with big, drooping ears and a heavy tweed jacket. A tweed jacket of all things. Hell, those things were as hot as blue blazes in the winter, and in the summer...A tweed jacket for God’s sakes. He was like some kind of Buddha or something, sitting there all by himself in some heavy, itchy tweed, looking straight ahead. I didn’t really want to sit next to the old guy, but it was either that or roast so I kinda gathered myself up in some respectable way and marched on over. I looked him in the eye, dead square in the eye, and asked him if the spot next to him was taken. He shook his head, so I plopped myself down and started thinking about my life and all my troubles. Only problem was I couldn’t concentrate with the old timer on my right just staring ahead like Buddha. It was damn distracting him being all quiet like that. I kept trying to think but my eyes kept wandering back over to him in all his tweedish glory. He just sat there, starring and starring, and I sat next to him, starring and starring. I looked towards where he was looking but there wasn’t anything in particular, just some pretty green grass. I wondered if maybe he was dead, but every once in awhile he would blink and I’d feel a bit better. He reminded me of one of those military statues they have in the big cities. You know, the one’s on the horses just staring at something only they can see. Anyway, I was looking at this old guy really closely now, and I was trying to notice the little details like a private eye would. I like to think I’m pretty observant and I felt real proud when I noticed that he didn’t have a wedding ring. I started thinking about this, about how he might not have anyone to go home to and no one to talk to. I figured he must come here often and just sit around and stare off at something he missed in his life.
I sat there for a bit longer with the old guy, at least until some clouds came out and the temperature dropped. Then I got up and walked home and mowed the lawn like my dad had wanted me too. Oh, I apologized to my Ma too.
You know, that happened awhile back and I still think about that old man in the park sometimes when I’m alone or about to fall asleep. Sometimes, if I try real hard, I think I can almost see what that man was looking at in the park, and sometimes, if I try real hard, I can almost keep myself from crying.
