DISTURBIA

First, the names of the streets: Valleyview at the top, Hudsonview in the middle, and then mine--Eleanor Drive.  Of course my street was named after a woman.  No lofty vista name for me, just a girl, some girl long lost to the NYC transplants who moved up here pushing their backs against real live farm country, Westchester County's last gasp before the rest of the state started its rural Hudson-Valley-ing in earnest.  Valley, Husdon, Eleanor, all perpendicular to Crossroads St., flowing downhill at a ninety degree angle to the others.

When our side yard collapsed I remember (maybe it's all made up) that it was attributed to an underground river, the flow of water from down the hill above us beneath the lawn I mowed constantly in the summer, below there was a cavern I would have gladly gotten lost in like a Hardy boy had I know it was there all along.  And the nest of yellow jackets that took up resisdence each June took on a whole new significance--if there was a cave, a network of vestibules beneath the grass maybe this tiny hole from which an industrious line of bees erupted when it started to get really hot was just the tip of an iceberg of drones and deep below a massive queen lay on her side spraying a hiss of larval insects coating the walls with a mania of menace.  One false step beneath the tangle of forsythia and neglected grape vine and down you'd go, stung over and over until you bloated and puss'd like a boiling pot of maple syrup.  

Behind the house a plateau for the rest of the neighborhood standing tall above, shitting and pissing into the water table, a pool collected momentarily in sight of our porch and the septic fields overran.  We soon learned to make home plate on the side of the house instead of behind though the backyard's longness and flatness was a perfect arena for one-on-one ball; your Keds ("7.07's" as they were known in local parlance) soon soaked well enough leaving an Armstrong footprint in the bright green well-fertilized lawn, teaching an adequate lesson of stink about this no-play zone.  From there, a rock wall, a line of trees and then an open field, another downhill, a wintertime sled hill, ending in a place known as "Freedom Gardens."  These names all must sound like something different to the casual reader.  To thems what was raised in this magical kingdom "Freedom Gardens" was an irony of the scariest, bedtime story, fairy tale splendor--the wolf in a red cape, the menacing hag with a tasty apple.  Nothing "Free" ever lived there in our experience--it weren't no garden!  Grown over fountains and lawn sculpture and half-dilapidated manses with B-movie vines and Boo Radley's peeking out from paint-peeling windows.  Sometimes they roamed weirdly and haphazardly in too-small clothing and over grown hair (where there was hair) or disturbingly bald-patched and blue lipped--wild-eyed monsters to a 7 year old being given an unsupervised run of nature.

Dennis almost drowned in the stream after sliding off an algaed rock.  I extended a limb as he wirlpooled momentarily and he dragged himself out.  We roamed the woods.  Down here at the very base of what would be known as a "development" in future years, everything collected.  Swamps swamped up in the spring and dried out in the summer.  The mud shimmered irredescent for some reason we couldn't understand but we did know if you clobbered the "skunk cabbage" with a stick you could raise a holy smell.

One summer we found a dead dog.  We determined that he must've fallen off the log and lost the ability to move and just died there.  Who knows what really happened but that's the story I have buried in the deep of my memory for no good reason.  Maybe he wandered down here in the woods because he was too sick though I know cats were more likely to go off and die than dogs were.  Maybe some Dad dumped him here, unwanted.  When we found him though his stomach was a boliling stew of maggots and Drake retched behind a tree while we laughed at him until we peed our bell bottoms.

If you kept walking you would eventually come upon an abandoned stone house, graffiti'd, blown out and collapsing.  The trees hung over and every shadow lengthened eerily.  No one would ever go in there.  Here was the smell of moulded wood and sweet discarded beer bottles filled with rain water, pot smoker campfire and garbage.  I came upon an old issue of Hustler and peeled open a water logged centerfold and found a leering pink pussy, pried open by a leering pale model, the first one I really got a good look at.

I know why the Blair Witch Project was a really scary movie.  I don't like nature all that much.  When you wander too far from home--from the safety of the lodge and the park ranger--the possibilities begin to expand, and anything can happen.  A line of cops a mile long could comb the woods and they may never find you.  I'm not embarrassed to say I enjoy a nice mall.  I'm not looking for anything exotic.  Maybe I got too much nature as a kid.  Maybe I drank my fill.  I can find a certain peace and quiet on a crowded street, a dirty old bus, a train car lumbering through a rat infested subway tunnel.

In my nightmares I wake up in the woods, not knowing the way home.

Coney Island Baby

B’s all Buddhist chanting, and planning for a second life which she will never see. She chants for reason, clarity, and the loving understanding of others, but she’s probably just finding a stillness in the somewhat self-imposed tornado of earlier life. She says things like “I would love to write an adult porno story”, and years ago when told of our mutual friend SL, the one whose hands she misses, and the fact that I, by proxy, caused her marriage to end (simply by an introduction to someone I had no interest in bedding anymore, if I ever had, and someone who I knew would never make the long haul with her either, but he was useless, and I found his one function, and put him to work it seems…), she would just make this deliciously excited face and say repeatedly “scandalous”! She is all for inner peace, washing out the toxicity with your own powers, and success in the world, as herself, but won’t hesitate to tell me to not cut my long hair, for reasons such as: “no…..for your wedding night!” (5 years ago), “noooo, the men love it” (2.5 years ago) and “when you work on clients (to my unspecified but wholly un-scandalous future profession), you can keep it in a long braid and let it sweep up and down their back as you work”.

She had no qualms, when you put the questions to her right and opened up her past tirades. No more happy hours for her. On a most infamous night, she started after work –at happy hour- and kept going until 10pm at least. Feels like a whole day has passed in those hours of hard drinking sometimes. When the Happy Hour is about to conclude, you order 3 drinks at the special price so you can keep the live wire sparking in your empty stomach as long as your mascara can hold out. And, did she ever wear it. Great Lash, the cheap drug store shit which was “all there was”, and thick, and clumped and out there. Five inch heels, “a few hundred pounds lighter” and a big Afro and disco era dress leading her way. She was ripped, as she said, along with her cousin who was out drinking with her. Unbinding her book messily, quickly, too many stitches at a time. She had to pee, finally, and had her tall heels in her right hand. No ladies room. Just a men’s room. So messy and drunk, she could only do what any good thinking drunkardess would – step barefoot, quietly into the men’s room, and look around. The stall doors were shut, causing some mild trepidation, and the urinals just taking up the space, one had burst with water like a bidet for men gone haywire in the corner of the floor. She stayed away from that great fountain, and noticed a drain in the middle of the floor. So, without much thought, she hiked up her dress and squatted down as far as she could. About halfway through, one stall door started to sway open – she was mortified, but also too drunk to stop (her first time with Captain Tanqueray) or move. A homeless man was sitting on the toilet in that stall, wearing black garbage bags as clothing – but not only that. Do you know, he had cut fucking fringes into it, like a high fashion motherfucker? And she couldn’t move. She couldn’t stop that steady stream of gin piss streaming out of her. She Could scream though. And she did, but the thing was, the homeless man in the stall, right in front of her face, he screamed too. Right in her face. In the middle of this screaming match came a cop. He must have laughed his law enforcing ass off. She had to explain to him in so many attempts at words that there had not been a ladies room. In hearing her story, I’m pretty sure she was mistaken. When is there ever Not a ladies room?

The other main tale told was on the night which was “the beginning of the end of my marriage”. This one made the first look terribly humane, and safe. Same situation, same drinking partner – she was so unbound yet again, that on the train home to Coney Island, she sat herself down next to a miniature sized Hispanic man of unknown origin – after sweeping some papers off the seat and down to the ground. She, with her long lashes and big Afro, curled up next to him, laying her head in his tiny lap and sleeping like a baby until she felt a tap-tap on her…shoulder, I’m presuming. He told her, in an accented and soft voice that this was the last stop, and he couldn’t get up in all that time, because she had formed such a tight grip onto his legs while she slept. She stumbled down the platform, her husband waiting for her after her drinking partner had told him she was in a messy state. He said he was scared at what the end result was, so he left the car home. She put those five inch heels right back on, and stumbled delicately home and away from him. She tells me she could walk on ice in those heels. Over subway grates? Tippy toed, like a ballerina. Even when drunk? But of course, you always remember to, it’s in your soul. On that night, she managed to get home and undressed and into bed, passing out again. Her husband comes home, and rolls up that blanket and sheet combination and does nothing other than tries to smother her in her sleep. She tells this unaffected, and almost with the chagrin of someone who knows full well that’s what she deserved. Unsuccessful, and after two weeks of silence, he tells her what a mess she was, and that her drinking partner had told him that she was laying all over this man on the train. She neglected to mention the dead asleep part. He remembered and noted that her mascara was all over her face, and her Afro was all flat on one side – the picture it must have made. To top it all off, she had just given birth and had a one month old at home. The pump and run technique was utilized with all success, depending on your idea of success.

So ended that era, and probably one or two of the main reasons why she talks of drinking, tying one on, cocktails, like one would talk of a honeymoon in Hawaii – with absolute wistfulness, nostalgia, the sort that brings a sparkle to your eye each and every time you relive it all. Now, she sits in her quiet place, alone and padded by a lot more of her than she ran around with before, chanting and hoping for clearer days, and giving into that selfless still beam of something greater, which she can chase with equal abandon, while at home, insulated, safe – but betwixt and between that incense of myrrh, wafting around the bend from that new leaf she’s turned, the corner of her quiet mouth is always cracked upwards a bit – looking through the smoke and mirrors for her high heeled shoes, and turning into and away from a mischievous half-smile.

~ M. Lucia

You can never go home again.

Even when you do, you realise you don't belong here anymore.  It, as it once belonged to you, ceases its knowing.  It can't look you in the eyes. Its towering heights and individual galaxies seem tiny to you now.  Why does that dress shop look like it houses the Exact same prom dresses as it did in 1985?  Mix a few more asian-rican cultural misgivings into the mix, and the cart that once probably sold leotards now sells equally as tacky cell phone covers, and the slightest shift to one side, and here you are.

Walking through the diner parking lot, someone grabs your hand from the right, and you turn with a jerk, but its just the boy, wanting to hold your hand.  He says, slurred and with the beginnings of little skater boy, you "roooooooccccckkkk".  "And you're weird too".  You agree, and admit that this must be the reason you rock.  Push-pull, that was branded onto you a long time ago, not too far from this sloping city-town.  Somehow, farther up north, where you last belonged, in the "real" country, with dirt roads, and rivers you took boys to, no street lights, no malls, it felt like someplace else. This felt like a wind tunnel, of invisible snowy trees that no one saw or paid any mind to, whipping winds back and forth of each repeated, undeniable, unbeatable strip mall.  The residents of the rural places preferred going to the strip club off of route 32A, nestled under the mountains, considering it a fine place to spend a snowy evening, drink up and lose some dollars, smile at other people a bit-- they made more sense to you than these people.  These people were stuck in an infomercial, and you couldn't believe how much waste their lives seem to lay claim to, with some kind of consumerist fatigue, like they got all done up in the most ridiculous way possible while they waited - to be put blindly out of their misery.  You might wonder if it looked this way in 1985, before you all departed onto your the million dollar waterside adventures, and all the rest that followed you back here, to this day.

And then him in the back of your mind, still there after declaring he was locking himself into his hermit home, again and without the wherewithal to listen to your advice, as you gave it: "despite your head, you are a man. Stand up".  Maybe in a time before malls, but not before those same who came out for the show - little did they know of their very own self imposed group executions- before the water made men into pussies, and women into caricatures of themselves, prisoners to everything that hurt them again and again, maybe it was then, in some biblical-type-ridden desert town, or in the middle of a battlefield after defeat, or after love was thrown out with little care by you, perhaps his DNA remembered this and this is his way of getting back at you.  From deep inside his message box, morse code ramblings of a lonely young man, who was stuck forever between action and thought, feeling and the realization of it, and between cowardice and absolute understanding, he sits.  Waiting for a saviour, and you, despite your sacrifices, longing, days forever gone on the calendar, you - are not it.

So, round goes the highway, and back down past the street from both his and your homes, where he stays locked away, his dog beckoning at his feet, so needy and he cannot understand why, nearby there you find yourself inside that hundred year old bar, where you see the shadow of yourself, drunk and brand new, him leaning over you, enthralled and amazed that your liquid eyes still could make out the black and white photograph on the wall of the bar's infamous owner - on stage, with a noose around his neck.  Head cocked, in a shoddy suit.  Hair long, and wild.  "Waiting for Godot", you said.  "Yes", he said.  He's still trying to figure out your secrets, as he stares at the blank wall, alone.  Your shadow, holding his hand from the right side of him.

~ M. Lucia

Wallace Dialogue Resource

Why did we evolve this way?


Why is it sometimes I don't want to get out of bed in the morning when I HAVE to--it would seem to benefit me to have evolved with a self-preservational instinct for dragging my ass out of the warmth and psychological  cover of dreamland.  What makes the farmer rise at the crack of dawn's freshly laid egg?  Habit or instinct?  Would it work as well if it was only just a sense of responsibility?  An ethic?  Much is made of that and that personality type, regional as it is often asserted, but it has to be more.  Even if it's just an affinity for the animals.  Something somewhere--some higher more complicated truth--that could allow for both a loving feeding, milking hand and still a steady hand with the butcher's tool.  


What if we evolved without teeth, if that were possible--what if there was a safe evolutionary line that could still be drawn through the treacherous waters of tribal-plain-hunter-gatherer existence even without the ability to tool-lessly tear at raw animal flesh or with only an extraordinary ability to grind plants with rocks while on the run   from predators.  I think we would still have an affection for foody matters; we would still think of exciting ways to prepare and present our food pastes.


Which is all to say that the truth comes out no matter what.  So maybe the desire to not get out of bed means I shouldn't.


It took 410 days to build the Empire State Building.  You know how I know that?  Because you can actually type "How long did it take to build the Empire State Building?" into Google and before you get to typing the word "take" it's already suggesting possible ways to complete your query including "to build Noah's Ark?" and "to build the Great Wall of China" and "for the Titanic to sink," which all makes one acutely aware that one is not the first person to tread upon this ground.  Which is only slightly unnerving.  It's a comfort to know someone's been here before but it also makes you feel a little dirty.  Until, that is, you get over yourself and realize that it's all dirty.  You think you're the first person to think about not wanting to get out of bed?  Or to dread the coming days when you wont have teeth to chew your food and how in ancient times that would mean being left out to starve beyond the walls?  Or even fucking your mother?  I mean shit, Oedipus was first performed in 429 BC (again, Google).


I very much enjoy the word "inveterate."  I like the way it sounds.  I like saying it.  I like drinking wine until I get intoxicated too but I know there's a limit to that kind of behavior--that it will ultimately do damage presumably to my liver--I'm not a doctor so I'm just going on conventional wisdom here.  So but do you think everything boils down to "it's either good for you or bad for you?" the way our society seems to suggest?  And if so where would saying the word "inveterate" over and over to yourself fall--on which side of the good vs. bad line?  Assuming of course that you could get past the obvious notion that someone who repeats the same word over and over to oneself would eventually get marginalized by his or her social circle and even most likely committed in some form of institution where food paste is served on a regular basis with no regard whatsoever for the charms of so-called haute cuisine.  Well maybe that's the point - that it is therefore "bad for you" by definition since being marginalized and served three meals a day of low-grade nutritionally balanced but aesthetically questionable potluck is quote-unquote bad.  But beyond that, do you think that in the long run saying "inveterate" over and over to myself would eventually prove to either be good or really bad for me?  Has anyone ever tried?  Maybe like in the way certain mantras can lead to higher thought or at a minimum focus one on the soi-disant more important things in life, repeating a word over and over can get you there too.  Maybe it depends on the word.  Maybe inveterate gets you off the wheel of samsara but, like, "pantyhose" consigns you to the 4th circle.  Food for thought.


Inveterate...inveterate...inveterate.  I could go on all day.

I write these words with the cheap pen given to me by a crippled old man, the man being the elderly father of a prematurely broken young man who used to mean the world to me. If he still means the world to me I am unwilling to find out. I do not invite contemplation of the person, nor the accompanying emotions that I have so deftly edited out.

Somehow this pen has survived the cleansing.

The pen is cheap and has no interesting features. Being of the sort that values good design, I question this pen’s survival in my life. It should be out of ink—tossed. I have more precise writing instruments. I question the comfort I feel when it is grasped in my hand. The smooth yet grainy black shaft is stamped with words set in small yellow type. They read:

Just A Reminder

December 22 is My Birthday

Roger Peterson

Happy Birthday! Sorry Roger. Better late than never.

The House of Orion

No cherubic curls on his inside face,
he's all sugar in his shoes;
no interventionist god could keep him
from circling every ellipse that called to his sky.

He sees me, yells my name as he runs straight to me.
Jumps up and hugs me, and I lift him right up, never to disappoint
holding court in his path.
Spin him round his universe a few decent fold,
follow him down the hall and kick an accidentally laid
pirate ship that clocks my foot in its walk.

He fumbles and tries to offer me a seat
at his table.  It's covered in boy's things,
straight arrows shooting,
toys and apparatus and parts to unknown wholes...
he lifts up a small, wooden folding chair for me.
I don't really fit, but I sit down anyway.

We are colouring in the lines, near enough
and he makes sure to tell me that
I can use any colour I like.  Just make the
hero's hair yellow like his.  It's turned to
golden brown now, his curls frayed
and more like windblown fields of a wave,
commanding him to sail the seas, bite
the breezes and fight each and every roadblock.
He already knows what it is to be a man.

When he is denied, or angered or frustrated,
he sticks up his little fists, round and over-exaggerated
like a boxer in an antiquated era. 
"Ding-ding-ding" he yells, and sounds the bell
ready to fight, win and conquer.
In the same breath, he ushers into character-
A baby, a cat, a horse, all three.
Crawl around, and run at me:
wants my attention every four and half minutes,
at the least.

Invites me to the train museum,
near the place where I grew up, away from the city.
The feeling of that past forces me into the age I am,
and all that has been gained, lost and recombined
between then and now.  He reads this in my eyes-
and I say yes, as we dance
and he stops to kiss my hand, and then continues.

When it's time to leave, my coat already on, he
jumps onto the bed, and says "no no no...
you Can't leave" and wraps his arms tightly
his grip around my neck.  He's getting stronger,
and knows it, but still like a little child curls
his legs around me, the core of his boyhood
working from inside me now. 

He knows I will be his, the golden light
warming from beneath the unseen portion
of the sunset drowning in all his colours of blue,
stone encapsulated at the front of his pirate ship
I remain;
there to catch his wild dogs, and turn them into
stars fixed safely in his sky.

He knows this too, as he smiles into me,
kisses my cheeks and remains,
not releasing with his grip.
I must promise to come on his trip
and I do.  I hug him hard,
and manage to release his ever growing
arms from my neck.

Later that night, I sit, and still feel that
force,
not letting go.  God help me
if I ever have a son like him. 
There is comfort in that feeling,
not leaving me. 

~ M. Lucia

The dream-eaters had gone to town on the place,
furniture overturned, clothing torn—hearts broken.
What they were looking for Nobody knew,
the remnants they had left behind were difficult to swallow.
Nobody was keeping quiet.

WALTER

Vinny Shrimp had hated his nickname which maybe goes without saying--goes without saying, that is, if you lived in the same neighborhood.


The name his mother gave him was Donald--or Don...Donnie even.  It's a name he liked because it was his father's name and the name of his favorite baseball player ever--Donald Arthur Mattingly, also known as Don and even sentimentally as "Donnie Baseball."


He started being called "Vinny" after a period of time being called "Vincent," same as Vincent De Gallo, the obese car salesman with the combover who sold Vinny Shrimp's boss, Charles "Chassis" Cooke, his Cutlass Supreme that same summer that Donald aka "Vinny" Shrimp Jr.'s father, Donald Shrimp Sr. died in a car accident on the Belt Parkway, also driving an Oldsmoblie though not a Cutlass S. of course since Sr. was a day laboring welder--more of a union hall sloucher really.


Chassis thought that since Don Jr. had a bit of a weight problem and a German nose similar to De Gallo's, that it would be funny to start calling Don Jr. "Vincent," for the first week, and then "Vinny."  So much so (funny that is) that eventually everyone used the name which then just became his actual name, though it wasn't.


The fact that Chassis could be so insensitive as to effectively change his name for him right after the father who actually gave him his real name had died in an accident in a car of the same MAKE as the one that Chassis had purchased from the disgusting person whose name he now carried around like so much psychological baggage was no surprise since Chassis was THAT guy in the neighborhood - you know, the one who ran it effectively, through influence peddling, protection and bookmaking - "the rackets" they call it.


So what could he do?


Strangely, no one had ever thought to make fun of his last name.  No one, that is, since Frankie Lombardi, the kid in first grade who started calling him "Scampi" in the lunchroom and then at least 10 times on the playground before (then-)Don pushed him hard enough from behind to drive his face (his nose mostly) into the red brick of the school building.  "Scampi" was actually a pretty creative nickname and Don didn't actually get the joke--no one did really.  But it did SOUND funny and therefore required some action otherwise it would stick.


Don had one of those moments of clarity years later ordering from the menu of what he thought, then, was an upscale Miami Beach restaurant (since it was for him relative to the McDonalds and diner food that comprised the sum total of his childhood "dining out" experience) and noticed "Shrimp Scampi" (served with pasta & salad, your choice of dressing) on the "House Specialities" portion of the menu and all at once remembered Frankie Lombardi's dad's restaurant "Lombardi's" in Howard Beach, and Frankie's from-then-on crooked nose and ahead-of-his-time orthodonture (there had been teeth on the playground blacktop along with blood from the nose too) and it just CLICKED and he laughed and laughed at Frankie's joke, and he kept laughing even after the maitre-D came over to ask him "is everything alright, sir?" which actually embarrassed the "escort" Don had hired to go to the fight with him to the point that she called him "a fucking asshole" and left.  Don had ordered the Scampi and had Thousand Island on his salad, had chuckled through the whole meal and then found a hooker off the street to go with him to the fight, saving himself money since he didn't have to buy her dinner.  All in all a good night.


Everyone knew the story.  If he had had a moment of self-reflection for a second in his life Don would know that was why no one had ever made fun of his last name.  Why it had taken years and the stature of the neighborhood Don to actually tag him again.  He might have even delved into the psychology of Chassis and realized he (Chassis) didn't want anyone else in the neighborhood being called "Don" although no one actually called Chassis that since he was Irish and didn't go in for any of that greaseball bullshit.  And he might not have been so surprised when, after Vincent De Gallo was found with his face smashed, in a pool of blood and teeth, at the foot of the brickwall behind Cicci's Automart, people stopped calling him Vinny, though they didn't call him Don then either.


But he never would have been able to figure out why everyone had started calling him "Walter."  

Ohio State Prison - Part 5

Kirk’s head hurt.  He was never good with headaches, but they kept coming thick and fast, and since he found himself in here, he more cherished those rare, inopportune (and short) interludes wherein the head ache would just ease off into the distance and almost…Almost leave him alone.  Like a bright, openness, coming out of a winter sky, crisp and making its way onto your face as you found yourself too wrapped up in clothes and layers.  The feeling of release, which he always thought to be fashioned in a white mixing with green, petals on Eucalyptus leaves which did not help Kirk from far away, wherever they grew, some place warm…A place like many, he knew in his chest he would never ever see.  When the times start coming, in the chitter chatter and flogging sessions within each new layer of the headache, wherein the absolutes start to become things, experiences and places you know you WON’T ever see, is when you begin to resign yourself. 

Being in there made that easy for Kirk.  He clung to this resignation, because nothing was ever easy for Kirk.  He poured more and more information into his head; or rather it was poured there without pause by those Jesuits.  It was as if they held him down and force fed him (and he accepted willfully) every of the canons of which they sheltered, once died and killed for the right to bear and teach.  Everything but the religion was imparted to him.  In name only.  That’s how they appeared to him.  He was taught to take care of himself and not allow anyone to make him weak, because school was like war, or at least like a microcosm of the society that the boys would be expected to accept into them, a disease they had to have by the tail and not heal from, or rise above, but integrate into, the parasite at their side leading them through the thoroughfares, whispering tactics and dispelling weakness in their ears.  He took to it like a general.  But his was always a defensive get up and go – strike first, so they don’t take you down with them in their struggles or strife.  All that becomes a system in your head – Kirk’s head could rival the best factories the post industrial age had to offer.  His machines worked exclusively for him, and told him to fear the idea of something larger.  If you ruled over your own strife, you took its broken pieces to bed with you too.  He always had accepted responsibility.  Even in here. 

Kirk was by far the most educated of the prisoners.  They were a lively bunch to be true – young men, also all defense and strife but with anger to boot.  Kirk not only turned in his anger, but blanketed it as one would an old piece of outdated machinery that had been replaced by something shiny, new, preferred.  It wasn’t broken, just outdated.  And (in his head) Kirk never smashed those outdated materials, just the aforesaid blanketing.  The warmth of a dull blue/grey woolen blanket (the same he buried his damp, heavy head into every night since he got here) hiding his shame, and every time he looked at that woolly, fallen beast lying prostrate in his head, he heard it sinking down, just a little bit more each day, the sound of a heavy boot slowly walking almost silently through the powdery snow.  The kind without ice, which had layers of previous storms beneath.  Soft, billowy but with a definite low point, easing into it more comfortably each time.  Kirk’s walks quickening with each day.  Those other younger men still had all their reactors out and in full force – whether working or not – they didn’t care.  Kirk cared too much about the bolts, the rivets, the occasional squeaky noises a lack of oil would make better for a time. 

He could never get to the root of it, with people, even with Darla, the girl across the street.  He would bring her things all the time – sometimes in silence, sometimes he’d make sure to explain the how and the where in which he retrieved such gifts.  They were always things he knew she wanted, or she’d like, and he thought she did, but his outward silence always breed her own as well.  What do you say to a whole lot of nothing standing in front of you, when in truth all Darla really wanted to do on that cold stoop was throw her arms around him, drag him inside, wrap herself around him every single night, but she accepted the gift and went back inside.  Of course, she never spoke this to him, because Kirk could turn around in that moment, and freely state that it (the gift) was just something he had found, and thought she’d like.  His words were always matter of fact, and could have just as easily been hiding the crest of a bounding wave, meandering at the top of it, held back by the violent sky, or been a curtain which hid absolute emptiness and silence.  A space in which something should have been, but something which he didn’t know how to create himself.  This was why he never seemed to get angry.  If you take nothing in, what is there to come back out of you? The glass of his eyeballs and “things” he worked from the world.  Not Him.  She could never see him.  Whenever he found himself giving her another gift on her doorstep, his head not removed from his Jesuit like shroud, and trusty white dog at his side (who was often credited as Kirk’s “id” – the dog was the friendliest around, and would react from his gut –not the smartest but you’d jump into a burning volcano to save him, he was the sort you referred to as a puppy until the day he dropped dead, never old, never slowing down, never- but the dog would just jump onto you, literally bounce up and down like a gaggle of giddy women as you danced with him, shove his face Right in between Darla’s legs with no fear or hesitation, Kirk looking on with that slight melancholia across his cheeks, half admitted desire in his eyes), he wasn’t even all there.  He was covering up the growing number of dead phalanx, blankets and crunching snow and screeching of his failing factories; he Knew Darla could hear that noise and he ran away from her each time as fast as he could.  Away from the noise, but it always was at his heels.  The dog ignored it, but he knew it was there.  At the same time, he knew she could hear beneath that noise, but that scared him to pieces and he would turn it up louder and louder so to hide his bevy of fault lines. 

Every man claims to be innocent, but he got himself into this jail on purpose.  Did you hear that, everyone? They could not hear, as all this, like most of his life, is taking place inside his headache walls, swollen and fraught with pulsing, ravenous pains.  There were so many different kinds.  On Purpose.  The men at the trading company had enacted a very non-fantastical, wholly average scheme to steal percentages from the foreign markets.  The company had only been around for a few years, and they trusted and valued him to be their engineer.  He could see into the systems that most human beings couldn’t fathom beyond an ankle wash.  He loved them like a family, like he had thought one to be, but they ended up using his “expertise” to their own ends.  Still, they had families and he did not, so he figured a break from the microcosm that the Jesuits had raised him up to disperse into his being would be necessary.  Sacrifice, just like the religion that they worked so hard to forget.  The company men loved him for it, and set aside a small chunk of funds for him when he got out.  In 10 years if he was quiet.  He could be quiet.  Of that they were sure.  Those men, the judge, the people on the street, the guys inside, they saw Kirk’s fantastical machinery, still and seemingly functional, like a war relic of old in a museum.  Look, don’t touch. 

Still, the repetitive, simple tasks he was given each day to do in the metal shop, and ones he had to do anyway for himself gave comfort, then routine, then tedium, and then the headaches got worse.  He could feel a rumbling, beneath the metal, beneath the snow, beneath the cracks in the pavement, deeper than within his stifling volcano, his dog flying circles around him, bounding up to the heavens and back again on the crest of his self created, wave, as it held there just in front of his eyes – he missed his dog, but he thought about him every day, and about her.  Darla took him in, without a complaint or a second’s pause.  She’d be walking him every day, and he loved her.  She would get to wrap herself around the white beast every single night.  And that, that would have to be good enough.  He couldn’t see them anymore, as they became hidden in front of the wave….the wave slowly though softened into the peripheral views, and left him nothing to stand on.  His bed at night and that wool grey blanket was his only protection.  He began to have nightmares, as he disengaged from the rest of the population – the crudeness of their loud voices plagued him, but as an overwhelming noise more than any sort of bodily threat or violence.  It was violence he could feel, in his glands, seeping out but always completely soaked up by the thick, hard wool of the blanket.  His little cocoon did not go undisturbed anymore.  He was looking to get out of his head – release himself from his machine. 

You can’t throw away parts like his – he wasn’t sure after all these years alone up there, tinkering away in the tiny light which shone humbly from the roof, what it was he had constructed.  He called them use parts, outdated constructions, but they had joined up, underneath the blankets, linked hands and were about to rise up against him.  He was not their leader, as he once suspected.  He was merely a cog in their dream – a drone in their production line.  He was soaking wet, and so dry and arid in his throat he thought they had wounded him mortally.  He wouldn’t let them have him.  The voices of the others, the fast talkers, the brutes, the criminals, their hearts beat so loudly and fully – why could he never hear his own beating this way?  The turns of the Catherine Wheel he learned about at school, horrific indeed, but also at least you knew where you were--- right There in that destiny.  Maybe there was another destiny in which Darla and he shared something more than the shadows left on her front doorstep.  His noise rambling its way down the street, silly dog grinning wide and staring her down as they went.  Kirk thought he felt his dog’s warmth next to him, curving around his hunched back and keeping him still, as he did this thing.  But he wasn’t doing it, the machine was. 

He climbed inside, as he usually did, and the parts, my god the parts, they had interwoven themselves and latticed into an absolute beast.  It was only at the moment when the apparatus took him in, and shut out the light for good that he truly understood he had fed it every day – nourished it, cleaned it, even loved it.  He should have tossed it, and loved her instead.  But it was too late.  The sparks flew, and it took him off into the darkness, it artificial life seeing the way on.  It took control, and his blanket fell to the floor.  No white paws around.  Why was that damn dog so full of love? 

The heartbeats left him, he couldn’t hear them anymore.  He wouldn’t have to worry about how to spend the money he didn’t deserve.  He left all that behind.  The wave, the volcano, all the elements of the earth which he could not master, they fell back, and retreated from his head space.  It was finally silent – free of facts, and information and alight with deconstruction.  They don’t know how he got his hands on that braided metal wire.  But he was quiet, and smart, and they weren’t surprised he was hoarding bits and pieces of strays away from the shop.  He had finally left the ground – his feet dangling, and a crooked little half-smile on his face.  Reams of digital information seeping on the floor, which was not level.  Darla and her puppy cavorted through the park at dawn. 

~ M. Lucia

I walked down the sidewalk in the cold.  My body was giving off steam, I hoped--anything to cool my reactor.  Every face was familiar.  If there was a flower I might've thought it redder, if it was red, or bluer if blue to begin with.  The sky spun its wheel trailing the moon through a skirt of pink clouds, where it disappeared.  The cathedral chimed the time and I was late but I felt early.  Right on time at the very least.

SHOW ME THE WAY TO GO HOME

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN - DECEMBER 17, 1770 - MARCH 26, 1827
WALTER "WALT" WHITMAN - MAY 31, 1819 - MARCH 26, 1892
HENRY VALENTINE MILLER - DECEMBER 26, 1891 - JUNE 7, 1980
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE - FEBRUARY 21, 1962 - SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

Beethoven's 5th-4th Movement blasts as
A man with long white hair - wildly unkempt - strides forward into the light on the left side of the stage.  He wears a long dark coat but his feet are bare.  At first he stands regally, facing the audience examining them, admiring.  Then the music catches his ear and he gestures to the audience as if to say "listen to what I did here...hear that?" then smiles satisfied, nodding.

Ludvig (German accented English - ESPECIALLY "V" for "W" and vice-versa) - The best part is I can hear again.  That was almost worth dying for.  (He laughs.  Listens again to the music and is again briefly transported--impressed with himself).  So...I arrived here first...I was here for 65 years, alone, before Walter came.  

Light up back and right - a raised portion of the stage - Walt's space.  There's a cot and a small field desk like that of a Civil War General.  Yellow light illuminates the whole front of his body from the right off-stage like the light of the setting sun.  He stands facing it, drinking it in.  He has pages in his hands and he crumples them in absentminded ecstasy.  His long flowing white hair and bushy beard and white suit are all standard Whitman fare.

Ludvig - And we did not speak - not a word (he punctuates his words with a conductor's hand movements) - for more than 80 years...or so.  Don't ask me why or how we came to be together, all of us in this place...I still don't understand even now that there are four of us.  


Beethoven's music fades and the sound of nature pervades.  Breeze, flowing water, leaves, birds, church bell in the distance.  Ludvig faces Walt and admires him drinking in the sun and the air.  There's a pregnant pause. Then the abrupt sound of laughter, stinking, drunken, unhinged laughter.  To Beethoven's right at the front of the left side of the stage Henry is now revealed in bright, florescent light, sitting on a toilet, his white robe draped over his shoulders but otherwise wide open.  He's skinny and white(!) and bald and HENRY and he's reading a newspaper laughing...

Ludvig - The rest are writers.  Three writers and me.  When Henry arrived conversation arrived.  He taught me English!  It was much easier than I thought it would be.  We both speak French...


He addresses Henry.

Ludvig - Henri, comment dit-on 'vagin' en anglais?


Henry - 'Vagin?'


Ludvig - Oui.


Henry - Cunt!


New peals of laughter.


Ludvig - So you see.  Very easy.  Henry adores Walter.  But the feeling, well, the feeling is not mutual.  

Ohio State Prison - Interlude

Someone pissed outside the warden's office again.  Right outside.  Figured it was one of the lifers marking their territory, but no - it was that whore Francesca!  It wasn't enough that she had fucked half the male guards in that place, but the sweet cherry (she hadn't seen hers for a long time, that sunset was a low, dark moan from the beyond) on the sundae was that she had managed to wrap everyone around her little finger.  She never had a clear thought in all her life - she was muddled inside and out- devising how to steal from sad, old people from her sweet sixteen, scheming on how to steal her best friend's man because he was better at criminal acts than hers at the time (who also happened to be her landlord- how low can you be...fat old polack sticking it to her in lieu of getting rent money...even then, when his big fat hide fucked her skinny ragged ass and licked her bones clean with his delusions that she (hard to hold back the laughter)...Loved him), planning her great escape by fucking her way through the prison system from janitor to guard....she fancied she could get the warden if she licked her lips hard enough and rubbed stale, expired makeup around her aging eyes, but not this guy. 

Little did She know he liked the fresh faced, ruby-assed boys that flocked into prison, laid out bare in front of him, like a Miss America contest - they knew they had no choice in the matter.  Sweetest ass won - and once he counted you among his minions (none of this was, of course, admitted to his wife, or the other guards, or anyone...) you were living the good life, practically champagne and roses, usually to be experienced in the juvenile ward.  She hated that prissy cunt Frederick.  A pretty little puerto rican superstar, but still...boyish somehow.  He wasn't a flaming twinkie like the rest of those sissies, he had the seed of manliness which would never grow quite right.  But for the warden, it was quite right indeed.  He told himself, all those times that he let the warden fumble through the folds in his ass with the last remaining shards of his youth and manhood, that he could have anything he wanted in here.  Anything.  Francesca Hated this.  She knew, every time she walked the halls late at night from the wood shop and glanced Frederick's porcelain skin bopping her way post coital that she could Smell the arrogance off of him.  The warden - well, he didn't know any better and found solace in youth she supposed, but why did he have to like the pretty boys? She had nothing to offer - nothing.  Her mother was right in calling her stupid, and a worthless slut, her father right in kicking her out after that incident with the census taker, Francesca knew Just who she was.  And she was proud of it. But this - what could she do? How would she be able to maneuver this one?

There he is again, that prissy little prick.  Bet that hasn't even grown up to full size yet.  He was a fruity little cupcake, all doughy and under baked.  Fall apart if you looked at him the wrong way.  Yet, she admired him for getting what he needed and what he wanted.  His time in here would be much better than hers...what did she have? Fucking a third rate prison guard who let her keep her contraband? Some fancy tampons and some crumbling blush? It wasn't even her color.  She looked good in reds and plums, and this was some pale pink shit you'd find on a born again, or some prissy mouse sitting in church on Sunday, waiting for God to reveal his big plan to her.  Keep waiting, Pinky Lee.  Frederick had it all right now - and she couldn't STAND that.  There he was now - last night when she saw him - coming from the warden's office after "maintenance" duties - yeah.  He probably revved up the warden real good.  Lots of acquiescing moans and grunts only to signal that he - the Warden - was in charge.  The big man at the show.  She wished she had a cock sometimes, since she just knew she could do it better than Franky. 

She had the gumption to stab Franky in the back of the neck and tear open his throat...but that would bring consequences which she couldn't wrap her mind around, and unknowns scared her very much.  Not that anyone deserved to hear that.  Certainly not Franky...knowing that faggot, he'd probably survive.  Then she'd be cleaning toilets and being ass raped by the lowest of the low - clowns and pimps, shipped in from the mental ward.  Looking for a good time; the sort from which she gained Nothing.  No...she'd have to think it out a little bit more.  Her brain was a constant failure, but her gut she trusted.  She was a survivor and she wouldn't let him have the last word.  For now, a clandestine and healthy squat was all she had to offer up, right outside the warden's office, when he was away on one of his administrative tours.  It was piddly, and not enough, but it was a start.  Just like when she was little and she used to love squatting down in the grass next to the public pool.  She felt like a kid again, and smiled with bright pink rosy cheeks when it was Franky, on "maintenance" duty who had to mop it up.  Let's see how the warden liked his overgrown, chubby fingers stinking of her piss when next he had Franky grab hold of his aging cock.  She smiled wider and caught a glimpse of herself in the foggy woodshop window.  The pink blush looked alright after all. 

~ M. Lucia

Ohio State Prison - Part 4

Mary Alice had never planned on having her baby in jail. She was one of those little girls who grew up, dreaming, hoping- nay, actually sketching, planning and practically blueprinting her wedding day, and the birth of her child. Every time, as a little girl, she would see an over the top wedding dress, in a movie, in a magazine, she’d tear it out. Log it, take notes and add it to the grand novel she was writing, of her own wedding day and child, and dress, the one she knew it was her birthright to receive. Fanciful like a fairytale princess of course, but never revealing in any way. Mary Alice had an almost built in aversion to the non-traditional, since men didn’t marry whores after all, as she plainly heard her mother note many, many times. As a little girl, Mary Alice made the mistake of putting on her mother’s red lipstick – truth be told her mother wore it once, having bought it on a whim for a fancy holiday party (it seemed festive and her mother could always be counted upon to create a festive home for the holidays), but the next morning, at breakfast, while her father was all happy-go-lucky, whistling and all around jolly, her mother, complaining of a bad back (and she was Not one to complain), was quiet; almost disgruntled, and not her usual self. She jut sat there, on the easy chair, watching her soaps, and not really talking or interacting, nor paying attention to the program at all. She would just look outside at the falling snow, and the driveway, and look…troubled somehow. It was at that moment she marched upstairs (with a slightly noticeable limp), and into the bathroom that was connected to the master bedroom. There she found Mary Alice – tiny feet, playing ballerina in her old dance recital costume, standing on the toilet and leaning in, while she added another thick crimson layer of her mother’s fancy red lipstick to her smallish pout. Her mother sure found her strength then, and grabbed Mary Alice like a sack of small fruit and practically shoved her head first into the sink, so much so that Mary Alice was scared that her mother might stick her head right down the drain. She took an overused sponge, which probably had been used to clean the toilet and the floor, and smelled of old dampness, and stale bleach and raked it back and forth, across Mary Alice’s little lips, until every last trace of the lipstick was gone. Red lipstick always leaves a stain though, so her mother kept scrubbing the bar of Dove soap into and around her mouth too – Mary Alice knew this was the punishment for saying bad words, but she was such a good girl, as they told her, that she never once went against this rule. When the great washing was done, her mother had even gotten the red stain usually left from two coats of red to disappear down the drain and onto the sponge, which her mother promptly threw away. Mary Alice cried a bit during the procedure, since it was pretty painful on the soft skin of her lips, but it was more of a whimper than a cry, a disquieting internalized reaction –probably shock, since this was one of the few times Mary Alice had ever been roughhoused by either of her parents- while her mother just kept saying in a low moan, “whores wear red. ..do you know what men do to whores? Awful things. No red lipstick will ever enter this house again…” etc. After that, Mary Alice, with her naturally reddened lips, was just left standing there, in the tiny offshoot bathroom, in her ballerina costume, while her mother clutched the dastardly red tube of unknown adult nightmares and marched outside, in her house slippers, without a coat of any kind, and threw it into the bottom of the garbage, already piled up for that night’s collecting at the street.

No, Mary Alice’s favorite dresses came up to the neck, and down to the wrist. Her husband would be a prince, and she a proper lady. A proper mother. She thought of this, as she circled her hands over her belly; cuticles cracked, especially the ring finger, bare and empty as his promises - the man who got Mary Alice pregnant, promising he was a prince – he promised her he would take her away! Turns out, he was the frog in reverse, but it was too late. No dress, no wedding, no prince. She wasn’t even wearing makeup when it happened. He told her he was going to marry her, and take care of her. Somewhere inside her, in her bloated belly and right down to her now swollen ankles, garroted by tight, over-bleached prison socks and shoes, lay Mary Alice’s grand disappointment –that he had stolen from her, which she was primed her Whole life to hold onto – it was “her power, her self, her motherhood” all wrapped up tight between her legs. But, he talked so sweetly, and looked her right in the eyes, and she thought- it didn’t matter what she thought. That shock left her lying there, afterwards, after he’d long gone and her family had disowned her, feeling like that tiny ballerina, with swollen, reddened lips, stinking of bleach. She thought this over, to herself, day after day, in the prison laundry, where of Course they assigned her. Mary Alice had a domestic quality, they said, and they thought she’d be good in the washing, the drying, the folding. Just like any good wife and mother, with a few minor alterations. Every day she had to take in that awful stench of bleach, and detergent, when she herself never felt clean since it happened. She often bit her nails down to the quick, and tugged with some new found glee at her lonely ring finger – out there, banned from gold and the world’s eyes. She’d eat her finger off one of these days, as the shock of her broken fairytale came to this, this place, these awful women, who belonged here. She fancied herself better than them, and told them stories of how her dear husband died suddenly of pneumonia – he was good, and dashing, and took great care of her until this unforeseen circumstance had landed her –unjustly of course- in prison. For, no innocent upright woman such as she would ever do anything illegal, or immoral. And wasn’t it all the more tragic that they had been expecting her baby? Truthfully, Mary Alice felt like the Virgin Mary sometimes, or Joan of Ark, which is what she yapped as if reading from a script to them who would listen. Persecuted for no reason. Still, in believing this story she told, again and again in the same roundabout motions in the prison laundry, she thought about the facts, and the story, and which, after all, was really true. If true in her head, it was true in the world, yes? It’s a good thing she was allowed to keep her dream wedding scrapbooks – she kept them neatly under her mattress and read them at night, when no one else could see her. The days became harder though. Too many questions as to why? Why, then, they'd say, was she here if she was innocent, and ain’t it funny that such a pious woman found herself in the joint, counting the days before she’d spit out a kid? The point is, Mary Alice’s story wasn’t holding water with these gritty types anymore. Her softness that she cultivated, and re-cultivated, was shot down by so-called reality, day after day, rough and scratchy white undergarments falling through her scabby and stunted hands.

Mary Alice grew angry – first at her mother for ruining her happy afternoon that winter, then at her father for ruining her mother’s back that night in December, then at these horrible people for not believing her, and lastly at him – the one who should have known she was Better than that – that she deserved a wedding, and a proper pregnancy – the sort wherein she glowed from pride and motherhood to come – not all red and clammy faced from this laundry and from the embarrassment when the others caught her, again, in a lie, or so They thought. They didn’t know her. They probably opened their legs for any Tom, Dick and Harry (or all three!) who came along and bought them a soda. This should not have happened to Mary Alice. The hatred brewed inside her, and even the child was at fault. Maybe she could start again. She was big as a whale, and shuffling from room to room like an albatross, thoughts dancing down to her nerve synapses, emptying her of all thought until the day might come when she took some stolen piece of prison cutlery (would it be sharp enough?) or picked up those strong, industrial irons and whacked those loose women in their ugly faces. Mary Alice stuffed the sheets, stained with someone’s blood, into the machine and poured the heavy duty powder detergent right on top. Her smile faded, as she knew she didn’t have it in her to hurt anyone. Maybe she Could just start again. She wouldn’t be here forever, after all. She stopped rubbing her belly and coughed some. She thought of the other women who came here “knocked up” as they said, and what they did to take care of things. She’d seen births in prison – it was heinous, and how could she be expected to survive that? What chance could she ever have of her dream wedding? Wasn’t she fat enough as it is? Maybe there was a way. She could muster up the ability to remove it. She could do it herself, when no one was looking. When she read her scrapbooks…in the dark would be hard, but she could do it. Her mother would be proud that she didn’t turn into a whore. She could go home again, and they would love her, and He would be sorry he ever messed with her. Against the chug chug lugging sound of the warm dryers behind her, she felt a kick. Mary Alice ignored this, as she would ignore all the insults that would come her way. She’d be happy as punch, a lady, a wife. A mother, but not without her wedding, no way. This was just a minor detour. She’d get out of this. She had the tools. The image of her mother, slipping through the powdery pre-Christmas snow in her bathrobe and practically burying that evil tube of whore red lipstick at the bottom of the trash played over and over in her mind, while Mary Alice ceased her rubbing removed her hand from her belly and went to work on her already torn cuticles, on the left hand, voracious like a beast who hadn’t eaten in days…the dryers circling behind her, static electric and warm to the touch.

~ M. Lucia

Sweet Action

Dull yellow summer strife
weeds buttered dry by sun
whistled by autumn wind
shrouded now in white
falling snow,
look up at me as they bend
sharply swaying, but
not breaking in the early
morning light.

Scent of the brewery
invades my algorithmic,
Roman nose-
rotten stench too hoppy;
Sweet Action, baby.
I prefer a Cotes de Rhone,
slithering its way within
my many faces…

Not but one here, soft
crunch of the walk past
stray cat and big man footsteps.
I have missed too many mornings
in my town. In lieu of the
blackmail of survival one calls work.

Blow up the bank,
winner takes all.
Rev up the motor and let my thigh,
in a summer dress
bound through the high-cut slit.
only to free me from the street:
steps,
past, toward
buses trains walkways;
The thin heel of my shoe slams the gas
:forward:

~ M. Lucia

JEEPERS

Jay had been right about Simon. He predicted that he would run. He knew he would get scared and run. And he knew that he would take it all harder than the rest of us.

I was the one he told everything to. I had that effect on people, even Jay. I think it was something about asking the right questions. It was like Jay would want to say something but not know how to start saying it. And then I would ask him something and it would be like: "oh, that reminds me..."

And so, he had been right about everything. We were sleeping in the orchard after working all day when they came for us, but we scattered. I was hiding in the shadows and I watched them take him. He went without an argument. I found Simon hiding in the cabin, under the cots. I said "they took Jay," but he was so nervous and he was having trouble breathing so I made him go out the back door and we ran back through the orchards taking the side road to town.

After they hung Jay we just left. We couldn't stay around the town because we knew they were looking for us so we hid in the hills. Then Simon made us take the pass down to the road and we walked south, me, Simon and the brothers.

*  *  *

The road was nothing but trees.  We encountered not a soul, animal, human or spirit, except for the bugs.  You could see them there in the air, swarming like.  It gave you a concern about taking a breath, seeing the gnats in the air above your head like that.  So you took the air in shallow, through your teeth, keeping your lips close together.  My nose was still broken and clogged from the fight in the market so it had to be through my mouth.

The worst part was the singing occasionally in your ear, the bug getting close enough to hear the whine and you swat it away or try to.  Walking all day in the heat and swatting at the bugs and that sudden singing in your ears—it was a disorienting day in the end.  Not surprising since we were wanted men now, and now that Jay was dead. 

*  *  *

We came to a lake with a narrow beach, and a boat.  We looked around and still there was no one and we were hungry and, you know, we’re all fisherman, or used to be, so the choice seemed obvious—and not that we wrestled all that much with it either way. 

Simon and I took to the boat and rowed out on the lake.  The brothers stayed behind and worked to build a fire.  The lake was calm, reflecting the trees and sky like a mirror, though our oars rippled the image.  A hundred feet out we threw the net.  Over and over it came back empty.  Simon sat down and stroked his beard.  I took some water from the lake and ran it through my dirty hair.  For the first time since Jay, Simon began to cry, quietly at first, but when his sobbing became too intense, I could tell he was embarrassed and so he slipped quietly over the side and into the water.  I knew enough about him to know that the water would be healing.  Down there, he’d be able to cry and scream if he wanted to.  His head popped up 20 yards away and just as quickly submerged again.  He needed time. 

I leaned back in the boat, hunkered down really, pulling at the knots in the net.  I could smell without looking the fire burning on the shore.  There’s not going to be anything to cook I thought, just as the smell of broiling fish tickled my nose.  I turned to look to the brothers and the fire and realized now there was a man with them, someone I didn’t recognize.  Simon climbed back into the boat and stared at the shore as well.  The man was looking back at us.  The brothers didn’t seem agitated.    Then he called out to us.

“Having any luck today, my friends?” 

After a pause I called to him that the fish seemed to have gone into hiding.

“Try the net on the other side—to starboard.”

Simon muttered something under his breath, impatient it seemed but I suspected something had changed and threw the net off the right side of the boat.  Within moments the water, calm before, teemed with life, fish leaping into the net.  Simon began to pull the net in, laughing now.  My suspicions were confirmed and this time it was me who went off the boat and began to swim towards shore. 

When I got there the man had his back to me and the brothers were arguing again, this time about who would go get more wood.  Simon was rowing to shore calling to me to help him with the fish. 

“There’s hundreds...” he was laughing again.  It was the first time I had heard him happy in days.

“John...” the man said, his back still to me, throwing another stick of wood in the fire.  A warm breeze gusted through me and I felt my clothing begin to dry.

“You know me,” he continued, his tone fixed in confidence and self-assurance, “come sit here next to me.  Peter will bring the fish.”

He used the name only one other had ever used for Simon.  I sat and he handed me a piece of bread he had warmed by the fire.  His face was a mystery to me.  I didn’t recognize his appearance, only I did know who he was. 

“Where have you been?”

“Yes, that’s an interesting question—of course leave it to you my brother.”

Simon stood over us now.

“John, there’s a hundred fish if there’s one.  We’ll eat like kings.  Good advice friend.”  He grabbed the man’s hand and shook it vigorously.  This was Simon’s specialty.  He could make a friend out of an enemy and put all strangers and wanderers alike at ease in an instant.  He was open.  He was like a net in the sea of the world—toss him to the tide and they will flock to him.  And so he was chosen well for the path he would walk. 

The man pulled him down and embraced him.  Simon recognized this, finally.  Even the brothers could see what it all meant.  Simon sat down hard on the rocky shore surprised at first but soon hanging his head, ashamed.  The man put an arm around his shoulder and turned again to me.

“The world is more like a dream to me than ever before.  I can’t remember what came before or what’s still yet to come.  It’s all mixed up, like everything is happening at once, all in an instant—all of it. 

“I can remember being alone in the dark.  And then walking along side you all, my brothers, though that feels like a long time ago, and some place far from this place.  But now I’m here with you, and I feel we must be here together forever.”

He laughed himself at this pulling Simon close, kissing his wet hair.  Then he made Simon face him grabbing his head in his hands.

“I know you love me Peter.  You will walk my road and walk it well.  I see it.  Eat with me now.”

I tore off a piece of the bread and gave it to the brothers.  The man shared his fish with Simon.  In the boat the fish came alive again in the net.  They thrashed and leaped for the water, most of them made it.  As the sun set the man’s face darkened even by the light of the fire.  Only his eyes pierced the darkness.  He continued to speak of places we had seen together as if remembering them only days later, though it had been...years now. 

As the night fell fully Simon stood and walked off into the woods.  The brothers fell asleep and I watched as the man slowly vanished right where he sat, staring at me the whole time.  

I AM PULLO OF THE FIGHTING 13TH!!!!!

Make-up-smell cloud masking the coffee breath, thankfully.  Double-swigs, from the makeshift container fashioned out of a Fiji water bottle, of the tan liquid looking cold and over-milky through the frond and putridly pink flower.  She leans in close--"...and he touches her on the leg."  I feel my eyes conspicuously holding focus and lingering on her face not wanting to give away my discomfort by glancing away or turning my head even...and to what anyway, the chubby ladies across the aisle in new winter coats with fashionable faux fur rimmed hoods gesturing at each other with their Kindles gossiping, indifferent to Dragon Tattoo novels glaring out at them from the screens patiently waiting for another shot at a virtual tickle of their greying libidos via pseudo-sado-machochisma and psycho-sexual anonimities?  "And you know he's Dominican and so I told him, in Spanish, 'you know I'm Columbian and so I'm just telling you but there's white parents around here won't think twice about bringing you up on harassment--sexual' and he just stares at me."  Larry in the next seat snoozes or pretends to and I get a close-up view of the smearing of colors on lids and cheeks and of the cold river snaking by the window. 

Midday Swim Haiku

Oh, chlorinated
womb. Hold me up my swaying
buoy, wayward ho!

~ M. Lucia