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Posts published in “Fiction”

The Boneman

The Boneman digs through the pile of discarded children’s toys (much different than grown up toys) and discarded computers (the electronics, not the people) and discarded instruments (musical, not surgical). He knows the thing is in here somewhere.

He pulls the necklaces of assorted (possibly human) bones around his neck tight and gives them a sharp look that says “I mean business”.

“What the hell am I looking for? I know you know!” They are often vague, however, hard to understand, circular talkers. Sometimes he wishes he had clearer bones, but they are what he has and would have to do until he could find better replacements.

The Attic

The ceiling collapse was the first thing that put a damper in Dave’s day. Michael and Greg’s master bedroom was a disaster. Crumbled drywall and fiberglass insulation covered the room in a damp-smelling blanket. Maybe a leak in the roof? What he knew was that this was going to be an expensive repair.

The second thing that put a damper in Dave’s day was the human bones spilling from a trunk that had fallen through the ceiling when it collapsed. The impact had forced the box open, revealing its ghastly contents. If it had been stored just a few feet over, it might have landed on the mattress and not opened, maintaining its diabolical secret. But, it had fallen through, hit a dresser, busted open, and spread bones all over the floor.

A Night At The Bar

Sylvia nursed her double-gin and single-tonic at the hotel bar and checked out the handsome, dark-haired man across the room. Just looking at him as she had been doing the last three or four drinks, she could tell she was definitely his type. She wanted to show him and his dark curls and darker eyes a thing or two.

He was her son’s age, but reminded her of her second husband, Ali, the car salesman with more body hair than any man had any right to. She remembered how he would smell after a day working in those cheap suits he preferred. “Buy a nice one!” she’d tell him. “Those dime-a-dozen suits don’t breathe right.” By the end of a hot summer day, his rank body odor would be vile.

1000 Words – Empty Basement

A day will come when you can give of yourself freely. You will give of yourself generously and selflessly for no other reason than that it is the right thing to do. For no other reason than that you want to. You will have a chance to pay forward all the kindnesses given to you when you were having a rough time, when you were bottoming out, when you really needed a helping hand. But today is not that day. Today is a day to take.

And take we shall.

Today is a day we shall take and we shall take dearly. The world will feel. What will the world feel, you ask? I don’t know. I am just the instrument. These decisions, they’re not mine. I am told to act and I obey. And today, they told me, today the world will feel what it is like to lose. The world will feel what it is like to suffer and anguish and lose.

Do not judge me. I do not make these decisions. I am told what to do and I act. Is that so difficult to reconcile with your notions of free will, of life, of morality? Is it such a difficult thing to believe that I act without considering the ramifications of the orders I am given? To kill a child? To bomb a church? To poison a well? Figuratively speaking on that last one of course. These days, you’d want to go for a large municipal water source. A reservoir, for example. That is the most efficient way to take out an entire population, beyond something like a thermonuclear strike. But those are so crude. So noisy. They lack subtlety.

We like subtlety. I think.

A few days ago an associate of mine—let us call him Bertrand, not his real name but it will suffice—thought that he would have a change of heart. He was given orders in the manner we are given orders, that is, hidden in the newspapers so that no one can trace their source, just like a hundred times before. Just like a hundred jobs before. But this time, Bertrand decided to think about the orders issued to him. He had a change of heart. He took issue with the task at hand.

Poor Bertrand. He was always so conflicted. There had been many times over the years I could see minuscule flickers of doubt dance across his eyes, but he never let them affect his performance. His commitment to our duty had been admirable even by the gold standard set by yours truly. He was a loyal, dedicated soldier who carried out his orders to the fullest extent every time. Except this time.

This is no hiding from the ones making our decisions for us. If an impure thought creeps into your head, they know. Every doubt, every hesitation, every slight misgiving and they know. To survive and thrive, one must become a pawn. Willfulness is your enemy. Let go. Be free. Act without thinking about why.

Bertrand asked why. Why killed Bertrand. Or more accurately, you might say I killed Bertrand, but the truth is that why is the reason he is dead. I was just the instrument. An appropriate word choice too. I made sweet music with Bertrand. I will never forget the great sweeping crescendo we achieved before crashing into silence. I loved Bertrand, but in the end he did not love me. It is the nature of my work, not to be loved, and this time was no different.

They know that we exist to serve and that to serve means not to be loved. It is essential to the human experience to seek love. We are social creatures, by nature, and love is the greatest natural expression of that. We give of ourselves when we love freely and unconditionally. To deny that instinct is to make yourself something more and less than human. A superdemihuman, if you will. That’s kind of funny, right? I just made that up. Feel free to use it later when people ask what happened.

Just a little while now.

Sometimes I remember my family. I remember my family and people I called friends. Do you remember your family? One of the first things they take from you is your memories. They are convinced that remembering will dull your effectiveness. In a lot of ways, they are right. I only assume this. No one has ever told me. I only guess based on what I have lost. My memories. My feelings. My loves. I understand what it is to give and why people do it, but I don’t know what it feels like. I don’t know what anything feels like. Do you remember your mother?

I am excited about what’s coming up. You’re curious, aren’t you? I know you are. I can tell. That is ok. You’ll find out what we have in store for you soon enough, but for now think about when you were a child. Think about the first time you rode a bike. About the first time you fell off that bike. Think about how scared you were. About how badly your knee hurt. About the way your fear intensified when you saw the slick shiny patch of blood seeping down your shin. How was that for you? Did you call out for your mother? Did she come to you?

You would never guess by looking at it, but this earthen floor holds a secret. A very big secret. I received my orders to give this gift to the world in the Sunday Times. Sunday papers always contained the biggest jobs and this was an Easter Sunday paper. Very big indeed.

We’re almost there. Soon you will find out what secret I have kept from you. I think you’ll like it. But first, think about your mother. Think about being a child and wanting your mother near you. Do you feel that right now? If you don’t, you’re about to. I do. I am very excited to give you this gift. Very excited. Because I love you.

1000 Words – Lady Boxers

“Why, Mr. Hardy, I do believe that my lady boxer shall best yours in this contest.”

“Nonsense, Percival! I would wager my pith helmet that my Gertrude will knock the fancy hat off your pugilista this very day.”

“You have my Myrtle confused with some common barroom brawler, sir. I have no doubt she shall be the victor in this contest of fisticuffs.”

“Would you like to make this a little more interesting, Percival?”

“Quite, Mr. Hardy.”

“Let us say that whoever the trainer of the lady boxer who loses this fine match is will be obliged to shear his whiskers and look like some wretched Chinaman unable to grow a fine mustache like my own. Or, in your care, Percival, a beard.”

“I accept your terms, Mr. Hardy.”

“Thank you, Percival.”

“No, thank you, Mr. Hardy.”

“I hope you are prepared, Percival. I’ve brought along this white bucket and towel for when Gertrude defeats your unkempt Myrtle.”

“Unkempt, sir! You have crossed the line!”

“Unkempt, Percival. Look at the crudeness with which she applied the detail to her skirt. No man with functioning eyes would claim that to be the work of a fine seamstress.”

“The gall, Mr. Hardy! I might also comment on the utter lack of decoration on your Gertrude’s dress! Or do you consider her black sash the finest of French fashion?”

“Simplicity is in the vogue, Percival. We are entering an age when needless decoration will be a thing of the past. You look on Myrtle’s poor embroidery and see elegance, where as I, a man of the times, see the old fashion. She resides in the past, my loyal servant.”

“Your father never would have stood for such words, Mr. Hardy. No, he was a man of great tact and kindness. You do his memory a disservice.”

“Percival, this era of Victoria as Queen, long may she reign, is nearly at an end. Why, soon it shall be the twentieth century and the British Empire has never been stronger. We must look to the future, not only in the way we clothe our lady boxers, but also in our attitudes toward change. We have great steam engines now! Miraculous balloons that float delicately upon the air! Coal for every family that can afford it and jobs for the children of the families that cannot! Percival, do you not see we are living in a gilded age? That we are living on the very precipice of the future?”

“Mr. Hardy, I must confess that you have lost me here.”

“What I am telling you, Percival, is that you and your Myrtle are woefully out of touch with the times. You are much like those giant lizards being dug from the earth by intrepid British explorers.”

“If I did not know better, Mr. Hardy, I would venture that you were trying to insult me.”

“Never, Percival. I only seek to express that you shall never win this wager of our, for your fighter has no chance of defeating mine. Surely you’ve heard of the Chinese Wu Shu?”

“No, sir, I have not.”

“Heavens, Percival!”

“My apologies for my grave misstep, Mr. Hardy.”

“Do see that you take measures to correct this, Percival. Anyhow, Wu Shu is a barbarous oriental fighting technique much too base for a good British gentleman like myself. However the study of this technique is not unlike dancing and I’ve found a great many women are quite adept at it. And when this ‘dance-fight’ is incorporated into a lady boxer’s repertoire of moves, I do find she becomes significantly more formidable. Would you like a demonstration?”

“No, sir, I consider the use of heathen knowledge to be a blight on our fair contest and tantamount to cheating. Indeed, if I did not know you to be a good Christian man, I would suspect you of indulging in the Devil’s handiwork.”

“Oh, Percival, you are so very superstitious. These are the Chinese we are discussing, not some heathen darkies from Africa. Have some sense, man. The Chinese may be no better than vermin, but heathens they are not. All right, granted, I will allow that some of them may be heathens, yet I know a good many Christian Chinese in Hong Kong who can prove to be quite white in their disposition. And those people do know their way around a duck.”

“If I believe you allow your Gertrude to execute some of your…what did you call it? ‘Woo shoe’ arts, I will consider you a scoundrel and scab, sir, and accuse you of foul play.”

“But, my man, that is the beauty of Wu Shu. You will never know. I defy you to call out Gertrude’s Wu Shu moves when she employs them on the manly countenance of your Myrtle, for she does resemble a man of poor breeding even when she is dressed in her finest.”

“Sir!”

“Where did you find her, Percival? On the docks lifting crates onto a ship bound for India?”

“Well, I never! I will have you know, Mr. Hardy, that Myrtle is the daughter of my late brother Albert. I have raised since she was a child. She was a childhood playmate of your cousin Gertrude there.”

“I do say, Percival, I never knew that such a homely little girl would grow up into such a homely man.”

“You wound me, Mr. Hardy.”

“I vow not to cut your face as I shear your beard off later, Percival. I shall treat you like the most delicate of spring lambs as I remove your whiskers. Your wife will not recognize you when I have finished.”

“My wife has been in the grave these three years past, Mr. Hardy.”

“Oh, yes, quite. I do now recall. Be that as it may, were she alive today, Percival, she would not be able to recognize you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You would do well to continue to agree with me, Percival.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Let us get this little match on, shall we?

“Yes, sir.”

In a lady boxing match for the ages, Myrtle defeated Gertrude in 10 rounds by technical knockout. However, instead of honoring his end of the wager and allowing Percival to shave his whiskers, Mr. Hardy accused Percival and Myrtle of incest and they were both hanged by the local constabulary.

01 – Of Friends and Lovers

In front of me on the altar lies my best friend Arturo, cold, grey, and dead in a box.  Arturo’s mother cries throughout the service, silently soaking her dainty handkerchief with tears and snot.  Beside her, his father holds the sans-handkerchief hand, looking stoic and strong, but the heavy lines of his face reveal the war this tragedy has caused inside his head.  Oh, poor babies.  Is it wrong to feel so little when so many people are mourning?

His sister Eva—god, she looks tight today in that black dress—speaks after the priest gives his eulogy, generic but comforting to those who would have it.  She is so sincere.  I am impressed.  She says they all miss Arturo, his bright smile, his laugh, his winning attitude.  That it is such a tragedy to have one so young taken from them before he had the chance to affect the world.  Cut down in the spring time of his life.  Strong and handsome, Arturo was a man who loved his family, his friends, his country, his God.  

I zone out.  

I imagine the taste of her lip gloss on my lips, something fruity, sparkles smeared on my face.  I try and imagine the color of her panties.  I stare at her tits gently jiggling in her dress as she gesticulates meaningfully during her speech, adding appropriate emphasis to the most poignant, heart-felt moments, when his auntie who is sitting next to me grabs my hand and looks deeply into my eyes.  Hers are filled with tears, red, swollen.  I do my best to play it like I have been captivated by Eva’s words rather than staring at her amazing rack, but the woman is so lost in her sadness that I could have been screaming and cursing and throwing things across the church pews and she still would have thought I was displaying a sensible expression of grief over Arturo, my sweet lost best friend.

Eva finishes and sits and some cousin who I have never met comes up and plays some sad sounding song on the piano I don’t know but which really opens the water works in the crowd.  I hide my face in my hands to avoid any more sincere exchanges of misery.  I close my eyes, enjoying the darkness, and press my palms hard into my eye sockets.  Hopefully the redness the pressure causes will be enough to convince people I have been suffering silently, tears barely held back in this moment of extreme loss.  

Oh, poor Arturo.  If only you were here to see how hot your sister looks today.

With my head swimming, full of Eva, I notice myself coming to half-mast—probably best not to stand up from the pew with a boner—I fill my head with all the unsexy thoughts I can muster: my sixth grade homeroom teacher, the homeless man who used to pee on my window and then shit himself while napping on my block, taxes, the rotten fish smell of the wharf on a hot summer day.  I focus so hard on not getting hard that I barely notice when the funeral procession begins.  Arturo’s dad passes me, misinterprets my attempts to thwart my erection as grief-induced detachment, and places his hand on my shoulder in a show of support.  

“Come, David,” he says, “let’s pay our final respects.”

I look up at him, my eyes still glazed and red from the pressure of my palms, and nod silently.  As one of the pallbearers—it’s me, his father, three of his male cousins, and some ridiculous curly haired guy he went to college with—I take my place at the head of casket opposite his father, good old Gus, and cast my eyes across the solemn, expectant crowd.  They are all miserable.  I hope that none of them can tell that I feel nothing for Arturo right now.  It is the living sibling I am more concerned with at this point.

I catch Eva’s eyes and think I read the briefest glimmer of a message there.  Hope for later?  A promise?  Is she thinking about me as much as I am thinking about her?  I shudder and close my eyes, my lips pursed, and swallow hard.  I conjure unsexy thoughts at a heretofore unreached pinnacle of torturousness.  I grimace at the choice scenes playing across my mind’s eye.

Gus catches my revealing facial expression and says to me, “It’s ok.  You can let it out, son.  It’s ok to let go.”  Gus, if I let go of the careful mental balancing act happening inside my head right now, I would bear your son’s coffin down this aisle with my cock like diamond, laughing at how stupid you all look.

I decide against letting go.

The casket lifts slightly and I take the cue and we start leading it down the aisle of the Roman Catholic church holding the service, with its idols and stations of the cross and blood sacrifice.  Roman Catholics are a strange bunch.  I do not and will never fully understand their mysteries.  Gus is a believer though, and Arturo’s mom, Adoracion, well, just look at her name.  I feign it for them, if only so they don’t suspect.

We make it halfway down the aisle when a woman wails and throws herself on the coffin.  Her weight makes my arm hurt.  I turn and place my other hand on her and realize that it is Adoracion in the flesh.  She grabs my lapels, tears streaming down her cheeks, and collapses into me.  Eva grabs her mother and I hand her off, but not before Eva lightly brushes my hand with her own.  I nod to them both with as much gravitas as I can muster and continue down the aisle, my hand still tingling from the electricity in Eva’s touch.

A hearse waits for us at the bottom of the stairs leading down from the entrance of the church.  Much of the audience, if you want to call them that, lines the stairs on either side of the path to the hearse.  The rest of the onlookers file out behind us.  Solemnly, with tremendous weight and importance, we lead the wood and metal box containing the sad, empty flesh of poor, sweet Arturo into the back of the hearse and shut the rear door.  Tears erupt in the crowd when the latch connects, signaling the very last car ride Arturo will ever take.  I am tempted to call shotgun.

38 – Mr. Spider’s Gift

The very next day, my friend and I were sitting on the deck.  It was a very sunny day, very fine, and we were enjoying the weather.  I was sipping on a cold Coca-Cola Classic, one of my most favorite things in the whole world.  Nothing seemed like it could go wrong.  

I thought a little bit about Mr. Spider from the night before.  I wondered where he had gone and if he were ok.  I sincerely hoped he was doing just fine out there.  It could be a scary world sometimes.  I felt where he had bitten me.  It didn’t even hurt, just a tiny bump to remind me of the gift he had given me.

I stared out over the placid, rippling waters of the lake.  Suddenly my ribs started feeling very itchy.  I pulled my shirt up to scratch and make sure there no ticks trying to get a free meal off me when I felt a patch of short, very coarse hairs, almost like sandpaper.  Now, I have to tell you, I am not a very hairy person.  I have just a few hairs on my chest, and they are all very soft.  So these new bristly hairs were something of a surprise to me!  I was concerned, but wanted to take a closer look.

“I need to go to the bathroom.  I’ll be right back,” I told my friend.

In the bathroom, I looked and saw a patch, maybe the size of my hand, where there a number of these tiny, black hairs poking through my skin where there had been none the day before.  Strange!  I thought that, perhaps, all the good clean country air was making me develop in a more manly way.  Nature has many secrets.  

All the Coca-Cola in me had worked its way through, so I made use of the bathroom for its intended purpose.  Killing two birds with one stone, right?  But when I peed, what came out was not the usual stuff, but a silky white substance that was very stretchy.  I wiped as much of it off my fingers as I could and flushed it down the toilet, hoping it wouldn’t clog.  That would be too embarrassing.

Back on the porch I couldn’t get the thought of the white sticky stuff out of my mind.  I thought about telling my friend, but I was afraid he would get the wrong idea about it and I think I had done something immoral.  I decided to keep quiet.  Just to keep an eye on things to make sure nothing bad happened.

Another soda pop helped me feel better.

“What are we going to have for dinner?” my friend asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied to him.  “Pork chops?”

“Yeah.  That sounds good,” he said.

“I, uh….” I started but then stopped.

“What’s up?” he said.

“Oh.  Nothing.  Pork chops sound pretty good, huh?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

Next door the neighbor’s dogs barked.  I found them to be pretty annoying while we were trying to relax, but what could you do about it?  Dogs had as much right to be dogs as I had a right to be me and as Mr. Spider had a right to be himself.

My jaw ached a little bit.  Maybe later I would go over and say hello to the dogs so they didn’t have to be scared anymore.  Yeah, that seemed like a pretty good idea.  It’s not fun to be scared.  

37 – Curtis Can’t Find His Phone

With the wind blowing snow into his eyes and freezing his ears, Curtis ducked quickly into the subway station.  Once down the stairs and in the lee of the wind, he sighed, releasing the tension brought on by severe cold.  Stepping through the turnstile, he reached into his inner coat pocket to feel for the chocolate bar he had hidden in there earlier, hoping that the cold had kept it nice and solid.  Unfortunately it was a big, melty mess, and instead of wrestling with it not to soil his fingers, he threw it into a trash can on the train platform.  Sometimes you had to sacrifice pleasures for the greater pursuit of virtue.  In this case, not to have filthy, sticky, chocolate-covered hands.  He hated dirty hands.

Absentmindedly he patted down his pockets to make sure he had not left anything at the diner while eating dinner.  Wallet: check.  Keys: check.  Chocolate bar shaped emptiness: check.  Cell phone.  Cell phone.  Cell phone?

Shit.

He doubled checked all his pockets, and then to be sure, checked a third time.  He definitely did not have his phone with him.

He could see where he had left it on the counter.  With his second bowl of soup in his stomach, he went to the bathroom to relieve himself before his long train ride home.  He left his coat and phone on the counter next to the check.  He didn’t want those guys to think he was skipping out on the meal, especially on Christmas Eve.  Curtis was many things, but a thief and a cheapskate he was not.  When he came back from the toilet, he put his coat on, dropped some cash with his customary 8.5% tip, and walked out the door.  He completely forgot to grab his phone.  

Shit.

He could go back now.  It’s only a few blocks between the subway and the diner, but the cold was nightmarish.  And, besides, he had paid his 2.25 fare.  Since losing his job, he no longer got the unlimited passes and each ride cost him.  He did not like to pay twice.  

The phone could wait.  No one was going to call him.  He had no family to speak of.  His only friends were the guys at the diner and he had already seen them tonight.  He knew he would be back there the next day for lunch.  He was sure they would just put it behind the counter for him.

But that did not stop him worrying about it.  A man in the station played the guitar.  Down the platform, another man was bent over looking through the gaps in the wall.  A pretty brunette read as obviously as she could, telling everyone to leave her alone.  And there was Curtis, a pathetic, sad sack, who had managed to worry so intensely about losing a 15 dollar pay as you go phone that he had broken a sweat on the coldest, bitterest day of the whole year.  And there was no one in the whole world to just give him a hug and tell him everything would be ok.

The train rolled up and he got on, feeling no closer to home.

Elsewhere, a lone cell phone, buried three feet deep in trash in a dumpster behind the only diner still open on Christmas Eve, rang.  When no one picked up, it went to voice mail.  She left a message, heartfelt, warm, caring, that Curtis would never hear.