Jaded (part 1)

Those fucking kids.

I watched this child- who could not have been more than twelve years old – repeatedly punch his dog in the face. Blow after blow after blow to the snout of this light brown retriever mix, a dog who was less than 50 pounds on a good day. Needless to say I was disgusted.

I see this dog now, tail between its legs and giant wet eyes, running through the neighborhood, fleeing from its tormentors and trying desperately to find a new way to live, but everyday it’s back in the yard of the demon-child; its back to where the food is; its back to where home is. 

The home it belongs to is just as much a mess as the dog: father, step-mother, three or four children and abuse running rampant from the floors up. The father is an ogre of man, a great belly protrudes from beneath his Cleveland Indians jersey and a coarse black beard fires out from his chin and swallows his face. The beard becomes a mask for him, his face dies within it – it hides – and his voice grows powerful, it becomes the rolling thunder of a cannon shot, the explosion of fodder from within his heart. His bellowing is heard for hundreds of yards, demanding obedience from his children and succor from his wife.

I never see them happy.  I never see them hold hands or hug. His subordinate (the wife, the step-mother) carries herself in fear; her shoulders hang down and she cringes beneath her too-large sweaters and greasy unwashed hair. I hear her tell a friend on the phone, “I can’t take it anymore, I don’t know what to do.” I imagine the voice on the other end trying to convince her to take action, to rebel against her oppressor, but she can’t. Instead of freedom she chooses to ride passenger in the life of a monster. She holds a yard sale to make money off of her broken dreams; why is she raising money? I haven’t the slightest, but I can see that she did not make much. The front lawn was scattered with odds and ends, a clothing rack with outfits long-ignored or children’s toys from a decade before; this soul has given up her life to play second-fiddle, to play step-mother to children who respect no one and nothing.

Clouds open up on the yard sale and she panics to cover her treasures; no help from the kids. Two of her step-sons (brothers) have taken their leave by way of one of their many wheeled devices – scooters, bicycles, skateboards, they had it all. They race the rain to rendezvous with friends behind Goodwill. I imagine the cold droplets striking their faces, hopefully causing them pain, hopefully stinging their eyes so they wonder how the dog feels when they act out upon him.

Step-mom sprints from the garage to the front yard, grabbing first the clothes, then the furniture and then the toys. Random trinkets are left behind to endure the stinging chill. She harps about something when she finally takes shelter. Her voice is shrill now, screeching about some disappointment or dissatisfaction to the empty walls of her cell.

Yelping, the only scream that dogs can make. One short burst of pain embodied in the high-note that every human can identify; clearer than the endless din of grey noise that comes from the house across the way.  

The silver bottoms of the leaves show as the wind whips at the world, a light comes on – automatically reacting to the sudden darkness – and the screen door entrance into hell flies open, battered by the wind and pushed clear for the panicked escape of the dog. His thin legs carry him down their four steps in one leap and he dashes down the sidewalk (I’m always amazed to see animals consciously choosing to use a sidewalk as opposed to crossing yards or the street).

Lightning flashes.

I Remain Unconvinced (Part 2)

[In Progress] Celebrity - Charcoal Transfers, 22"x20"

A cold pinch ripples out from my shoulders and I’ve forgotten where I am. The dark spot in the center of my vision floats back and forth so I see the edges more clearly; the seam of the ceiling is a crisp line where two greys meet. A warm pressure settles over my ankles, the low thread-count sheets tighten and pull; I panic.

In a fractured second my heart pounds so fast it feels motionless. I flail up from my bed, swiping my hands downwards to ward off my attacker. The flurry of limbs and glowing yellow eyes stare widely at me – and with such contempt – as my swinging arms hit air and I kick my feet to free them from the sheets.

I feel the weight lift and hear a smack against the wood floor beneath me. I blindly grope for the lamp. Click. The yellow haze floods the room and I have to squeeze my eyes against it. I snatch the dull knife, flipping it open with a practiced twist of my thumb – another click.

I’m standing beside my bed,

Hot huffs of carbon dioxide push out of me as I slide towards the wall – inherently afraid of the gap between my bed and the floor. My long shadow grows up the green paint, my head contorting at the ceiling to look down upon me and laugh in silence. I flatten my body against the wall, ensuring nothing can come up from behind me. My breath is the only sound; raspy, wet and heavy air that has the beginning stench of morning-breath.

I stand still for one, two, three seconds. Ten. Twenty. A minute. My heart and breath slow. My knife hand drops to my side.

Meow. Those brilliant yellow eyes peek around my bed skirt.

“Fuck.” My shoulders drop. “You little…”

Of course it’s hilarious. If my tiny black feline could laugh he would cackle at me for the rest of the night, replacing the spectral sounds I was imagining with the piercing ups and downs of a cat-laugh.

“Dick.”

Snap. He lunges onto the foot of the bed – now a disastrous mess of sheets – and reaches out his front paws, stretching his un-cut claws and snagging my comforter.

I tap my foot, waiting for him to pick a spot. My life around that of my cat.  

-----------------------

We’re in the darkness again, the wet, multi-lidded eyes of my night watchmen are closed and I wander in the labyrinth of pre-dreams; one thought leads to another, one image to the next and yesterday’s memories to today’s. The rattle of my back door has dulled with the death of the wind, somewhere nearby a dog barks.

Sleep comes, it takes me. (I snore).

The noises are back, but they do not come from the floor; before me lie train tracks - rusted, in a field of sand. No train comes, nor do I see one in the distance, the cracks and creaks of my floor seem to just leak from the oxidized iron, dripping from beneath the spikes that hold the track to the earth.

I can feel my toes wriggling, the sand dragging between them and my weight pushing me down inches at a time. I sink.

The rest of my body is without feeling, the wind blows through me and stirs up the particles at my shins. My knees near the earth and I can see a black dot on the horizon, I can only assume it’s a train. As it approaches I begin to hear footsteps – heavy boots, solid soles and dragging laces.

The locomotive becomes visible in the distance and the footsteps become louder, their din drowning out the wind and shaking my bones – bones that feel so exposed. The sand is at my waist.  

The splitting sound of old leather peaks out from behind the footsteps and the train rolls to a stop several yards beyond me. The sound of boot falls ceases when the train settles and its engine stills, my breathing is heavy as the sand approaches my shoulders.

I sink. The conductor door opens at the engine car. Someone walks out. The sand is around my neck, it tightens.

Snap. The pressure does not let up- my neck is being crushed from all sides. My great circle eyes cannot see in the darkness, the weight of the black still sits on my vision. I grope at my neck and my fingers close over leather.

Gloved hands.

I can’t pant, I can’t panic or gasp; my left hand tries to pry at the claws, the cold, dead, leather-covered claws. I thrash my right arm towards my lamp – it crashes to the ground – and my hand finds the phone. My brushing of the screen floods us in pale blue, the cold light outlines a broad-shouldered monster, someone in black.  A human monster, a man in a jacket - a man in boots.

My fingers go through the motions, but I cannot see if I hit the correct numbers. A dark red closes in on my sight from the corners and I taste blood in my mouth.

A small voice comes out of my phone. I feel sand between my toes.

I Remain Unconvinced (Part 1)

I’m alone, if only for a few minutes. I think I can handle it.

I put down my book and lean over to the dim lamp that guards my nightstand. With one slim click the room plunges into a familiar darkness, the door to my closet becoming the shadow of a man, the curtains in the next room shift from a silhouette to the shoulder of a predator, hulking around the corner, waiting for me to close my eyes. It was the bedroom as before, but now the shapes made new faces, the sounds were all slight – someone sneaking around – and the window behind me was no help; no moon or stars tonight.

Lying on my back, I stare at the threshold to my bedroom. I have no idea what to do should  my fears and nightmares become reality, if someone or something were to slink along the floor boards, avoiding all the creaky spots in the wood and bring their slimy  and eyeless face up to mine, time to die. The knife at my bedside -beneath the lamp- is dull from use; my cellphone is half-charged and I’ve memorized the muscle movement for 9-1-1, but I can’t help to imagine myself paralyzed in fear.

If one of these creatures of the night were to greet me, would it do any good to call the police? I think bullets would only help against your garden variety intruder – not the one I see hiding in the corner.

How long can I sit here by myself?  I could turn the light back on, stay awake all night and try to force myself to be brave, or I could keep choking my way into a panic-driven cardiac arrest. I knew there was one event – one single moment – that could calm me down and bring me to a place where I could sleep, where I could dream a dreamer’s dream.

My ears perked at every snap of the wood, trying to settle my crawling skin and convince my twitchy mind that those were not footsteps. Pop. Creak. Sigh. At the foot of my bed the floor was breathing, it was bending and relaxing – something was there, something was waiting for me stretch my feet from beneath the sheets. The bed skirt ruffles, it rubs together.

My heart is pounding; I can barely hear these terrors over the thump, thump, thumpthumpthumpthump of my own insides.

I pull my feet up slightly, slowly, gently – I don’t want to warn the creature that I’m awake – and I turn my head to watch the right side as the sound creeps along the bottom.

Silence.

I slow my breathing; thinking, perhaps, I imagined the noises, I imagined the nightmare. The wind rocks the outside, knocking my back door around in its loose frame. I can close my eyes.

Sigh.

I stare beyond my eyelids, into the depths of darkness and the boundaries of sleep. Blackness - complete and hollow - blankets my sight, allowing me to see the bleeding colors of my dreams, the fuzzy lines of my imagination and the memories of yesterday. My body map condenses and my hands and feet feel close to my body, but miles away.  The sheets draped across my chest fade away and dull into a warm hum in my skin; I float.

SNAP.

... of the Human Heart

Lion King of Pop - Charcoal Transfer, 18x8

A cargo train sat on top of the overpass, unmoving. The engine car was a deep blue; faded yellow letters declaring the name of the company to all of us below.
I could see the conductor leaning out the window, watching the traffic, just as I was watching him. The chain of cargo stretched beyond vision along the track, a mongrel of colored and tagged cars of diverse sizes and shapes. I was never very good at reading graffiti tags.

The orange hand of God blinked in the “Don’t Walk” position, warning those on foot that I was soon to plow through this intersection. The interval of the hand and the blackness synced up perfectly with the music I was drowning in: “In the End,” Nicholas Megalis.
The way the pulses matched up, not quite a coincidence but something close, made me smile; I sang along, “I’m hyper sensitive, focus on the positive, Nick you are insensitive, Nick you are insensitive!”

I pulled out through the intersection, turning left.  The car and I slip under the overpass, forgetting the train as we get up to forty. The engine beneath me purrs as it shifts gears all on its own and I end up behind an early 2000s Honda Odyssey with small, rusty bits at every corner where two planes meet. The song ends.
I hit the AM/FM button and flip to the radio; an overbearingly loud voice heralds the fortunes of Kia of Bedford. The Odyssey and I make another left, heading east.

The early May breeze flows in my window, a faint smell of exhaust, but mostly a crisp scent of cut grass – I had been hearing the sound of lawn mowers all day. I let my left hand drift out the window, gliding on and breaking the air with a heavy whipping sound.
I look at all the lawns I pass, green yards and pastel colored houses silhouetted against the muted grey sky. The blanket of clouds is slightly ruffled in the distance, a dark red color washing the folds. I hear a tearing sound, a scream of metal and someone sounding far away, “Oh my god.”

I pry my eyes from the clouds just in time.
My idle feet slam on the breaks (screeching and ripping) and I wrench the wheel to the right, not wanting to swerve into carnage.
Thankfully I hadn’t been following too close; the Odyssey was no longer in front of me, it was something else, a twisted fusion of cars and people that were stitched with blood and glass. The minivan’s side panel had been struck by a red-light runner, a Ford Focus. The new metallic mass was hissing smoke and other drivers, like me, had to slam to halts to avoid joining this automobillic monstrosity. 

I push the red safety button on my seat belt and fly out the door, cell-phone in hand.
9-1-1.
“911, what is your emergency?”
“There’s been an accident! Tiedleman and 117^th! Oh god, uhh, a t-bone, I – Oh god.” I dashed to the Odyssey’s driver-side door and find it knocked open and a limp figure hanging out, kept from falling by her taught safety belt. A woman.                
The phone is limply grasped, “Sir? Sir, are you there? Help is on the way, please stay on the line.” I wasn’t really listening, but I know that’s what was said.

I drop the phone – the screen cracks – and shoulder the door farther open as I put my arms under the young girl in the tangle of belts, glass and airbags. The bags have begun to deflate and I’m trying to hold her up as I fumble for her safety belt release.
My shoulder feels wet and I hear panicked voices on the other side of the car, I hope someone else is miming my actions with the Focus driver.
“Hey, hey you, I’m getting you out of here.” My fingers manage to find the plastic where the belt clips in, if I wasn’t so scared I would have felt perverted – my hands were practically groping her thigh as I searched.
She’s free. A small blonde thing, if I hadn’t seen the accident myself I would make a blonde-female driver joke (“there is a tree in the road!” “Ma’am, that’s your air-freshener”). Another pair of hands helps me lower her to the ground, a few yards from the wreckage. The left side of her face is a scarlet mask with flecks of safe-t glass peppered in for texture.
“You’re going to be alright, I called 9-1-1.” Who did I say that for?

The pair of hands beside me disappears and becomes feet that move towards the car.
My first two fingers move to the side of the girl’s throat…
Nothing?
No. No, I felt something, she was alive. Barely.

I look up and sigh with relief; I want to share with the other someone who was there. The helping limbs belonged to a tall man in jeans. He was bent over fiddling around in the car.
I should be puzzled, but I can’t be anything but thankful, “She’s alive.” I know I need to get something on her head wound.
I see the man who helped me. He spins on his right foot, eyes darting left and right as they settle on me. Guilt is evident on his face and I finally start feeling confused, “Hey! What are you doing!?”

In his hand are keys - a jumble of silver and a tiny Eiffel Tower replica – bunched in the crook of his arm is a patterned bag, a woman’s purse. Far off I can hear the whistle of the train.
The scene feels still, no one honks their horns and the few screams have died off. The voice of the 911 Dispatcher leaks out of my broken phone, I don’t know what she’s saying. The man in the jeans swallows.
He breaks eye contact with me, head down, and dashes around the hood of the car. Gone.

I hear sirens in the distance.

The driver of the Focus bled out. 

Morning Irrelevant

                            [Work in progress] Morning Elephant - Charcoal Transfer, 8.5x11

They were three white dots at this distance, floating on a column of air.

Looking out the window I wondered what drew the gulls to the storm front, what attracted them to the purple monster outside my west-facing window.
I had the glass open, it was the first warm day of spring and I was not going to miss a single breeze.  Morning storms always had a particular scent, especially in spring, a smell of being clean, of an air that still had a purity to it.
The gulls sank below the line of houses that crowded the horizon, the deep purple grew towards grey and the breeze gathered force: a warning for me, for me alone. All I had to do was listen.
How long could I stand here watching the clouds and the birds before I figured out something new and different about life? If I asked myself that same question thirteen minutes ago, I would have been cruel, “Forever, kid, because those mindless birds and that cumulonimbus won’t give you anything, nothing but the rain and the cold.”
But I know that’s not true now, I know the rain isn’t always cold and the birds aren’t always mindless; something like a single moment is enough to tell the history of the world.

I tip-toed down the stairs, out the already unlocked door and into the narrow gap between houses, in this gutter of a space the wind was strongest, drowning me in its normally unwelcome whoosh, swallowing my naked body in the heat of its breath. This moment is so hard to describe.
Pale orange sunrise to my back, the darkness of a coming downpour to my front and here I stand, naked and unafraid. Randomly in my youth I would perform activities without clothes - cooking, video games, homework, whatever – just to see if it changed the moment, if it made cooking less banal, or games more demanding. In this moment (realizing that until now I’d never been completely nude while outdoors) I can say that I was a bright child; that I was on to something, that this moment would not be the same if I was chained to the earth with some label-laden latex or cotton jumpsuit.
I took the few steps towards the mail box, lifting the red flag – outgoing mail – I hope someone spends a great deal of time considering why I did this, what did the dead man’s actions mean?

Five black dots ascended across the storm front, moving opposite their predecessors, which flock was moving the right direction?  This passing did not seem as crucial as the first, was I a racist for paying more attention to the white birds? It seemed silly to wonder, but all of my thoughts were important, every last firing synapse was critical.

Four more steps and I am at the curb; cars parked along the opposite side of the street and a child’s bicycle thrown casually in the tree lawn. One more step and I am in the road, the indigo monster is overhead and the sunlight senses it, the morning gets dimmer. The street is already wet and I take my planned position in the middle, facing west – away from the rising sun.

The road runs along my outstretched arms, one hand facing south, the other north. The northern hand is heavy - a handgun will do that, it seems. There would only be a few seconds of silence as the wind died, the noise at the front of the storm passing as it gave way to the quiet raindrops and the screech of tires.
I raised the gun, thinking briefly about a diagram on how to properly shoot myself in the head (the most effective avenue would be to shoot into the top, aiming down), but the thought passes and the barrel touches my temple – best to look the part. This was the first half of the last second of my life, the second half was supposed to be my pulling of the trigger, of a lightning-less thunder that would break the stormy sky. 
I didn’t have the time to be disappointed though, the F-150 collides with my pale, ivory skin; the way my body moves from zero to forty is like a dance - my arms become the long colored ribbons. I twist in the middle, hugging the red paint. The pick-up had swerved into me, the driver’s side window meeting my face and the hammer of the gun – together we crack the glass into a web of splinters and fragmented reflections.

My descent from forty back to zero was less graceful, it happened over twenty three feet, another half second. I rolled to a stop at the apron of my neighbor’s driveway, landing so I could see their crab grass. The truck stopped short of running me over, the screech finally ending with the staccato of glass shards and muffled cries of panic coming from within the cab.
Where was my gun?
My eyes swam around, desperately searching for the small black death-machine, I want to look further, but my head won’t roll over. I have another passing thought about how I should be in pain, but I’m not. The concern comes and goes, instead I’m wishing for pants.