What Think You I Take My Pen In Hand?

Too Human of a Case - April 2009

2009-04-13T20:30:00.000-07:00

Too Human of a Case

The hospital was too large. It was too tall, too foreboding. The front doors didn't even require a human hand to touch them they were so detached from the world. Swish. Swish.

Taking the exhaustingly long elevator ride to the twenty-third floor, a young man went up to another of the long, artificially lit, sterile hallways, the one with the flickering light at the end; they had put in an order for the maintenance team to fix it three months ago, but the paperwork hadn’t yet made its way through the system. He walked down the hall until he reached a door with a number like all the others: the same number of screws holding it up, the same number of inches apart, drilled to the same depth within the wood. He slowly opened the door and looked inside at the curtains drawn between the patients within the room. He pulled back the second one, closest to the window.

“Hi, Dad.”

No answer. An elderly man lay in the bed. He lay there insufferably, looking out the window as the sunlight streamed in and over his face. It was a summer day out there. Inside, it seemed like February. He looked out the window.

The young man slowly walked farther in to the room. He pulled up a chair next to the bed. Someone checked in on them and left. The old man was still looking out the window. Didn't notice a damn thing, his son thought. His oxygen machine was still pumping, you could tell by the beep. It hooked into his gnarled, hairy nose that fit with his cragged face and arthritic hands. There was something about the father with his preoccupied look, wispy white hair barely present, spider veins running up and down his legs that were visible where the sheet was pushed back halfway up his calf.

He had begun to twitch last Tuesday. It began in his smallest finger on his left hand, almost imperceptible. He put it off figuring he had slept on his arm wrong. By 5 o'clock, he would have called the local doctor, but the office had just closed. Wednesday morning, his whole arm slightly convulsing, he was waiting outside the doctor's office at 8 A.M.

He was checked out, from top to bottom, but nothing seemed to be wrong. He was sent home with some muscle relaxants and told it was probably just an oddly pulled muscle or maybe a pinched nerve, but that it would more than likely figure itself out in time.

The treatment worked for a while. However, by this past Sunday he could sense that something was wrong; he felt it in his bones. He went to the doctor and was just told to go home, the treatment had worked for a week and there was no reason for him to worry.
Monday, his finger came back alive, but moved more slowly than the first time. It was as if it were tapping out some barely whispered rhythm, and was moving slowly as an old man from old age. But it did progress. Tuesday, he went back to the doctor's office a changed man. He looked as if he'd aged ten years in seven days. The doctor, after being taken aback by his appearance, began to look him over, but as time went by a specific look came to the doctor’s face. It was a look of calm but irrefutable vexation with a tinge of guilt, as if he were the one who could be held responsible but at the same time so could anyone, or rather everyone. This was visible in his face. It did not need to be said.

It was decided that on Wednesday afternoon, Frank Byron would check himself in at the hospital and be watched for twenty four hours. They would do all they could there that his doctor couldn't do. They had more people with more backgrounds and more fancy degrees hung on walls, after all. After an hour or two of physical examinations, he went into the MRI room, the machine buzzing while looking inside his brain, and they found nothing. It was decided he would go off the muscle relaxants and all his other medicines that went with being an older man and they would see what happened.

At ten o’clock that night, the monitors at the desk which corresponded to his machines didn’t seem to be working. The floor nurse walked down the hall to his room and checked everything, but nothing seemed to be out of place. She got a new machine from a different room and tried that one, trying to resuscitate her trust in the robotic beep. It didn't work either. After asking for help, she went to the closet down the hall and brought out some of the older models, one of the older nurses said they had never had a problem with them and the rest figured it was worth the try. It worked. It only held the most basic information, but it worked. After this, they kept a nurse in his room for the night. She was needed at midnight.

The machines began to twitter and shudder. No one quite understood what was going on. It was as if even the most basic machines weren’t capable of doing the job. The doctors and nurses didn’t know what to do. They just knew the son of this patient would be coming in the morning and then they could relinquish responsibility; the forms wouldn't be in their hands, it wouldn’t be their signature on the dotted line. Until then, he was under their protection. They needed to calm him from his shaking, cool the blood in his veins, and make his eyes stop squinting shut even tighter as if he were having a bad dream.

He was lying in his bed at home. The sheets were turned back, pushed down around his ankles. His wife was next to him at a nice, middle-aged forty-five. There were traces of tears down her cheeks, down the small wrinkles, the roads laid down years before just for this occasion. He was there simply thinking back to earlier that evening in wonder at how quickly things had changed.

She had seemed distant at dinner. He hadn't understood why. There had been awkward silence, enough to fill three entire houses let alone one dinner table between the two of them. He just kept glancing up at her, wondering what was wrong. She cleared the table, something as natural to her hands as lighting a match to a smoker, but she dropped a plate in the sink and the silverware slid down, cutting her first finger. It bled profusely like any small cut at first. He rushed over to her, thinking it was more serious than it was, and hurriedly pressed his grandfather’s handkerchief to her hand. It became covered in blood and later that night would be thrown away, but just as he was applying the pressure to her finger he noticed her crying.

She explained that she had cancer, whatever the hell that really means, and that it had just snuck up on her. It was pretty late in terms of finding it, and she had been told by the doctor to just live her life the way she had always done, as if that were even possible to continue living life without change. They spoke about it, and when the crying was over they went back to their normal evening routine. It was all they had to go back to. They only wanted mundane change from day to day. Maybe seeing a movie instead of watching TV. Maybe going to the local diner instead of eating in. Maybe inviting old friends over for cards one night. But not this.

He was lying in bed. He didn't know what to think, but his brain wouldn't stop. The wheels were moving, like a clock going until it will break itself apart. He just couldn't sleep. She was on the other side of the mattress. He turned to his side and looked over at her. He scooted a little closer, awkwardly, but unknown to her. She was fast asleep facing the ceiling with one arm curved over her unbridled hair and her legs slightly turned away from him, the inside of her knees uncautiously open to him. He crawled up next to her extending his left arm, his hand brushing over her stomach. She awoke and, turning toward him, lightly dragged her right hand's fingertips down his forearm. She briefly looked down at him, not realizing that he had been awake longer than a moment. He looked up at her and held her eyes open with his, even through the darkness of the room. Then turning from their held glance to let her drift off again, he pulled her closer into an embrace just loose enough that they were able to lie comfortably. He was able to fall asleep.

The nurses and the doctors were all gathered around him. It was two in the morning. The machines were still not acting correctly. All of a sudden, Frank Byron gave a violent squirm, as if an involuntary reaction to some horrible happening. But he was still sleeping. The machine to the left said so.

They had been dating only a couple months. He felt strongly for her and he thought she felt somewhat strongly for him as well. However, neither of them had said anything of significant substance to the other on the topic. They were driving out to the country for a picnic, like many young couples do when they want to avoid a few middle-aged stares. They both wanted to defy convention. They were young and thought it was some sort of control the first generation had on the next. They often spoke of these conventions.

She asked him, “What do you think of marriage?”

“Marriage, I don't know. It always seemed like more of a reaching out than a reaching, at least to me. You know what I mean?”

She did.

“It just seems as if everyone's going for something, anything, more than what they have already, and when they get there they realize it's not the end-all, be-all, solve-all they were expecting. They expect a solution and they end up with a situation they have to try and make work out. I don't know if you understand what I'm saying. Maybe it doesn't make sense.”

He looked over at her from behind the wheel and saw her face. Through the windshield, the light came down and reflected from the ridge of her eyebrows to the ridge of her cheekbone and around the inside of those valleys making everything that happened within them. And at that moment, she was looking back at him.

“I understand what you mean,” she nearly whispered without breaking her glance.

He broke the stare to look back at the road, “Okay, maybe it's not all wrong then.” He felt a twinge of something deep in his stomach. He readjusted himself because of his posture hitched to one side from the filthy handkerchief he always kept in his back pocket.

He convulsed again in his bed. The doctors were beginning to get worried. It was four o'clock in the middle of the night and they didn't have control, the one thing they wanted more than anything else in rooms like this and in the end all the rooms in the entire building were the same. They fretted and worried, worried and fretted, wringing their hands and walking circles. The night shift wasn't supposed to be this exciting. They never expected to run into something they didn’t know how to handle. They had degrees. They had experience. They had never met a human case like this one.

But then, he calmed for no apparent reason to any of them.

He was walking through the greenest grass. A shadow was above him. He looked up toward it and saw his strong, limping grandfather walking beside him, looking down toward him. Frank remembered this one. He had remembered it often. His grandfather said something and leaned down to show him an object on the ground. It was a brown, natural, spiked ball. He knew it was a nut now, but had wondered in amazement at what it could be when this had actually happened. His grandfather and he walked back toward the house, past the tractor, the small strawberry patches, and the horses in the pasture next door.

They sat down on the cinder blocks used to make a large planter by the back door of the house on the other side of the circular gravel driveway winding its way around the entire building. Grandfather laid the encapsulated nuts down on the cement and produced his tiny pocketknife from somewhere. He began to cut into the first one and then stopped, looking sidelong at his grandson, Frank, beside him. He put his tool and purpose down and pulled out his handkerchief from his back pocket. He began to say something to Frank as he wiped the dirt off the child’s face and brow. But for all Frank could now try, for all the times that he had remembered back to this happening in his childhood, he could not remember what had been said. He did remember the feeling of the handkerchief. He had repeated it for years after the funeral of this loved one, when he had inherited that cotton cloth. Frank had felt that day the sacred object with the strong hand behind it move up one side of his face and down the other, from side to side, cleaning everything from him. Exactly what he desired.

His grandfather got back to work with the nut. He finally cracked it and held his palm open with the present for his little grandson. Frank slowly took it into his grasp and put it in his mouth, moving his jaw down upon it, savoring the taste. He would remember this for a long time. It was warm, the nut had been sitting in the grass in the sun all afternoon, but it tasted as if it had gotten its warmth from the ground. It was like roots, deep roots, sinking into his memory. The earth had worked its way into his life. It would take his grandfather. It would eventually take everyone and everything including himself, but at that moment it had only taken a small portion of his mind and made it into a taste that would be remembered.

He had calmed around six. They had left a nurse in the room, just to make sure, now that all trust was lost in the machinery until the next patient would come through the door. They had switched shifts at seven, and so when the son of Frank Byron arrived, the nurse that checked on the two of them looked well rested and well fed, practically brimming with young life. The disbelief was still held suspended; the staff had done their job.

The old man had woken just ten minutes or so before his son walked in, and had spent it silently looking out at the sun actively drenching whatever lay twenty three floors below. It was probably just asphalt, but it might not have been. As the young man was sitting there, hand on the side of the bed like he was supposed to do as the lone child and lone member of that family belonging only to memories, the father looked up at his boy.

From somewhere, a slight breeze crept into the room, like a breath whispered, and played across his face pushing the white wisp of hair about his forehead. His eyes became clear and he hoarsely said, “The worst kinds of dreams are memories, memories too far gone to change.”

His lock of hair settled in nearly the way he used to wear it in his younger days. And the breath was gone.

The son of Frank Byron stayed there just a moment longer. Stood up, looked down upon that old man, and walked from the room, leaving the curtain drawn and the door open. He passed room after room. He took the elevator all the way down, nodded toward the receptionist at the main entrance, and walked through the doors. Conveniently, he didn't even have to touch them.

Swish. Swish.

As he was walking across the parking lot, some blessed rock lay in his path. It was lying in such a way that when he stepped on it he fell and fell hard. He propped himself up on his elbows and put his hand to his face. It came away red, deeply red, and a deep warmth covered his hand as well. He slid his fingers across each other slowly and then put his hand back to his face.

Hillocks - March 2009

2009-03-17T13:52:00.001-07:00

This is my first short story for my class. Just so you know, with the layout of blogspot being what it is, I made one empty line mean new paragraph, and there are a few empty lines between sections. Let me know what you think.

Hillocks

The car backed out of the driveway.

“Goddamn, it took you long enough.”

“Shut up and just take this,” and he handed it across the aisle between the two front seats. I took a long drag and leaned back in the passenger seat, less connected to the floor than it was intended to be. It was the dead of winter, nearly dark, and we were in the Midwest, so we went for a drive.

We pulled up to a stop sign as I reached over to the radio dial and gave it a spin. NPR evening jazz came rolling over me as I started to feel something going on. We turned the corner and started down Main Street, my eyes focused out the window, and I began to imagine along the faces of the ancient buildings people-like cartoons playing along and morphing one into the other as the sound of trumpets and saxophones sunk straight in to my bones. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw part of the flock of pigeons turn their heads to watch us as we drove past; I decided it was best to give it back to him for a while.

Our philosophy had always been that if we were going to spend an evening relaxing, then we had better start off somewhere completely on our own where we wouldn't be abruptly interrupted. Of course, we’d want to do this as quickly as possible on my one weekend home out of the fall semester; it called for taking the highway. In order to perform such an expert maneuver as the entrance ramp demanded, he handed it off to me and I didn't let it go to waste sitting there in my hand.

As we pulled onto the highway, we saw a cop nestled behind the bridge's support beams. Hand went down holding the precious cargo, nobody moved, speed stayed steady. Seconds passed. Nothing happened.

“Shit. Tonight's going to be a weird night if we already ran into one of those this soon.”

“Yeah,” I said as my hand crept its way back up toward my mouth.

It's interesting how even though I've been down that highway so many times it never gets old to look out the window, right along the back edge, and watch the rows of invisible corn sweep past. I don't know why I get caught up in it, but it seems so mesmerizing to see row upon endless row fly by. Snow slowly seeping from hillock to hillock. And if you catch it at just the right time, you can see it go blowing over the ground, less than an inch from the earth, erasing the footpaths of anything that happened to wander past.

“What are you looking at?”

“The snow in those fields,” I said innocently.

A few moments passed quietly, awkwardly, but I didn't notice.

“You better give that back to me, buddy,” he said looking over at me with his right eyebrow slightly raised.

He took it from the loose grip between my index finger and thumb. I turned away to try and save face, brushing the curled fingers of my right hand against my upper lip. I snuck one last glance before looking forward at the yellow lines, gripping the seat a little more tightly when we would move into the other lane and pass another traveler.

We took our exit and turned right at the stoplight, not caring enough to come to a complete stop, rolling through it with control. A few miles down, we made the left turn onto the dirt road, pulling up to the copse of trees where we usually stopped, car sinking into the ruts barely hidden from the last visit. We walked out to the spot more in the middle of the woods, where the clearing presented itself, and took out the lighter.

“Come here, man, I need your help. This wind is vicious.”

I stepped up to my first job so I could be repaid in a moment by his becoming a wind barrier for me. Just walking around in a well-worn circle, we soaked it in. By this time, the cold wasn't affecting us and we could enjoy ourselves, the trees cutting off most of the abominable winter weather.

Every once in a while, he looked over at me with an odd look on his face. Nothing like that to get me more paranoid than I already was.

“This is good stuff,” I said trying to break the rhythm of those glances.

“Yeah, I knew you'd like it. I got it from Mike.”

“He always seems to come through, but I swear if he stays in that house he's going to get busted. They know something's there.”

“You know how it is. Once you get that deep, you can't get out until something happens.”

“Yeah, I guess. But I still think he's going to get caught.”

“Yeah, you're probably right. You just about done with yours?”

“I've been done for a few minutes, just letting it smoke its way out.”

“So kind of you,” mockingly. “You want to do another one before we head back?”

“Sure, but only one, it's freezing out here.”

“I'll go get some.”

I stood in the middle of the circle and just looked deeper into the trees. The snow suddenly began to fall seriously, rather than just whispering down like it had been before. The wind whipped the snow around, destroying my line of sight. I could hear it as it swept down on me from somewhere above; I heard it before it hit me so I could brace for it. The whole world seemed imagined. I didn't dare breathe out, because if I did something of myself would be forced onto the image before me. I just wanted the image to be forced onto me or, at the very least, to be a silent, untouched bystander. But I was not untouched. That blessed wind. It touched me, slapped me, pushed me, caressed me, held me. I didn't think the amount of snow falling could increase but then I saw that it hadn't reached its peak before. It built and built. Swirls crissed and crossed before my eyes more frantically. I wanted it to continue growing without end. And then, it seemed to stop altogether. The silence enveloped me. Maybe if I closed my eyes the absence of sound would be richer. I closed my eyes.

A twig broke behind me.

“Hey, I don't have enough paper. We'll have to run by my house before we go anywhere else.”

“Let's go,” I said and flicked the smoking remains of my preoccupation into the snow. If I had listened closely, I would have heard it hiss out.

The car ran while it sat in the street in front of his house. He walked out the front door, down the concrete step and the driveway, and swung himself around into the driver's seat.

“Alright, we can go. I just had to tell my dad I was staying at your house. I don't know what I'm really going to do, but I needed to tell him something.”

“If you want to stay at my house, you could. There's room for you, and my parents wouldn't think anything either way.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, no problem.”

“Alright, thanks. I might do that.”

We drove downtown and parked in one of the lots behind the storefronts: the old drugstore, the family owned bakery, the coffee shop where we used to hang out after school. They all looked down on us, and over us in some odd kind of way.

“Hey, I heard about something going on over at Olivia's house, you want to check it out?”

“Yeah, sure. She lives around here somewhere doesn't she?”

“Yeah, just up a couple blocks.”

A phone call and a few hundred steps and she came out to greet us. She was more than a little gone.

“Oh, hey! I didn't realize you were with him! It's so nice to see you! I don't see you around anymore! Come here, give me a hug!”

I was sloppily grabbed and held against her teenage frame. I looked toward him and he just looked back at me with some smug look. Having hung out with her a couple times, I knew she'd fallen into this lifestyle much more quickly than I had. It kind of scared me to be honest. All these young people, younger than myself, going into it so headstrong.

“Hey, so my sister is here and it's all cool and whatnot, but you guys should probably go in the backyard first and just hang out for a while.”

We walked around the side of the house and saw a wooden playground. We just walked and chatted while she went into the house. Another friend walked out and was happy to see me. Gave me another hug. Threw some other small talk at me. I sat down on the swing and moved myself back and forth. Some other people showed up who I didn't know. The stuff was really starting to work. I went inside the house where they had the drinks; I had been told everything I'd want was in the basement.

The older sister and her friend were smashed in one corner, hands exploring. Some younger people were sitting at the bottom of the stairs holding a fifth. It was just sad. I walked back up the stairs and was confronted by the dog. I took one sidelong glance at the creature and shuffled around it, going straight back through the sliding glass door to the safe outside.

He was there with these people I didn't know and apparently they were having some kind of disagreement, so they left. The few that I was acquainted with stayed, which was better. We heard a door open and a man walk out into the gravel driveway.

“Olivia, I told you that guys couldn't be here. They need to get out of here right now.”

“They're leaving, Dad. See? That's where they're headed already.”

“Fine, but I still don't want them around.”

“Okay, okay. I know.”

We had slunk down into our positions. A few quiet minutes passed and she came to the backyard and told us that he didn't realize we were there, and would probably be fine with it, but we should leave all the same. The other friend asked for a ride home, so we walked back to the car, gave her one, and just came back to the same parking spot in the same parking lot. The buildings still above us. The pigeons were somewhere watching the masquerade.

“Okay,” and he pulled out his small, glass figure.

“I should have known you would bring this.”

We did three.

We began to walk down the empty streets of midnight in our small town. I kept looking over at the wall. Someone jumped across the brick facade of one of the buildings. We passed a window and there was a strange man looking back at me from just on the other side. My shadow flitted around my feet and ran circles around me trying to use me to hide from the light, but at the same time wanting to escape from me, savior and chain. My shadow didn't realize the trouble it was causing my mind, or maybe it did, and that's why it seemed to be smirking at me the whole time. I turned my head to look forward, resolutely, firmly. I won't look back at it, I told myself.

We walked, hands in pockets, down Main Street, in front of all the memories of my childhood. We talked about our lives since the last time we had seen each other: parents' jobs, moving from one house to the next, girlfriends and not girlfriends, high school and college, observations and thoughts. I suddenly thought about how odd it was to spend a Saturday night walking the dark streets until they weren't dark anymore. He seemed to have gotten the same impression and asked if I wanted to go to the local 24-hour diner.

We walked in like we owned the place, which at this time on a Saturday night we might as well have. It was one of those nineteen-fifties American-revival diners, jukebox and everything. As we sat down at the table by the front window, some song started to play, Tom Waits or Mick Jagger or Bob Dylan spitting their thoughts, and we settled into the grooves in the benches on either side of the table. We ordered fries, or something else that we didn't really think about, the point being more to just chew on something, anything, rather than just sit there. Not a word was spoken until the coffee came. Our waitress brought us hot mugs of cheap, burnt coffee accompanied by seemingly hundreds of little packets of sugar to deal with the taste. Without even asking, she knew we would want them. I put a sugar packet in before he could say a word.

“So, how have you been?”

“I've been alright, but nothing much going on.”

“Yeah, that's how it is with me too.”

A few more minutes passed, a few more sugar packets picked up and emptied, a few more clinks of the spoon in the ceramic mug, a little more added to the mark of coffee on my napkin.

“I'm a little paranoid,” I said.

“About what?”

“I don't know. How can I answer a question like that? I just am. I can't explain it.”

“Well, there's nobody here except them over there, and him, and us.”

And us, I thought to myself.

After a while walking around and not seeing much, but saying quite a bit, the red vinyl seats and abhorrent advertisements of a fast food chain seemed to have been too much and caused us to go conversationally blind; we had no idea what to say or how to break that silence we wished to so badly. It's odd that we didn't have anything to say. I knew there were thoughts going through his head; I could tell when I looked up at him. I'm not really sure what they were, but I knew they were there and that he just wouldn't tell me. He was a secretive bastard, but he always came through in a pinch. I mean, there were all the times we would go to the Chinese buffet and talk after I was dumped by my last girlfriend. And there was that time he called me at three in the morning waking me up and we actually went to that very same diner, and sat in a seat just like that one, only that night we talked about his mom and his dad and his brother and his problems with that. There were all the times we would drive to the next town up and get late night coffee and just drive back and forth. The most meaningful conversations I've had in the last couple years have been held over a hot cup of caffeine after three in the morning.

I emptied another sugar packet. He continued the conversation.

“So how are the girls down there?”

“You know how it is. They're alright, some cool people, but mostly just scenery,” I said soberly.

He laughed at me.

“Don't laugh at me when I use words correctly. Laugh when I use them incorrectly.”

The table turned silent.

I took a drink. It burnt my tongue.

We stopped off at the gas station downtown and got some cigarettes. He gave me some money and I bought them for him. We drove down to my house and walked to the back. Lifting up the latch on the chain link fence, we walked up to the deck. He sat in one of the chairs, and I shuffled around the table to sit at the end. There was an umbrella up against the moon. He tapped the package against his hand a few times, the sound resounding in the quiet of the yard. He took one out, lit it.

“You want one?”

I nodded my head. He handed me one and slid the lighter across the tabletop. I lit it and drew it all in to my post-asthmatic lungs. I breathed it out and let my hand fall down along the armrest, the smoke expanding in front of my face while at the same time obscuring him from view.

“You know I didn't mean anything by it, right?” he asked, testing the waters.

“Yeah, I know that. I've just been on edge the last few days. I think it's being here. It just puts me off in some ways. But, at the same time, it's also the only place I feel certain types of good. I don't really know how to explain it. You'll know what I mean next year.”

“Yeah, I'm sure I will.”

“It's just that sometimes this place feels like it never changes, and sometimes I look around and nothing looks the same. There's nothing here controlling time, and at the same time there's nothing here to be controlled. I don't know. Part of me thinks I'm on to something, and part of me thinks it's just that you got some good stuff earlier.”

“Don't worry about it. You're not crazy yet.”

“Yet,” I said as I laughed nervously.

Laughing, “See? I told you you'd be fine. So you really think it's alright if I stay here? There won't be any problems for you or anything having to explain this to your parents?”

“No, it isn't a problem. You know how much they like you around, no clue in the world why, but they do,” I said laughing again. “You remember that time that you got caught here just sitting around waiting for me to show up and you were eating our chips on our couch just watching TV?”

“Yeah, I remember that. What must your parents think of me? I can't believe some of the stuff they know about me.”

“Hell, the stuff your parents know about me, sometimes I wonder if they know me better than myself.”

“Yeah, it seems like everybody knows quite a bit about us. Hopefully we'll catch on to it sometime too.”

I looked up at him slowly, but it felt like a stare. The wind blew somewhere nearby. It could be heard in the distance.

He hurriedly handed me another cigarette after realizing mine had been gone. We smoked these last two in silence, just looking around us. A little bit of snow was falling, whispering its way down.

“It's getting cold for me, you want to head in?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure. Don't worry about my being around in the morning. I know you've got a lot of stuff going on before you go back to school. I'm thinking about going down to the boat launch and watching the sun come up anyway. I found this really cool spot. If you sit in the back corner of the band shell down there, you can watch the light start to brighten up from the other side of the lake behind the trees. You should try it sometime.”

“Yeah, I'll have to do that.”

“Besides, I think I'm going to meet my brother for breakfast downtown somewhere. He had to stick around the house all night and I felt kind of bad that I wasn't doing anything with him. I know he must have been bored out of his mind. So, don't worry about me in the morning.”

“Yeah, like I'd worry about you being around in the morning.”

We walked around to the front door. I unlocked it and let us in. My dogs raised their heads slowly and looked at us like we didn't know what we were doing. We crept up the stairs and walked down the hallway to my room, stumbling in the dark as if the dogs had been right. I told him that he could sleep on the recliner in the corner. I went to the bathroom and then downstairs to get him a blanket. When I brought it back, I threw it at him.

“You remember the last time I slept in here?” he asked.

I answered as I pulled off my t-shirt and, leaving my jeans on, I crawled into bed, “Yeah, I do, but I don't want to remember anything right now. I just want to get in my bed, shut my eyes, and not remember anything for a while.”

I woke up, tired, at 8 the next morning and he was still there in the armchair asleep. I decided I would go get a shower and then come back and wake him. I got some stuff that I would need, then went down the hall to the bathroom. Once inside, I took a minute and looked at myself in the large mirror. I looked a little gaunter than the last time I'd been home. I'd lost weight. I'd lost other things as well. I needed to shave. I needed to get some sleep at some point so I wouldn't look like a wreck when I went back. I undid the button on my jeans and unzipped them. I grabbed a handful of denim to start them off and then let gravity slump them to the floor. I stuck one thumb on the band of my boxers and hooked those down to the ground as well. I found a towel in the closet and got in the shower.

I did remember the last time he slept in that room. We were a lot younger then. We had just gotten back from a concert in Chicago and had been having a really great night. He slept on the floor that night and we cracked jokes in the dark before we were too tired to understand what we were saying to one another. It seemed like so long ago, but it had actually only been a few years back.

I dried off and walked back to my room. He wasn't there. I started to get dressed and sat on the edge of my bed as I slipped on the dress socks and shoes. Where the hell did he go? After all of it was finished, I walked downstairs.

“Hey, you don't know where…”

“He just left,” my dad answered. “He said he was off to get some breakfast with his brother or something.”

I looked out the window in the front door. Damn it. He would do that to me, wouldn't he.

I got my jacket out of the closet and started toward the door. I walked down the front steps and toward my car to go to church. My mom stepped out onto the front porch.

“Hey, we'll see you there in a few minutes.”

I stopped myself from sliding in, the door open to me.

“Yeah, I'll see you there. I think I'll stop off and get some coffee first.”

Someone To Lay Beside - February 2009

2009-02-21T13:13:00.001-08:00

Someone To Lay Beside

He was laying in bed. She was on the other side of the mattress. He turned to his side and looked over at her. He scooted a little closer, awkwardly, but unknown to her sleeping body. She was fast asleep facing the ceiling with one arm curved over her unbridled hair and her legs slightly turned away from him, the inside of her knees uncautiously open to him. He crawled up next to her extending his left arm, his hand brushing over her stomach. She awoke and, turning toward him, lightly dragged her right hand's fingertips down his forearm which had been exposed by the thin sheet collapsing back when he had moved. She briefly looked down at him, not realizing that he had been awake longer than a moment. He looked up at her and held her eyes open with his, even through the darkness of the room. Then turning from their held glance to let her fall back asleep, he pulled her closer into an embrace just loose enough that they were able to lay comfortably. He was able to fall asleep.

Marriage - February 2009

2009-02-20T13:11:00.000-08:00

Marriage

“What do you think of marriage?”

“Oh, marriage. I don't know. It always seemed like more of a reaching out than a reaching, at least to me. You know what I mean?”

She did.

“It just seems as if everyone's going for something, anything, more than what they have already, and when they get there they realize it's not the end-all, be-all, solve-all that they were expecting. They expect a solution and they end up with a situation they have to try and make work out. I don't know if you understand what I'm saying. Maybe it doesn't make sense.”

He looked over at her from behind the wheel and saw her face. Through the windshield, the light came down and reflected from the ridge of her eyebrows to the ridge of her cheekbone and around the inside of those valleys making everything that happened within them. And at that moment, she was looking back at him.

“I understand what you mean,” she nearly whispered without breaking her glance.

He broke the stare to look back at the road, “Okay, maybe it's not all wrong then.”

Isaac - February 2009

2009-02-18T20:40:00.001-08:00

Isaac

He was born on the eighteenth of July, 1947. No one quite understood how it had come about, just that he had come. His mother lived on the edge of town in one of the shacks that numbered too many, built out of boards and dirt never-ending. She had no contact with nearly anyone in the village, only passing coins back and forth between the woman who owned the local store, and only that much communication every few weeks when it was absolutely necessary. No one had seen her for months, and even fewer had been seen near her hut. Most assumed she was dead, the worst assumed she had been killed, the best that she had finally given up her solitude in this world for something better in the next. And so, it was with near alarm that her closest neighbors heard a child's cry on that balmy July night. They turned to each other around their little huts with a look of shock upon their faces. No thoughts were able to take hold in their minds. No other scream had been heard.

The next day the local mothers decided to go and look, because there had not been another sound throughout the night. They knocked on the door and it swung open on its hinges nearly rusted away. The woman sat inside on the bed, the only piece of furniture other than the rocking chair in the corner. She looked up at them, and said, haltingly, “His name is Isaac. Take care of him as if he were your own. There is no life for him here.” One of the women hesitatingly crept across the dirt floor to her side and grabbed the child as if snatching it away but in a much slower motion, as if swimming through freezing water. As the woman walked backwards across the hut with Isaac, his mother looked up at him, and then they knew she had died. She sat there, leaning against the wall in her bed, blood soaking the sheets, having uttered the only words they had ever heard her say, eyes open to the world, as all dead people unafraid of their fate do. One of them closed her eyes out of fear for their own.

An Ant - February 2009

2009-02-18T08:48:00.000-08:00

An Ant

He sat underneath the tree, it was dusk. There was no one else there except for the grass around his underlaying feet. The passing sunlight played across his face as he looked up to see its parting farewell across the plain. Too many things had happened. Too many to explain. He looked down at his jean-wearing leg in the dry dirt. An ant was crawling across it and stopped moving about halfway down his calf. It looked up toward him for a moment, almost as if it knew what it was doing. He looked back down at it.

An Update

2009-02-17T13:49:00.000-08:00

I haven't been on here in a while, so I figured I'd just update you guys on what's going on with my writing. The most immediate being that I've written a few little things, like what I've written in the past, I'll have those up in the next few days probably, as always let me know what you think of them if you think anything. The somewhat more long term, but not really, being that I'm writing a normal length short story for my class which I'm revising like crazy until I have to turn it in. I would say expect that to be posted in the next couple weeks, some of you will probably read it beforehand, but give me a little longer to edit it. Well, that's the long and short of it, so I'll talk to you soon.

Character Description

2009-01-31T18:49:00.001-08:00

Here's a character description I had to write this weekend for my short story class. I'm turning it in Sunday night, so any comments would be immensely helpful. I'm a little nervous with this being my first piece which will be seen by the whole class. Here it is:

He sat there in the dark of the room, nervously, with the light from the television playing across his face. It was a loveseat and she was sitting at the other end. He looked down at what he was wearing: a wrinkled plaid shirt, corduroys he should have washed before he wore them again, and there was a hole in his left sock. He reached up and scratched his head trying to conquer his unyieldingly unkempt hair. He stole a glance and saw her profile. He coughed softly, for no reason, but brought his hand up to his mouth to do so. She turned a little to see him. If it hadn't been so dark, she would have seen his cheeks change color just because she had looked at him. She turned back to the movie and his chest was able to relax, but his stomach could not. He put his left foot up on his right knee thinking it would look a little more at ease. She had barely looked over and turned back to the screen when she looked back again with a purpose in mind. She had turned to look at something in particular. Shit, he thought, and at that moment he realized that the foot sitting so idly on his knee was sporting the sock with the hole in it. He put the leg back down and crossed his legs the other way. Within five seconds his leg had fallen asleep and he gave up trying to look comfortable. He took a deep breath. Relax, he told himself, just watch the movie.

He didn't realize that his hand was resting in the middle of the cushion, being too preoccupied with thinking of how uncomfortable that very cushion was, until she reached over and, grabbing his hand, slid over on the couch and put their shared grasp on her leg. She put her other hand on top so that his hand was held between her two. His breath was holed up within him, no escape in sight. She looked at him for a longer moment. Immediately, his perfect posture disappeared, his breath was slowly released, and he smiled at her. They turned back to the movie and he forgot about the hole in his sock and his wrinkled shirt and his week old pants. She reached up and patted down part of his hair and grasped his hand again.

A Winter Evening Revised - Jan 2009

2009-01-12T13:40:00.000-08:00

As I've looked through some of my recent posts, I kept coming back to this one. I felt as if it were unfinished in some way, or maybe not finished correctly. I've made some pretty drastic changes in this revised version of the story. Hopefully this one improves on the previous version in some ways.

A Winter Evening

A light shone out over the darkness. Through the conifers and the snow and the night's cold blanket, rays of light weave their way into view from the grimy, dust-riddled, abandoned, woodland farmhouse.

The man looked around the dining room and continued his way through the last tour of his home. He eased his way up the creaking wood stairs, hand gliding up the old oak banister. He looked throughout his empty bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed with a heavy sigh. There was a single oil lamp on the bedside table. Shadows flickered around the room. Rubbing his fingers from his temples to his forehead and back, he closed his eyelids for a moment. He thought of the lamp. He felt, for whatever reason, that the wick should be left burning. He locked the door behind him and stepped off onto the snow-covered pathway. He walked away sure-footed, knowing where he was headed but slowly as from old age.

Inside the house, the floorboards creaked and the the wind could be heard from outside the windows and the thin walls. The corners and the furniture bathed in shadow looked at each other in wonder. The owner of the house was gone, and he was not returning. Whether it be because of the wind, the anger, sadness, or the loneliness of the house, or whether it be that the old man had left it off balance in some minuscule way, or perhaps it was just the oil lamp's own doing, but gravity worked itself upon the object in question and the oil found the wood of the bedside table, the down of the comforter, the metal springs underneath, the old oak of the banister on the stairs, and the mat on the front porch that had once invited the owner of the house back home.

It was a stark, lonely winter evening. A light shone out over the darkness.

Icestorm - December 2008

2008-12-19T10:19:00.001-08:00

Icestorm

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Little ice crystals were banging their hearts out against the glass window pane and he had just taken notice. Looking up, he looked to the dark dusk out his little viewfinder on the world. A crystal hit his window and immediately melted, but he heard it for a second, one tiny immutable portion of a second, whatever the amount of time the present is he had heard it in that moment and it sounded like a tiny pick on a guitar or maybe a hundred choir members or maybe one little girl saying, “i love you” or maybe an old man dieing. He thought to himself in reflection on that one little crystal.

All life happens simultaneously. We're moving downward, while hitting a window with all we have, while sliding down it, while melting, while being brought back up to the sky from whence we came. We hit we scream we run we laugh we cry we pack we move we stay we hug we talk we sing we walk we love.

But all it took was just one moment of listening to someone else doing all those things to realize he did them as well. All it took was one moment of quiet focus. All it took was.

All. All. All.

The Only Confession - Nov. 2008

2008-12-05T16:59:00.000-08:00

So, if you didn't know, I'm heavily influenced by what I am reading. My thoughts tend to dwell on those texts and that comes across in my writing. This is why I think if I ever want to write something truly my own, I need to spend time alone for a while. This is just a forewarning before this next one because it is heavily, to the most extreme, Augustinian. I just finished St. Augustine's Confessions which was amazing. I just wanted to preface my story with this little explanation because most of these thoughts aren't mine, although Augustine might have argued they weren't his either. This story is just the fruition of my mind still grappling with what it's been thinking about for weeks.

The Only Confession

A man sat in his study. Books and papers were piled around the room, dust sifted through the air. Light streamed through. He sat with his hands on his temples, fingertips at the edge of his hairline, thinking.

If time is a philosophical construct of the mind of Man, then it is not real. Then the way I see the world is incorrect, or at least not complete. I have said before that either I am a Christian or an Atheist, a follower of God or the God Complex. If this idea about time is true, then I am either a Christian or an Atheist already. I am already married, widowed, and dead while at the same time being born. I am already lost, alone, and crying. I am already full, complete, and wise. I am already in the abyss. I am already in the light. But where am I now, if now doesn’t exist?

He opened the book sitting to his left. “Shout out, do not hold back! Lift up your voice like a trumpet! Announce to my people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins.” He leaned back from the table. But what if the rebellion is within me, within the house of my own soul?

And then, he slowly, not in regard to time but as if softly coming to the realization, saw how if he has to overcome himself, he must be saved from himself. If his own ideas were keeping him from understanding, then they were what needed to be overcome. If he thought in regard to time, something needed to stop his thought, his reason, his humanity. If time is an illusion, then so is my reality and so is what I think I am right now.

I do not understand.

And with that, a song was sung with the sound coming before the song but in the same moment.

A Winter Evening - Oct 2008

2008-11-01T20:27:00.000-07:00

A Winter Evening

A light shone out over the darkness. Through the conifers and the snow and the night's cold blanket you see rays of light weaving their way into your sight from the grimy, dust-riddled second story window of the abandoned, woodland farmhouse.

The man looked around the dining room and continued his way through the last tour of his home. He eased his way up the creaking wood stairs, hand gliding up the old oak banister. He looked throughout his empty bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed with a heavy sigh. There was a single oil lamp on the bedside table. Shadows flickered around the room. Rubbing his fingers from his temples to his forehead and back, he closed his eyelids for a moment. He thought of the lamp. He knew no one would be going this way, but he thought to himself and decided that he would leave the wick burning. Yes, the oil would eventually burn out and there was no one to be expected. But, he thought. He left the little flame burning. He locked the door behind him and stepped off onto the snow-covered pathway. He walked away knowing where he was headed but slowly as from old age.

It was a stark, lonely winter evening. A light shone out over the darkness.

Watching Leaves on an Autumn Morning - Oct 2008

2008-10-20T08:59:00.000-07:00

Watching Leaves on an Autumn Morning

The leaves trembled, shaking as if from the cold. They awoke in the first grays of dawn. Small drops of rain tumbled from the sky alighting upon one leaf, sitting still, gravitating toward the edge and hesitating for a brief moment, as a suicidal man on the Mackinac Bridge remembering the last he loved, then falling to the next leaf to start again.

The nocturnal rain clouds faded away as the sun rays faded in over the far off hills on the horizon. It was early enough that every new section of the colored sky seemed like a single stream of light aimed precisely for where it landed. And when the beams reached the trees, they echoed from drop to drop, leaf to leaf, branch to branch, tree to tree, like some nearly nonexistent web of heavenly light.

The sun covered the earth and warmed it in its embrace. The light grew until it seemed as if, instead of landing on the leaves, it emanated from them. Some form of energy brought forth from the deep, deep roots. The wind started to play among them, twisting and turning and brushing some of them aside. The wind made its way through the branches of the trees lining the dirt road, while below a boy ambled down the graveled path rattling pebbles with a stick he had picked up as he found his way back home.

A Chance Encounter - Sept 2008

2008-10-20T08:54:00.000-07:00

A Chance Encounter

A man and woman were walking in opposite directions down the sidewalk of a side street in a busy city. They bumped elbows forcefully and were turned by it. They looked toward one another and their searching eyes met.

The man came from a working class family and grew up in the suburbs. He had worked his way to his present position. He was having a bit of bad luck and had gone out to get a cup of coffee to think about it all.

The woman had always lived in the city. She worked for the newspaper in the entertainment section doing music reviews. She knew where all the important places to be were as far as the social scene went and physically participated but was never really drawn in much by it.

The two of them would have gotten a small apartment and loved each other very much. They would have had three children, two boys and a girl in the middle, and have been very good parents. The woman would have consoled the daughter after the break up of her first relationship. The man would have checked into their rooms each night after they'd gone to bed and kissed them all lightly on the forehead. They would have eventually moved to the country and bought a small, quaint house. They would have lived there until the end of their days. She would have died first and been buried in a little spot by the church just down the street. He would quietly go about his life for the next few years reminiscing about her until he joined her in their little plot.

"I'm sorry I bumped into you."

"No, really, it's my fault. I'm sorry."

And they both kept walking their different ways down the sidestreet.

An Elder Man on a Park Bench - Sept 2008

2008-10-20T08:48:00.000-07:00

An Elder Man on a Park Bench

There is a man sitting in a park. He looks left. He looks right. He looks up at the sky and then sighs. He is sitting on a bench on an open pathway in a park in a city. It is a nice Fall day. The wind is slightly blowing, just enough to see the leaves tumble across the increasingly dull grass.

He had walked here this morning from his apartment in the city. Everyone he passed was looking down, briefcase in hand, silent, on their own way. Even the sky seemed busy with all the skyscrapers crowding it. The park was his place to go on days which felt like this.

Sitting in the park, he began to observe. A woman walked by with her energetic dog as if it were a chore. A man walked by talking on his cell phone to some unknown businessman. A woman went jogging past with headphones preoccupying her brain. The man sighed.

He remembered a more vivid time in this park. A young man and woman walking with their arms around each other. They smiled and laughed as they spoke. They looked up into the tree branches and it seemed as if the colors of the leaves changed before their eyes. They sat on the park bench, looking across the pond at all that was going on.

The man stood and walked from the park. Today it hadn't helped. He bought a newspaper on the way home. Bustling through another group of people, he lost grip of the pages and they fell to the sidewalk. A young girl walking past bent down and picked them up. "Here you go, sir." And she smiled in her eyes as well as with her mouth.

"Thank you." He walked away with a tear welling in his eye. Today was a very good day.

Sitting by the Telephone - Sept 2008

2008-10-20T08:43:00.000-07:00

Sitting by the Telephone

He set the condensating water glass down on the wooden coffee table. A pool formed around the bottom edge within minutes. He drummed his fingertips on the tabletop. His foot tapped a silent rhythm in the air beneath the chair. He scratched his day old beard and coughed subtly. He had told himself he wouldn't do this. It had been two days and his inner clock was already off. He had gotten a partial message, "Hi... I know I shouldn't be doing this, but... it just felt like I needed to... I wonder what you're thinking..." Click.

He needed to move beyond this chair in his small apartment. He stood. He walked to the coathanger and pulled the sleeves up his arms, settled the jacket on his shoulders. Wrapping a scarf around his neck, he felt the scratch of his facial hair on wool. He opened the door. He walked out and down the stairs. He was going to get a drink at the local coffeeshop and when he returned he would shave. And then he would go from there.

The First Post

2008-10-20T08:41:00.001-07:00

This is my writing journal where I will put things which I have written since the beginning of college and onward. Everything older is on my livejournal for those of you who know me already. Any responses and thoughts on anything I write is appreciated and sought. Thanks for reading!