storyforms

[storyforms]

Henry and the Whale

Henry wanted to live inside a whale. He had read a children’s book once about a man being swallowed by a whale, and painting the inside of his stomach beautiful colors. A whale belly seemed like the safest place to sleep. He would light a candle and sleep on the squishy, gooey lining of their stomach and cling to the ribs when needed to avoid the digestion track. Every now and then the whale would open it’s big mouth and Henry would climb up the tunnel of the whale’s esophagus and catch a vibrant view of open ocean. He would gaze out allowing fresh ocean spray to slap his face, and the sun to beam down on him, warming his nose.Then the whale would open his mouth even wider to trap the fish at the surface of the water. Small and big fish would rain down on Henry as he’d tumble back down to the whales belly. He’d learn to eat the fish the whale caught and would tell himself he enjoyed it, but the poor fish were alive and terrified. There’d be no hard surface to stun them and put them out of their misery so Henry would have  no choice,  but to chomp down on them. Head first. This started to weigh on Henry particularly because he would never have the courage to eat the heads after, so they would just stack their beside him, a collection of his kill. Henry would feel like a cruel murderer.  This would make Henry feel guilty.  The darkness of the whale’s belly would grow denser and colder at night as the whale floated towards the dark bottom of the ocean. And suddenly Henry would scream after biting into another dead fish and promptly spitting out it’s head. “What have I done!” and he would beat on the walls of the whale to let him out. The whale would wonder what the stirring was and would decide to sing to distract itself from the stomach ache it seemed to be having.  The whales song would reverberate inside the whale causing what would feel like an earth quake for Henry. Henry would hold on  to the ribs of whale as tight as he could as the walls shook, and the fish flopped around crazed,  but the notes of the song were so pure and lucid that Henry would be hypnotized  into a deep sleep. His hands would slip off the whales ribs, as he would yawn serenely and his limp body intoxicated by the song would  slowly slide towards the whales digestion track. Luckily, Henry decided to stay living on his parents sail boat no matter how much he longed for the solitude of a whale.   

[storyforms]

Insomniac Child

I had terrible insomnia as a child. I was absent around 30 days each year. “Irregular attendance” was often the comment on my report card. This gave me some odd satisfaction “they noticed!”.   I made up for sleeping in my twenties. My twenties were sleepy, fucky, and a never ending feeling of making up for all the sleep I lost as a child, often in the beds of older gentlemen, who took care of me with parental and sexual love. But thats what the twenties are for, mixing the two- the extension of childhood and the delightful festering of it’s darkness. Fear of school kept me up at night, I never felt safe at Catholic School and was intensely sensitive to the point of paranoia. I would get spooked by a teacher putting a paper on my desk. 

I ran away from home  when I was seven, a cop picked me and my cousin. We were two little girls with suitcases on a busy road. Where were we going? My note said we would be back in the fall. I had 300 dollars and a box of grapenuts with me. That’s confidence.  A year later, a cop came to speak at our school and I stayed home that day. I kept imagining him playing footage of me for the class “this is what a real criminal looks like.” I was devoured by shame. Whenever I saw kids doing things they weren’t supposed to do, like putting ice cubes down their shirts in the cafeteria, I would preemptively make my mom write a note saying that I had nothing to do with it. “I had nothing to do with the fun the other kids were having.”  I was a “good” child. If I was good and quiet, I would somehow survive Jesus’s wrath, which at the time was the thought of growing up to being one of these repressed teachers who terrified us into thinking our pets could not go to heaven and unless you became a martyr you were sent to purgatory. Lovely fun stuff to spiral about once the sun set as a child. Although there was plenty of fear and nausea at the flood of worst case scenarios that would enter my brain at night to keep me up for weeks at a time, something else was keeping me up too. At the time, I was very little, around 6, 7,  8 and in the background of the mind chaos was this- waiting. It felt like at night I was waiting for something to break through my vision or someone to present themselves, not necessarily to say everything was ok, but to pull back a layer of reality  and show the mechanics of it all. I wasn’t waiting for Jesus or any specific person, but  there was an invisible, felt sense that I left something or someone behind pretty recently and I wanted to know they were still there.  The waiting would or maybe has driven me crazy, maybe its meant to so you arrive back where you are. You’re closer to it as a kid, you’ve only just came from wherever the hell we were before. Pure nothingness, a life as an insect, a pig on a factory farm?

   I remember thinking as a seven year old. “There’s no way I was born in 1990.” Where was I? I was always here. I am named after a woman who they are not sure ever existed. “Bridey Murphy” was who Virginia Tighe called herself while under one of the first past life experiments done in the 1950s. She named specifics of her life in Cork, Ireland and recalled floating above her own funeral. It was a big story that turned into a book and a movie. People wondered if it was real, but Bridey Murphy was never found to be real. Perhaps my name sake  has painted some of my perception. How really real are we? I know I’m real, but lurking like a ghost has always felt comfortable between blips of attention and stage time. Now, in the quarantine I can say that I feel this return to this waiting, but it’s not manifesting as insomnia. It’s in taking in the realness of reality again. My life had become somewhat unreal. Everyday, the same insecurities would get pricked at, the same distractions would cause me some stress and numb, work lacked passion. I had stopped trusting my intuition. Life was a loud party where I was just pretending to be able to hear the conversations. It’s real again and the party is over? Or the real one has begun. 

[storyforms]

Just Take More

No part of me was interested in the older man in yoga class. The silver fox with the long curly hair and surfer body who smiled and waved at me eagerly when I walked into class. Yoga people can get away with so much unwarranted affection.  No part of me was interested in his blue Kurt Russel eyes and soft lips that seemed to always be smirking about getting laid or having just gotten laid.  I just wanted to be in Yoga class, getting better at breathing and being present, a goal I’ve had since I could talk. It wasn’t working. Nothing was working. I was just passing time. Life had dissolved into a stagnant loophole. There are people who don’t grow and I felt I was one of them. I was just twiddling my thumbs on this planet waiting for a ride to the airport. My indifference toward everything seemed to be magnified. I had not been living life according to any sort of values. Everyday felt like a new start in some terrible cursed Groundhog’s Day.  I was a scattered actress who didn’t care about acting, a writer who couldn’t focus enough to write, an artist without any inspiration. I was a hole with nothing at the bottom of it. 

So I obviously could stand to get fucked. Fucking was a short cut into feeling. The feeling always had a slight bitterness to it. A settling. But it was still a feeling and that was better than the vacuum of my own emotions. His name is Piper. He likes to golf. We get along on a superficial level. He’s funny in some diet sense of it. I’m funny back, but not in a way that’s pleasing to me. He gets deep, I get as deep as I can get without revealing the graveness of my condition. You can always transmute hopelessness into quirky cynical charm,  it gives you a character to play.  He is super kind to the waitress and watches her ass for a beat as she turns away. He makes eye contact very intensely with me. I keep averting my eyes as I give shell details of my day to day, a little white lie, here and there. Leaving out the porn addiction, social media addiction, eating disorder, money problems, soft grip on reality in a time space sense. My version of reality is too macro. I don’t live in the day to day, that reality feels conceptual. Dinners, hanging out with friends, trips to the beach. It all seems like boring minutia. I’ve consistently trekked the same existential crisis since childhood. This journey was my only interest and it had me glued to the chaos of it all. From an early age I become a passive observer of my own life. Not fully safe with other people or really myself. This gave way to unnatural connections, self destructive behavior, and trusty, old inner conflict. I want to be somebody. I want to be nobody. My eyes looked older than 29, and my brain felt sparse like an elderly woman looking out the window waiting to die.

Piper just wanted to fuck, but I could tell he thought he was saving me from something, doing some sort of favor. God’s work, its in his posture. I wasn’t the first yoga rat he had ever thrown his hat over and scooped up.  His apartment was clean, but cluttered with surf boards and tantric art.  It was very 2000s, healthy plants,  friendly cats, homey and uncomplicated. I envied the life in it. My room felt like a flat surface, no life coming in or out. All the decorations in it fixed and immovable, not personal, no mapping of my journey. Shame had kept me from sharing myself with myself. I took no pride in how I got to where I was which was no where. 

Piper poured me some water, and sat me on the couch. He wanted me to open up more but I didn’t want to talk, before he could be too disappointed I leaned in and started kissing him. His face was salty and oily with a scent of eucalyptus on his neck. He moved his tongue slowly in my mouth as though he was massaging my tongue into submission. It worked. I was lulled, and after a moment he was holding my hand walking me to his bedroom. A black comforter is always a little scary, but I wasn’t going to leave without getting fucked. He fucked me on my back with my knees up by his shoulders, sometimes sucking on my big toe. I liked him fucking me. He looked like Zeus his curls permeanantly wet from the ocean deep as he thrusted in me, his eyes open to mine. I glazed over, a glazed donut. Playing possum, playing dead, my sex/ life signature. If he was Zeus, maybe he could put life back in me, but he's mortal so he takes more instead. 

[storyforms]

Movie Lover Harry and his Chimp

Harry fiddled in his pocket for the rest of his almonds. They were unsalted and satisfied him very little, but a pocket full of the stale almonds from his cabinet was the only food he had in his house. He loathed going to the movies without a snack, and hating giving away his money on over priced concessions. The physical world only ripped him off and living off of unemployment without any dreams left had Harry in a bind of frugality and self hatred. 

Harry passed an elderly usher cleaning up popcorn on his way into the movie. The elderly usher glared at Harry with icy indifference. Harry pointed to a piece of popcorn, the elderly usher had missed and headed inside. He sat in the theater staring at the white screen in front of him. The lights were not yet lowered, and the trailers would not be coming on for at least 30 minutes, but he was in there. He stared riveted at the white, matted screen in front of him that had hypnotized him his whole life.  

The opening silence began. He shifted in his seat, coughed, and excused himself although no one was in there. His eyes flickered as he watched nothing, eating almonds a little bit at a time with his front teeth to make them last. 

 His heart stirred, by the lack of story,  the ease and unease of emptiness, the collecting momentum of non-existence spoke to his dying intellect. The air remained stale around him, clearly they hadn’t cleaned the theater in a while, but the smells of past life comforted him. 

He saw himself up there in the pale, vast uncertainty. He watched as it unraveled some tight unconscious ball inside him like all good films do, drawing him closer into the present, his most feared tense.  

The empty slate of the screen held his concentrated attention. His heart started to race as the dullness of nothing swelled to a romantic crescendo. Would the absence of anything end up together? He found himself reminiscing about a first love of his and how it had soured with such pungency, that he almost took his own life at the age of 29. Refusing to believe life could feel as good as anything he had with this woman, he began ranting to himself all day and night.  Sometimes out loud, other times silently, but just as shrill. He walked around his neighborhood with what felt like an adult chimp screaming in his ear over any logic. The chimps voice was many voices at once, he recognized his father, his mother, himself as a baby waling, his heartbroken teenage self shouting curses at the bully that slipped viagra into his pepsi. 

He cut off from the world as the chimp grew bigger, dense with loud pains . He sank instead in the movie theater seat and escaped. He absorbed the beautiful actors, the stories about the contradictions of humans, the desperation of saving oneself from themselves. They broke him and challenged him, seeing how big the world was and what other character he could be playing if he would only open up to it.  After decades of indecisively watching movies, Harry’s chimp had gained control over him and suddenly the chimp was too loud to listen to while keeping up with the films. He tried, but the shrieking chimp was becoming so hostile that during his most favorite movies, was when he squalled the harshest. Harry fought the chimp during Bad Day at Black Rock, he gouged at his eyes, punched his ribs, even tried to tickle him but the chimp just shouted back with the painful, guttural teams of threats from Harry’s past. Harry even tried to lighten up the chimp and brought him to Every which way but loose starring Clint Eastwood and a Chimp, this only angered the desperate monkey. 

Finally, Harry decided he had better give up movies and when he did the chimp trotted behind, him a few a more feet, still yelling, but not as close. Harry settled into just watching the quiet screen and began feeling just as engaged as he did during his favorite films.  After awhile, the chimp mysteriously left him. 

Now in the third act, Harry watches unblinkingly as nothing happened and nothing had to. He leaned forward as space and time invisibly triumphed over the blankness. He stood up and clapped as the nonexistent credits scrolled over the white. Harry gathered his hat  and wiped tears from away his eyes, tremendously moved by the whole  vacant experience.  As the audience members for the next film began to file in, he rushed out so he could not make out any faces or details,  only shapes, outlines of folks. Keeping his head down, he absent mindedly bumped into the elderly usher who scowled with piercing  malevolence. Harry said “excuse me,” but the elderly ushers face did not change. As Harry walked towards the exit he turned around to see the Usher’s face had turned into the chimps! He ran out of the theater as fast as he could and into the world.

[storyforms]

Mary’s Massage

Mary was in the mood for a massage, a real deep one that would change her insides. She wanted to feel like her organs we’re being bruised and her bone structure was changing. Like everything was getting moved around so much when she left she’d be some cubist version of herself. Why did Mary want to get rearranged so bad? She felt like what she wanted on the surface didn’t match what she wanted underneath and this baffled her because both what she wanted and didn’t want we’re always swapping places. One on hand, she wanted to settle down and get married. On the other hand, she wanted to own a bar where all her favorite, fellow barflies could go without shame, even though really the only one causing and feeling the shame was Mary and it went deep. She wanted this to get moved around too. 

 Her money from her divorce had almost all ran out. Her options were growing minute day after day. As she drank in indecision, over the next stop on her path, Mary shifted on the barstool,  her ass had become larger than it’s radius. Many who knew Mary knew her as the friendly giggler sitting at the end of the Sunset Bar, a real old sticky dive that was populated by ghosts and their unfinished business, and unrealized lives. Mary liked drinking there, it was dark and her appearance had betrayed her. She felt old and fat, and she was, but to those around her she was sweet, pillowy, and wise like Mrs. Clause. Mary watched as a slender, sexy eel of a woman glided in with her husband and children. Sipping her Sazerac, she sized up the woman with sheepish, sad eyes as though a little kid who was jus told he couldn’t take home the puppy. Mary wasn’t a jealous woman, but there was longing in her heart that would show up every time she got into bed and beat her heart to a pulp. She numbed the nightly internal beating with a night cap

 Why are some things so impossible for me to find?  When I look for love, I find a dirty shoe without a match, I find a naked, decapitated Barbie doll from my youth, I find my only piece of lingerie that doesn’t fit, but I couldn’t return because the fancy bra store doesn’t take refunds. Some people glide around knowing that the world is theirs, and others sit back and steep in the injustices, obsessing over finding some universal law that prevents them from being apart of the whole. Mary went back and forth, when she got buzzed she could feel the connection to the families, and lonesomes, but paired with the buzz came the obstruction of conscious knowing so when she was sober again, her giddy revelations  over the lightness of being became the polar, and people looked like aliens who were all better equipped to experience this life. 

Mary was getting a massage by a Thai male masseuse. She loved when the masseuse was male. She hadn’t been touched by a man without paying him since her husband. In her meak voice, Mary asked the man to go hard on her. She wanted the pain, it might reform her. The touch of another human felt like the only thing powerful enough to stretch and tear the blubber of skin around her that acted as a defensive bubble. The thai man rubbed his hands sensuously down her, rubbing her shoulders aggressively. She felt pops of tightness unfurling and her spine releasing tension. Mary felt orgasmic pleasure from the massage, but pursed her lips and tempered her bliss. He rubbed near her kidneys and pushed her fat away so he could squeegee in between her ribs. She felt like a piece of dead meat that was coming alive by his touch. Mary began to convince herself that there was something seriously powerful and sacred between her and the masseuse and she fantasized about how they would address it after the massage was over. “This never happens, but I am in love with you, I’m not physically attracted to you and I don’t understand who you are in the world, but I am in love with you. And I don’t care about anything else.” Mary felt a cold wet towel slap down on her back, a little scratchy rubbing off the luxurious oil that he had ran so gracefully with his fingertips on her neglected body. “ Ok, Thank you. Pay up front!” the Thai man said, before exiting. Mary still didn’t know what she wanted. 

[storyforms]

Max and Marcella

                Max loved when his cat would brush up against his leg, almost too much. It turned him on a little bit because he’d imagine the shot in movies where a person is doing dishes and their partner lovingly puts their hands around their waist and  kisses their neck. He felt his version of anything close to that was a cat brushing up against his leg. He didn’t own any himself, but he cat sat for a living while in between his half assed attempt to start a stuffed pizza restaurant with his girlfriend, Marcella. Marcella wasn’t tender, she was fierce and communicated a lot about herself during sex, theatrically moaning and pulling Max’s hair. It was her stage. She was so loud, it made Max quiet. There’s always someone contemplating the act while it’s happening. Sex breeds an organism all by itself and one person has the physical passion and the other person holds the intelligence and when it’s good, the passion is healing and the intelligence transcends thought, but when it’s bad, the fervor is forced and the mind feels trapped by inauthentic connection. I’m hypothesizing. Max just thought of himself as a nervous sex-er someone who would spiral no matter how good or bad it was going. These beliefs held over into different areas of his life, a constant spiral of doubt and distrust.  The pizza restaurant was her idea, she was Italian, grew up on the Jersey shore going to Atlantic City and chewing Rita’s Italian ice while she made out with almost every heavy weight in town. Max was in love with her tan, glittered body and the dream of being a stuffed pizza power couple led him to abandon any logic even the kind that was felt deeply outside of the brain. Any idea that wasn’t his own was the better idea, so Max went along with it. 

Marcella didn’t want to open the restaurant anymore. She was having doubt that Max wasn’t actually just a loser who cat sat and dog walked for a living. She knew she had him on a leash and she resented the power he gave her. She loved stuffed pizza. As a kid, her grandfather would make the most rich tomato sauce outside in a huge pot over a fire. He let her add a little sugar, but it was his tomatoes straight off the vine from his garden that made the sauce so delicious and bright. Eating stuffed pizza made Marcella feel like a child again. She wanted to be the child and for Max to be the parent unconsciously, so she bossed him around like she did the adults around her her whole life who entered her into beauty contests and painted her room with rainbow lines. She was the little princess of her family, and every action she took was motivated by protecting her throne.

They were in the throws of cut off, loud, cadaverous sex, when Max couldn’t stand it anymore. Marcella was grinding her pelvis  into him so hard that it felt as though his penis were on fire. A throbbing hot iron pain swelled in the the head of his dick and he couldn’t help, but push her off of him. “What the hell? What’s wrong?” “My penis hurts. I don’t know. I love you. But I’m worried about the restaurant.” Marcella asked him more about his penis. “What is the pain like?” “Hot. Like a fire, but almost like an icy hot patch. The outside feels cold.” “Almost, like your dick ate a mint, huh?” Max didn’t like this conversation very much. “I think we should talk about the restaurant.” Marcella smiled and hopped up from her bed, heading into the kitchen. Max felt helpless to her selfish antics, he laid back down in bed. He wished there was a cat to curl up next to him. Something wet  was thrown on his dick. He looked up to see that Marcella had splattered her Grandfathers tomato sauce on it. “We put my Grandfather’s sauce on everything, using it topically for infections or pains works too.” “Ew”, Max thought.  Marcella began getting dressed. “I think you should own the restaurant without me, I am a burden to you. And I feel like I have a higher calling. I love stuffed pizza, but I need to move on. I am holding you back.” 

Marcella left. Max wiped the tomato sauce off his dick with toilet paper. His penis did feel better, but he chalked that up to Marcella leaving. A very classic “Meow” was heard outside Max’s front door. He opened the door to find a perfect tabby cat, who brushed past his leg with innocent charm. “Sometimes, you don’t need a stuffed pizza restaurant, sometimes you need a cat”, Max didn’t say.

[storyforms]

George’s Father’s Gas Station

George worked at the gas station. His father passed it down to him. He hoped he wouldn’t, but when his dad died, his mother, teary eyed, passed him the keys to the gas station, and the big bat that had the bathroom key dangling on the end of it so customers didn’t leave with it. George always found it curious to hand strangers a weapon every time they wanted to use the bathroom, especially since the only people who got gas from George’s father were either doped up transients on their way to the city or George’s Father’s friends, Henry or Abe. Henry and Abe were loyal, they knew it would break George Senior’s heart if he had ever caught them pumping gas at the Mobil or Shell. 

George’s Father died of a heart attack while waiting for his meal at Sonic. The waitress tapped on his window thinking he had fallen asleep with his forehead on the steering wheel. George hated that the girl who rejected him in high school was the one to find his father dead, but maybe it would get to her and the image of his deceased father would haunt her so much that she would wind up contacting George about getting coffee and they would reminisce and she would pretend that she had never rejected him and he would be fine with pretending that and they would leave Sonic and the gas station behind for Panera Bread and Chevron. 

 It was George’s first day behind the counter with his dad dead. A framed picture of his father was put on the counter by his mother, along with a dried rose. George felt this was dramatic and the opposite of what his dad would want, but who cares, no one was coming in anyway. George loved his father, but his “when you go, you go” attitude about death made his end almost impossible for George to feel. He had no delusions that his father wasn’t in the ground, in the spot he had chosen decades earlier, he was a planner. But he could not feel it yet. 

Until the waitress walked in. She was dressed in black, looking like a fancy receptionist, with her, was a boyfriend, Todd, in loose pants, and a surprisingly  large t-shirt. This man had no sophistication, unlike his smartly dressed gal, Teresa. “I’m so sorry about your dad” said Teresa. “Metoo” mumbled the loose clothes boyfriend.  “Thanks.” said George. “I always thought you and him we’re great.  And…” Teresa blew into a tissue dramatically. “I know we never we’re romantic, but your dad always said, we would be perfect together.” Loose Clothes cocked his head confused like a slow Dalmatian. George was just as confused as Loose. Teresa picked up the picture of his father. “Wow, this is such a beautiful photo. He loved you very much.” “I didn’t know my dad and you were so close.” “Yea” chirped Loose. “SHUT UP, TODD.” “Your dad said he trusted two people with his gas station, you and me. I’m happy that he made the choice he did, in giving it to you, but I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you. He had big plans for us.” “Let’s go! I’m hungry” said Loose. “I need to use the bathroom.”

 George handed Teresa the big bat, she stormed out, blowing past confused, loose Todd.  George turned around the picture of his father and studied his eyes. The sound of glass shattering, made George look up. Teresa was beating Todd’s car to hell, while Todd yelled that she was a crazy bitch.  George was glad they never went out, and he decided to retire the bathroom bat. He thinks his dad would approve of this. 

[storyforms]

Harry And Juliet

Harry put too much cheese in my eggs again. A mouthful of raw shredded cheddar and burnt eggs. How does he do it?. It was the big bag of it I bought at Costco before Christmas time. It’s now three months past the date, but that didn’t stop Harry. He’s now laughing at Judge Judy in the living room. I’m in the bedroom losing my mind looking  for my granddaughters slippers. Her mom swears they’re here. These slippers with a cartoon character on them from Lord knows what movie. I hate not knowing who a princess is. It makes me feel like a cold grandmother, but when your kids live across the country, you don’t go out of your way to binge the latest children pictures unless you’re like Dorothy down the road. Dorothy has a whole Disney bathroom set up, a portrait of Sleeping Beauty and her prince above her bed, and minnie and mickey salt and pepper shakers. That’s going too far. Her grandchildren are all grown now. There’s no reason for it. Maybe it just makes her happy. I’m not sure what upsets me more, the kitsch or the happiness she derives from it.

 I can’t find these fucking slippers, but of course I find a picture of Harry and Juliet in the night stand.  A moment like this would have really bothered me in my 30s or 40s. “Why do you have her photo in your night stand, you son of a bitch!?” I find it sweet now. I wish they had gotten one final fling, I really cut that thing out with my nose in the air. In hindsight, when I found out about Harry’s affair, I didn’t react properly. I had rage, a deep acid reflux of a tantrum that I could barely get out I was choking so hard. I found out through my friend Gail who had seen them outside the movie theater on 92nd and Broadway. Harry had slicked his hair back and was wearing his tweed blazer, not something he did every day. Usually, Harry’s hair was wild, stressed like him, and he’d throw on a workman’s shirt with paint all over it and grab us bagels with dirt all over his hands from the previous nights work. Harry was a painter, but worked loading shipments in from South Street Seaport. 

He worked all night and painted all day. He was committed to that. Juliet and him kissed outside the movie theater. I could have been anywhere, but I was drinking at home at the time. Gail was at the antique store across the street. Gail was a trusted friend, I met her in dance class. We both we’re the bad ones, taking disco for kicks, trying any way possible to sleep with John Travolta. Gail was in the antique store arguing with the owner over the price of a mirror that she lied was promised to her for 300 dollars by the younger man working there at the time. She almost had him convinced when Harry and Juliet caught her eye. The first thing she recognized was the coat on Juliet. A beautiful beige cashmere pea coat that had caught my eye at Ralph Lauren a month before. I loved that coat. I told Juliet about it, I told Harry about it. No one got me the fucking thing, but Juliet got it. Gail called me that night. “Juliet has the beige pea coat. And I saw her and Harry kissing.” To be honest, the coat really screwed me up. I was in a different place then, money was new and possessions were sacred. This cut my gut open like the fish Harry was hauling in. I wanted to beat him up. I screamed, and threw a vase in the apartment, we never got all the glass up it disappeared into the wood. Once in a while after the fight for years, we’d pick out glass slivers from our feet. 

I asked him why he would get her the coat and not me. He said when he saw it, he thought of her, and my interest in it, made him feel like it was valid. I thought that was a horse shit answer, but it was honest. I made him break up with her in front of me. I made Juliet give me the coat. She did, embarrassed and apologizing as she handed it over. She didn’t mean to cause any trouble. I was sick with power and slept well that night. Harry for years after seemed happy, and for years after I didn’t care if he really was or not. We had kids, we grew ugly. Then one day, I saw the coat hanging in my closet and told Harry I wanted him to give it back to Juliet. I didn’t need it, or want it. I barely wore it and every time I did, I remembered her  teary eyes avoiding mine. I thought I was separating them, but I was really separating myself.  Harry was overwhelmed with joy. We hugged and laughed at the absurdity, and then he rang Juliet. Her husband answered the phone and told us she had passed away. We thought about bringing the coat to her grave or something, but it felt too dramatic.  I was going to give it to my daughter, but I wound up losing it before I had the chance. 

[storyforms]

Time’s Friend

  The young girl played with the caterpillars on the tree. She pulled them off the bark and inspected their vibrant fur coats, letting them play on her hands. Their gummy black legs felt soft and cold on her palm. The sun was bedded in a white spring sky. The warmth was new and welcomed after a winter that kept the girl from tracing the veins in green leaves and  touching the small insects whose intelligence was not wasted on her.  

The caterpillars all seemed excited for the cocoon, pacing around the tree with nerves, waiting for the call of transformation. The little girl was jealous of their clear process of change.

According to her, change was impossible for humans, since they didn’t operate on the rhythm set by mother nature.  They insisted upon their own clock, their milestones, their holidays, their deadlines,  all of these totems replicating a human experience as opposed to actually living in one.  Her father was addicted to time. Rushing his meals, early bed times, regimented game night, movie night, reading night. The girl dreamt about seeing her father in the times between the schedule. Maybe his face would lose its wrinkles, or maybe his eyes wouldn’t be as intense as they were empty. She longed to see them full and open. What was he like when he knew he was timeless. She dreamt about who he’d be if he could let time crawl around his hand once in awhile, aimless. The young girl returned the caterpillars back to the bark and headed into the thick, loving woods behind her house. A small dirt path surrounded by wild vines, mossy trees, homes to the deer, snakes, and foxes, led her to a rocky stream where she watched the water smooth over black rock. 

The young girls mother was ignorant of time. She was always late, always delaying, never appreciating. She lived in reaction to her husbands neurosis. Rebelling against his militaristic march through the joys and hurdles of life, her mom stood by the edge of the rink,  sheepishly inching towards the exit through the years with her eyes on her feet,  never going close towards the center, never learning to skate. 

The girl was different from both, she was only six and still connected to the timelessness that she had been apart of before landing in her body. There was a peace and beauty that collected in her stomach, once she was alone in the woods, as though a celestial reunion was taking place.  It would come back, all the wisdom and effortless happiness. She didn’t know why it was, or what it was. All she knew was that there was no way, she had not existed before the year 1990. She doesn’t remember the timelessness with her mind, but her soul did. 

She meditated looking at the water, grateful to be there, when a crunch of leaves startled her. It sounded like a cautious yet deliberate footstep, unnatural to this world. She looked around and there was no one. The faucet of the stream suddenly came to a stop, and  a silence steeped in dread took over. She nervously began digging her fingers into the protective moss over the rock, playing with the hairy mud. Native Americans used moss for diapers,  she remembered. 

She continued to tear at the moss, rubbing the dirt into her hands as the air around her felt like it was being vacuumed up. She closed her eyes for a second, and when she opened, an arm was reaching into her dirt pile from over her shoulder, a black sleeve with a metal silver hand grasped the loose earth. 

The girl, petrified, slowly turned her head over her shoulder in the direction of the alien arm.  She saw a silver bald man with white eyes wearing darkness. Nothing about him was tangible, but he wasn’t blurry either, a clear apparition who was eating the soil like it was chocolate cake. He licked his metallic fingers as the girl watched in terror. The only sounds reverberating through the woods were his tongue smacking against his fingers. He walked towards her. She jumped back as he plunged his hand into the moss again taking an even bigger bite.  The young girl scooted further back as the man smashed the moss into his mouth.

 She began to cry at the violence of the scene when the man looked up at her. “Don’t cry” his voice was modulated like it couldn’t travel correctly through regular sound waves, deep and mechanic. “Who are you?” the young girl whispered through tears. “I am what follows you.” “When did you start following me?” “When you were born, Libra moon.” “Why? The metal man walked rigid around the clearing, observing the woods with robotic attention. He paused and looked at her “I was sent by the timeless, to show you time.”  “I don’t want you”, she thought. “When do you stop following me?”, she asked. “When you are out of time.” The girl didn’t like this answer.  She scooted back further and put her knees to her chest resting her head on them, guarding herself.  Time began to jump around and attempt to make the girl laugh, but Time had little experience making anyone laugh and his timid dancing did not console her. He picked a dead leaf off a tree with his mouth and chewed on it. The girl tried to ignore him. He walked stiffly up to her, she clenched her knees into her chest. He pressed his finger into her arm, when he lifted it, a brown spot appeared on the girls pale wrist. “What is that?” She shouted as she tried to rub it off. “It’s me. A reaction to me. I think it’s pretty.” The girl glanced up at him curiously and began to look at the different shades of brown that the age spot contained while the sun reflected on it. “You’ll feel me more than you see me.” When she looked up from her new age spot, Time was gone. The stream began its journey again and the young girl admired her new mark, that looked a little to her like a butterfly. 

[storyforms]

[storyforms]

Susan Was Dry

 Susan left people dehydrated. Like a dying house plant, she sat in the shaded corner of the party waiting for someone to water her with attention and details of their lives that she could recycle. Most people knew to stay away, that although she looked like a fuzzy succulent she was really a fly trap that had lost all preferences of prey a long time ago. She’d eat anyone. Those wise knew  if they got caught in Susan’s small talk spiral, they would eventually get cotton mouth and go home with the aching anxiety they were robbed of something and begin compulsively checking their pockets for their wallet, phone and keys. What Susan took was what she could not give herself, and now in her late 30s she had stolen too much from those close to her, so she had to depend on acquaintances, those who didn’t see how hallow her eyes were. In the tea light serenity of an LA  party, her solitude was easily mistaken for quiet confidence by those seduced by darkness.

She hadn’t been there very long, but her mind had been on the night all day. Playing with sentences in her head to describe herself. “I am in between things right now…” “ I am in my Saturn Return…” “I am a searcher”. What romantic web of her world could she spin so the other could feed this false self.  Her addiction to self deception was validated by her field, the entertainment industry welcomed delusions for they served the dream of immortality.  The party was calm, no one drunk enough yet to speak at a volume above gentle party patter. Ottis Redding softly played as Susan applied chapstick to her thirsty lips,  eyeing the men around her. Everyone was engaged in balanced discussions of current topics like an alien race talking about the gossip of their far away planet. Susan felt bored and began pulling out strands of her hair gracefully, a habit that she concealed so well one would interpret it as her playing with her hair, carefree. Yet after she twists the lock around her finger she’d jerk it out of her scalp in one fell swoop. An instant prick to her skull that let her know she was still there. While searching for a face susceptible to her to neon Vacancy sign,  Susan counted 5 holes on her face. These were all portals in which the nutrients of other people’s lives could enter her. She studied her face in the reflection of the glass door across from her.  Blue eyes that couldn’t hold eye contact with themselves for very long. Nostrils that we’re always bit too turned up for her liking, and a mouth that was her power. The place she sucked from, the place that opened and swallowed all that was outside of her to moisten the dry soil inside. It never worked, but she was addicted to trying. Her finger reached for another piece of hair to pull out when Michael sat down next to her. Susan released her grasp, parted her lips.

Michael didn’t seem to notice Susan at all. He was scanning the crowd nervous to see an ex who he assumed would be there and is why he came, but who is also the reason he’s been hiding for months. She had broken his heart by needing something other. He resented her for wanting more than him. Michael  had made a comfortable home inside her. Susan knew all this immediately by the way he was nervously picking at his thumb cuticle with his index finger and whipping his head toward the sliding door every time it whined open. His anxiety  tried to be subtle, but just as Susan was a liquid pretending to be a solid, she saw the cracks right away, she had to, they were her only home.

Susan asks Michael for a cigarette. She improvises her personality in sensuous detail serving delicate, rare sushi of highly composed life stories enticing Michael with each bite. Her portrait tonight is that of a loner who misses when house parties were dumber and louder. The sophistication of the party is lost to it’s coldness. Michael is half intrigued by Susan, but is feeling too sorry for himself to open up. Susan is frustrated by her charms not being batted at by him like a kitten. She has noticed them working less and less. She begins to worry that the human race is evolving towards total transparency and her methods of survival have outworn their welcome. Susan panics, if she doesn’t get nourishment soon, her blood will spoil, curdled by the bitterness of living off experiences that don’t belong to her. She felt hot behind her ears, and decided to take up the stoic posture of a complete human again and keep on the look out for another other. As soon as Susan’’s gaze traveled back toward the crowd, Michael’s mouth opened towards her and she could breath.