Minor Short Story For My Fiction Class
Lua glanced over frantically at her friend- “What the hell are they talking about now?” she asked. Her friend shook her head in utter disbelief and snickered “I think she’s talking about her terrible eczema or something” Jaime said. “Are you serious, she just gave us our food?!” Lua almost shrieked in fledgling disbelief. They had gone to this diner with the intention of appearing hip, with-it, cool, young, and also Lua was currently broke. Both of the girls initially thought there was a certain rustic charm to the diner they encounted two blocks from their house. Blackened Olde-English typeface branded it “The Wright Inn” and it got terrible reviews on Yelp (Jaime had checked). The bulbous white diner itself was situated on the block of a busy boulevard, the kind of location that would seem to draw a ton of locals. Considering themselves ‘urban explorers’ the two roommates decided to go.
Jaime convinced Lua to eat there on the supposition of “blue-collar charm”. The two girls always found themselves mining their expensive cell-phones for the ultimate eatery, drooling at the prospect of Burgers topped with Foie-Gras, or heaping hot bowls of Pho. “Today, let’s be random” Jaime had said, and so Lua cautiously obliged.
When they arrived at the restaurant, an old man stood outside the door. This immediately bothered Lua, as it meant they had a tolerance for the homeless, and thus, poor business. The man stopped Lua as she walked in the front door “Excuse me miss” “Yes?” Lua asked. “Where do all the leaves go miss? They not on the trees, but they not on the ground neither. Do they just haul ‘em away to some secret place? Lua nodded nervously. “Sure they do” she said with obvious condescension and slipped inside.
It was 5 on a Friday and the restaurant was completely empty. Two cooks stood around back in the kitchen, while a score of bored and trashy waitresses emptied their lips to each other. “Why should I give a shit about the kid, she’s not kin to me, I’ll lock her out anytime I want!” a particularly gravelly voiced waitress declared. Jaime awkwardly asked for a seat, and the waitress nodded- “Yea, sit anywhere hon” so they did. Besides the total and complete absence of patrons, the place seemed pretty run-of-the-mill. Jaime was excited, Lua was demur. The gravelly-voiced waitress skulked over. She was around 50, sullen, depleted, blackened teeth, hair streaming, likely addicted to some drug. “Here’s our menus, I’ll be back after this cigarette” and she left. “We have to get the hell out of here, nothing on the menu is over 4 dollars Jaime. Jaime. We are going to get food poisoning from this diner.” Lua said. Jaime persisted, “Oh c’mon, you are broke aren’t you? Beggars can’t be choosers, but they can be hip” she said. So they stayed, Jaime ordering a simple cheese burger, Lua ordering a chicken wrap. “May-on-aiseee?” the increasingly terrifying waitress growled to them. Both girls looked at each other- “Sure” they said.
Around 10 minutes later their food came out on plastic plates, both orders laying in strange pickle juice. It appeared the chefs were unable to drain their pickles before adding them to the side of the plate. After hearing intimate details about gravel-voice’s strange and intense case of eczema, the girls decided to finish eating as quick as possible. They could hear her still: “It itches like hell all the time, I just gotta scraaaatch it” she said. Lua didn’t want to seem impolite, as the entirety of the restaurant staff seemed to be watching them whilst conversing about beating their children, medical problems, where to score, and why Ben Affleck is such a great actor. “He’s so dreeeamy” gravel-voice said. “She must gargle cigarettes” Jaime whispered to Lua. They paid their bill of 10 dollars, leaving a 5 spot for tip. Jaime said such a fat tip was a little insulting, Lua disagreed. “I think she needs it for her eczema cream!” and they both burst out laughing as they walked back the cold blocks to home, assured the trip was worth it.
Moon Song: 6
And then I was a king, I was the all-knowing. I was stately, graceful, bound in fine faux furs that made me a beacon to the impoverished… I was proof that nothingness could rise to the sublime in such a society of greed.
I watched Mr. Deeds and knew that I would be kind to my butlers. I knew I would be friends with my servants, my kings of house. We would eat cereal together, sitting down as one family in majestic tribute to my gifts of conscience. During holidays, my servants and I would play tricks and pranks on each other, and then retire to remarkable dinners, toasting thusly: “To Friends! The Only Family You Can Choose!”… I was 9, and I knew this is how I would be. I wanted nothing more than to be endearingly kind, to love everyone, and the less I followed through on these whims and desires, the more I faded into disillusion. Darkness most glib, inklings of dead most nitid, fuzzy nebulae devouring cancerous, cancerous night.
Night talk became best talk, my servant friends left my side, the crown dulled, the furs fell apart. Growing up blows cock.
I was weak, because my heart was fat and sentimental. I am strong now, because I am indifferent.
I am nature, I am faith, and-
I am dead from the neck up.
Moon Song: 2
If anything about my being is profound, it is most certainly my capacity for denial. The great zeal I have is only reflected in the life of my brain, in my head, alarmingly real and yet altogether unrealized. I live within myself. There is another I present here.
For it is true that every situation I find myself in, I ask what ideal can I fulfill? How can the vision of suave in my head become more official, more real, more profoundly human? In truth, I largely ignore the reactionary feelings in my gullet. These feelings are true because they are reactions, natural, unbridled. Yet, I mistrust them.
I am skeptical of my intuition because it has only served as fodder for my logic. Life is a series of natural knocks against the knee of intellect, to which effect the reflex of kicking is refined via maturity and learning. But what serves as more true? The natural motion of the brain in life, or the need to cultivate reasoning for such natural reflexes? Do I dream because it is natural for me, or is it just a way to keep me from being natural?
Today is an ordinary Monday. I think about soft grunge supermodels and their gray eyes, playing basement shows to applause, and then slowly smoking cigarettes in lonely alleyways to end it all.
Today is an ordinary Monday because I don’t really believe it to be so.
A Short Piece on Pissing from “The Compendium of Infinite Vexations”
My fingers reek of low-tide, the gf is gone, all is lost. And sometimes I rise in the middle of the night, imagine myself whipping out my member and pissing all over the wall next to our toilet, having way too much fun alone, with my dick.
But that’s pretty much the ultimate male conundrum is it not?
When I was a child, I would piss most inaccurately. If I had to compare it to something, I would say it was akin to a fire-hose with rabies. Fomenting, foaming, glistening with anticipation, I would slam the door closed in a fit and piss. As I gratefully stained the bowl and tiles, I noticed a decoration my mother placed.
On this tiny hanging reminder there was a message “My aim is to keep this bathroom clean- your aim would help”. It was one of those cutesy, hand-made pieces of mom swag that mothers need to call a house ‘complete’. I read it differently.
Because of my youth, I read it as “My aim is to keep this bathroom clean- your aim: world help”. I and my penis, we were born for greatness, born to save the world! Such delusions of grandeur, even in the most unexpected places! I ate, slept, lived, and pissed grandeur.
Only years later did I discover what the sign really said. We see what we want to see. I saw myself saving the world somehow with my jettison of liquid ammonia. Only years later did I hear of how often my dear mom scrubbed the tiles under the bowl.
So I decided I would learn something: Grandeur is the piss of false promises, worthwhile dreams.
Sleep now Arick, as both are long dead.
{8}
Meditation is the second childhood of intellect.
{6}
When my thoughts best flicker, panic awakes. No matter how long the slumber, morning is rough, always.
But sometimes, I have pen and paper about, to ease these hang-overs of conscious unbridled…
{5}
Not a lust for knowledge- No, anything but that.
A lust for the condensed, for the spectacular, for the foreign signals of a love ethereal.
I sense in my creation the simplicity of a child, unable to fail. He holds himself highest in the swing of his mind, back and forth between jumping and failing to hold on. And when no decision is made, the dark blanket of wood-chips below him will decide. The earth is innocent, we just happen to land there. So it is recognized, and so does he plummet, even while staying in his likely swing. Yes, his sense of perfection does plummet, swilling mouthfuls of dirt and dingy chips; so he is crying, asleep in body, gentle tingles withering his mind…
Perfection is decay. Like soil itself, gradually diminishing all spectators into something useful, some cache of exploratory nutrients, then absorbing any and all worth absorbing. What we attempt to maintain, time holds constant. Still, few people would fall on their knees and declare only the lowly dirt perfect.
Fewer still will read this.
{4}
In the taciturn breath of night there is only time exhaled. I have no conception of being alone. This is because I fantasize about the effect solitude will have upon me, as if some alchemist of profundity prescribed his best potion. Of solitude I shall swallow.
Of night, I will only inhale.
{3}
…And her blood on the floor, sickly erythrite, lay sticky and supine.
The knife winced, the brain of hive
awoke.
Sun ran for cover-
She: persistent in last gasps.
Lua felt shelter, smelled the sweet pages of pulp
tucked about milkcrates
festering in her brain.
Driven to hear that dirge.
Thought she: suppose I actually stand up for myself?
Purposeful
Begin again.
The days idle on. I watch trees grow indifferent to death, they breeze through the phases, ending on acceptance. They blare morose colors. To these colors, I respond. To everything else, there is more indifference.
I am aware that my favorite season is on the wane- still-it is taken for granted. Change bores me, flux is ubiquitous. So I hold the leaf piles slumping about my college campus in their place with my eyes, and forgo limply staring into the sky with a pillow of fluorescent crunch. When yr young, contrivance affects even yr smallest notions and movements- and they would scoff at me, supposing I think myself an iconoclast, purposefully laying in the dead leaves. I only pass by, absorbed in my phone.
A rapidly burgeoning machine of deference we all are. Mini microwaves pressed against our skulls, skittering about, vacuous. Cellphones are best as deterrents. I find myself using the damn thing more and more to allay conversations in public. There is no beginning and no end to all the conversations I’ve never had, so I don’t miss them. My life is an endless scroll, aching touch upon a callous screen, tirades of tired digression among only cold circuits. At least I have a decent battery.
1 of Many
Lara let focus her energies. She never sprinted faster. The gunshot was so close, she could hear the ricochet splinter against the patient concrete. When she was supposedly safe, 5 blocks away, she rounded a corner and let her breath catch. You breathe, you breathe, you breathe she told herself. There was nothing else now, an ethereal silence after watching those kids get into it. She rationalized it as best she could.
He had gunned down the one next to him, everything but sloppy in his endeavor. Pure precision was in his gaze. Lara saw them for the longest distance, slowly, they grew larger as her breathe grew smaller. One of the kids was short, wearing a spider-man hoodie, apathetic and smoking a cigarette. The other one was powerful. Not because of his stature, or grimace, but because he simply walked up, mentioned something to the kid, and shot him point blank through the head. All at once, the poorly painted indigo wall behind them was smeared in dark vermilion.
Nobody was on the street, save for her. 4 am. Dangerous, is it not?
So he saw his only witness and subsequently shot at her. Lara closed her front door, collapsed at its completion, and sobbed.
Not because of what she saw, but because of what some kid was now missing-
the infinite mist of breath against darkening cold.
Epochs (short excerpt)
Genius is a selfish yardstick,
intelligence- a game of proximity:
and as like souls begin thoughts entwined,
all the rest can only exhale warmly
against these realities of glass