Do You Remember?

       I just saw this video:

       Which should make more sense after watching this:

       Anyway, the former video was obviously inspired by the latter and I was about halfway through the video when I suddenly remembered (ha!) my own entry into the unofficial "Do You Remember?" project (which only exists in my head). I wrote this all the way back in October as my first assignment for the Fiction II creative writing class I was taking at the time. It's a short-short (it could only be 500 words max) and it's called "And When I Get Lonely I Explode". Enjoy.

...

            Do you remember late afternoons in summer looking out the kitchen window of my old house? Our hands inside yellow rubber gloves submerged in dingy, soapy water floating food bits like soup? And we stood pressed together on a chair pulled from the dining room table because each of us was too short to reach the sink without it?

            We stood hip to hip and elbow to elbow and you told me whenever you got lonely you would explode. Pieces of you flew straight up sometimes, or flung out at the walls. Sometimes it happened slowly so you’d watch as your arm separated from your shoulder, your hand from your wrist, your fingers from your palm, and you found mouse holes along the baseboards that led to labyrinthine cities lit with Christmas lights like a constant night full of stars. The mice lived in apartments with sardine can doors and each of them shared a name with one of the bottles in my mother’s spice rack:

           Oregano and Bay and Tarragon and Caraway.  Tellicherry was the fashionista in the wide-brimmed silk hat who always spoke in a smoky lilt like we thought all women of sophistication were meant to speak.

  

          Do you remember? We huddled together atop that chair and traded turns between a rough blue sponge and a worn dishrag. It was only ever a game when you came over. I remember you had one of those stretchy bands with the metal tube pinching the ends together. If you didn’t use it to tie your hair back I’d steal it away and chew on it though it tasted like shampoo and old spit. I’d loop it around my tongue to keep from swallowing it.

           And there were times when you’d absolutely turn to dust. You told me your parents came home and sometimes it’d be like walking through the desert from the front door to the door of your bedroom. You’d get caught in the breezes of the air conditioning and end up in places that were unexpected. Just a speck of you could leave through the screen covering your window and travel for miles on the breaths of neighborhood dogs and enter a drainage pipe where a pack of small, feral children lay head to foot in dead silence with their thoughts.

            I made you promise that we’d find that pipe because you said there were at least a half dozen of them and they all looked the same with skin like sausage casings. We never went looking because there was always some excuse not to; then we forgot in the way that so many things were pushed from our minds in those days. I moved away and sent letters. You sent some back, though one of us must’ve stopped responding because I barely know you anymore. Your face is scary now in a way that I don’t remember. Womanly.

[Deleted Scenes] 'It's nothing you did,' and, At the other end of it

There had been plenty of screaming and fighting before then, maybe years of it, but it certainly intensified in the preceding months before she awoke one morning to a silence that was at first a relief, then like a weather-beaten port in the storm, before it became a portent of all her days afterward. What could she remember of that first day without her mother? Not much. It hadn’t yet taken on any significance, and so passed with little acknowledgment that anything in the world might be out of place. That day was a school day and she walked it like any other school day, her bag slung over her shoulder by its strap and a pink-billed baseball cap angled on her head to keep out the sun.

She stared into the houses that she passed, their curtains drawn and the windows transparently opaque, and wondered as she always did what it was like to be on the other side. Not so much to live in these other houses, but to explore where their stairways might curve upward, or to walk into tiny rooms that were hidden away like secret compartments among the larger rooms. She wished that it would be proper to knock on these doors and ask the occupants for a look around. At times she would imagine these spaces to be unscarred and devoid of the markings of tenancy—furniture and dishware and clothing and books, etc.—and at other times her mind came to be wading into the flotsam of coagulating lives long lived and stuck away into basements and attics. Or at the back of long, disused hallways that couldn’t be said to lead anywhere at all anymore. And in all her imaginings she was always alone to make what she would of whatever she found: faded banisters worn by the climb and descent of hands, or a tiny dancer set free, for the first time in ages, from the wooden enclosure of her box.

These would have been her same thoughts on that first day, walking the same slate slabs that lined either side of the street and wearying quickly beneath the weight of her schoolwork. Of course she didn’t worry that her mother may be gone. Her mother had gone before and come back, a little humbled but no less furious, time and again, like a ball tethered to a paddle, and no less temperamental. But as the days moved forward and numbered one atop the other her father’s passing gaze in the kitchen over their breakfast, or his kisses goodnight when they stood together out in the hall after she’d brushed her teeth, communicated a kind of weariness and loss. As if Ana herself was the one who had left. He began to look at her as if he always had something to say but never the courage to say it.

The succeeding days were long, quiet ones in the aftermath of a hurricane when ships and docks are repaired of their broken and torn planks and sheets of metal, and are refitted with fresh hulls and new paint and reinforced struts. Her father was rebuilding something inside him that had been recently rebroken—and continuously rebroken for a long time. He took to standing alongside windows at odd times, morning and late evening, and appearing in the darkened living room during the night when she had gotten up for a glass of water. Was it his gray form at those dim hours that sometimes haunted her dreams, or was it herself that found it difficult to exit a room that felt both infinite and confined as she stared at a wall-bound nail that hung nothing? What was it that she was rebuilding inside herself? She never had a clue about what might’ve happened and how she should feel about it.

“Your mother’s a difficult woman,” her father said to her once. “She…she’s…I think don’t think she’s ever been very happy.”

Years later this would become the only description that Ana still retained of her mother. In adulthood, after the rejection of old photographs and the cut of familial ties, when she would no longer be able to recall even the woman’s hair color, this would seem the most apt thing to say of the person who partially raised her. But while he said it she could imagine her mother standing in the next room, silent and tight-lipped, brimming with fury. It made her want to retreat quickly, either to her room or to the sidewalk in front of their home, her mind falling upon a single object, one sentence within her favorite book or the action of a neighborly dog turning circles around a colony of dandelions, so she wouldn’t hear the fever pitch of her parents’ voices.

“I understand,” she’d said.

“I’m taking you out of school for awhile. You’ll live with your aunt and uncle and cousin. Just until…. And you’ll have to fly down there alone. I’m sorry.”

Did she cry then? In her memory she didn’t, though she must’ve been scared. He held her, she did remember that, and he said something about being bigger than he remembered, though she still felt quite small to be held that way. It was the first of a lot of goodbyes, her plane wouldn’t be until the end of the week, and she still had to pack. “It’s nothing you did,” he assured her, and his voice was just sweet enough to make it true.

…

At the other end of it she felt a little weather-beaten and demure, her skin the creamy color of an exotic coffee and her hair lightened to natural streaks in the illogical, obsessive attention of the sun. She walked bare-footed among black, fat scorpions with their almost-ineffectual sting and venom, and for awhile there was a hawk that had fallen from the sky whom she fed little pieces of cut up lizard to and held in a cage hooked at the end of the clothesline. And the clothes she came in became frayed and shrunk, herself grown more slender and angular, every part of her reaching outward as if to touch an unseen boundary. Her eyes a wall, her mouth an oasis, her palms and the soles of her feet openings for every extra-sensual admission: she knew herself as somebody different, began to move in strange ways that weren’t always apparent to her at first, the objects of her attention not always the ones she was looking directly at.

The message came for her to fly back on a day as cloudless as any other, except for a dark bank to the east fast approaching the jagged teeth of a range of mountains that would tear open its stomach and spill it far away from where she stood, gazing in the other direction, almost toward infinity. The gutted contents of her suitcase needed to be re-folded and re-inserted in the proper order (her mind was trying to recall how these same articles of clothing had looked in the light of her room) and the suitcase itself sutured by its zipper around its face. The message had mentioned nothing of her mother, mentioned nothing really at all, except that she would return to him, to meet him in the jostling expanse of an airline’s arrival gate. The message came with a one-way ticket that seemed too precious to send by mail.

Ana spent the day swimming again and again to the bottom of the spring where the water broke surface in a calm, imperceptible gush like the jets at the bottom of a fancy tub. She held herself under and opened her eyes to the stirred-up settling of silt that danced with her and traced the valleys of her probing fingers, a little like what it would be to glide freely between the Earth’s geologic layers. She felt the roots of herself and the roots of everything else running deeper than the spring’s secret geyser. In the claustrophobic mass of liquid all around her, her mind could only contain one thought in the single present moment, if she was anyone else she may have worried that she might drown. It stripped her down to everything that she actually was.

“You have grass on your lawn,” she’d said once to Geoff.

“Hmm?”

She’d pointed to the thick islands of scrub that she’d been warned away from as being homes to other (probably dangerous) creatures. There, the grass was as tall and thick as reeds, and could be plucked and held aloft in the air like an impossible wingspan. He’d followed the line of her arm, past the hinging bones of her wrist, to the point of her finger, and farther on to the island, which he’d looked upon unimpressed or disinterested or just not willing to comprehend. It was joke, didn’t he see? Though a broad kind of joke that didn’t require laughter. She’d meant it only as another way of saying goodbye.

Catalpa Ln.

Within the past week, Jack found he couldn’t stand the thought of walking through the thick fog that stood as a wall at the end of the street, couldn’t believe that there was any longer a side opposite to what he could see. He grew apprehensive when he thought about it, and that apprehension turned to fear. He might be lost within it. Five, maybe ten, feet in the fog became impenetrable, a wall of flat white, and each time previous when he’d ventured into that white, often herding his brother and sister in front of him, to school or to buy groceries, his mind remarked (calmly, even though his heart would race as the words began to form): So this is what it’s like to be struck blind.

The fog began farther uptown about six blocks past the higher end of Sonora Grade and created a giant ring either encompassing or cutting through three separate neighborhoods. Newspapers began to report on the phenomena and scientists were asked to hypostulate on its structure. It began as a haze building in ground fog and with tendrils of mist lacing a three-story wall in a tight knit. The wall of fog stood at an estimate of thirty feet high and twenty feet thick, and only as it became a thing of depth instead of water particulates floating through the air, did the ring begin to shrink toward its center and gradually—over a duration of a year and a half—encroach upon Jack’s street: Catalpa Ln.

And now he worried that there may no longer be a world outside of that thick mass, the fog retroactively (his mind could easily convince itself of a sentient knowledge and a willful act of bio-chemical sabotage that allowed the chemical bonds in all things—buildings, plants, animals, and even human beings—to break down long after the fog had passed, as if on a timer) erasing everything that should’ve been and replacing it with itself so that he might be doomed to wander a sightless landscape until the end of his days.

Jack Corbeau Page, Jr. (age 15)—known as ‘Corbeau’ only to his family and to his parents’ friends—lived at what he believed to be the very center of the fog’s circumference, what would be the last bastion if the fog continued to shrink. He woke up again that morning to his mother’s violent coughing, followed by a few sympathetic coughs of his father’s own. They had been sick for three months and twelve days by then, falling ill one after the other like dominoes over a period of several days, and were too weak to work or do household chores or to even totter the short distance from the bed to the bathroom. Jack had taken to caring for them, as well as his younger siblings, feeding them, helping them to the bathroom, and changing their bed sheets after depositing them in twin rockers brought up from the living room. His parents had a sizable sum in savings and Jack made trips to the bank carrying slips of paper scribbled in his father’s hand allowing him to withdraw a predetermined amount. But, lately, the account had run dry and the last bit of it wasn’t going to last after next week’s groceries.

He needed a job. He needed to make money.

Mr. Aalto—maybe equally apprehensive about traveling through the fog—had bought bag upon bag of potting soil and fertilizer and, building plywood walls and laying down a thick tarp over the tarpaper to create a large square bowl, turned the roof of his building into a small garden to grow and harvest tomatoes, peas, and squash. But he didn’t need anyone. Nor did old Mrs. Starbird, who morning after morning walked undaunted into the fog and returned a couple of hours later with bags of potatoes or oranges or a whole watermelon. The potatoes were sold ‘as is’, the watermelon divvied up into shrink-wrapped slices, but the oranges were squeezed to juice in an archaic-looking press that only produced a third-glass at a time. But she resisted his offers of working the juicer for her so that left only one last opportunity on his street: Cass Tinker of Tinker’s Toys.

Rumor might have it that Cass Tinker were dead if he wasn’t seen every Friday on his way to market in a suit, polished shoes, trimmed beard, slicked hair, and gas mask (maybe Jack wasn’t the only one convinced of the fog’s ulterior motives). He stood at five-foot-six but always seemed much taller if you happen to be coming from the other way. It was difficult for Jack to pinpoint what made Mr. Tinker so ‘huge’, though it might have to do with childhood memories of being towered over by the man as Jack, with mother usually, perused the shelves of toys in his shop and Mr. Tinker followed close behind remarking upon this or that toy’s unique qualities and limitless ‘imaginatory’ potential, always due to their existence as handmade objects. All of the toys Mr. Tinker sold were handmade, and all of them were handmade by him.

So Jack woke that morning, having decided the night before that he would bug Mr. Tinker for a job.

Nameless

Delilah had her litter just the past week, Clara telling him this as they climbed the singular tree in his front yard, the foliage thick around them so they probably couldn’t be seen from the street.

“They’re mewling,” she said.

“What?” Rowan asked.

“That’s what my dad says, ‘mewling’. It’s like…” and then she made the sound.

“Oh.”

He was higher up than her among the thinner branches that would waver and shake each time a gust of wind pushed through, his heart thumping with the imminent fall that never came, but was no less likely to occur. Clara wore a dress as she climbed and he would have to turn away and pretend to look at the next branch up whenever she hooked a leg over and planted the other against the trunk of the tree in order to hoist herself higher. The backs of her knees were all cut up and scabbed. If he happened to see her underpants she would look up at him with a grimace and might even tug his shoelaces as a warning that gravity may be the price of admission to a girl’s under-things.

“Weren’t you worried that Delilah might die?” he asked.

“It was really cool!” Her dress billowed out below her, the paling skin of her legs flashing just at where he wasn’t able to look. “No, I didn’t think she was going to die. You should’ve come over and watched.”

“I didn’t know about it then.”

“Well, I should’ve called you, then. You know what? We should make phones that go to only each other and whenever something important like that happens I can tell you and you can come over.”

He thought about it. “Yeah, that does sound pretty cool.”

They climbed high enough to where the branches shrunk to thick pegs tapering into twigs. He was stranded several feet from the tree’s pointed top with no way to climb any higher and Clara distributing herself across the few scraggly branches below him, blocking the way down. There was at least fifteen feet of air to the grass of his yard, which was a hard impact even from a drop at two feet, and many branches that wouldn’t make the fall any softer.

“Okay, let me down,” he said.

“But we just got up here! Look, we’re higher than your roof!”

“I have to pee,” he explained.

“Well, then, just pull down your pants and go pee.” She held up a hand in scout’s honor. “I promise not to watch. Just don’t pee on me!”

“I can’t pee in front of you.”

“Well that’s too bad, because I’m not getting down.”

“I think I’m slipping. I’m going to fall unless I get down.”

“You’re not going to fall,” she said.

He began making his descent on top of her, urging a “Hey!” as she ducked away from his feet searching for purchase. The thin branches he held onto bent at his and their exertion and might’ve been cracking and coming apart if he wasn’t too scared to look up and see. Instead of forcing her down like he expected, they became entangled and he had to clutch the trunk of the tree in order to keep from toppling on top of her.

“Fine,” she said, “I’ll get down! Just stop stepping all over me!”

He climbed back up a little so she could right herself and begin to move down. In the lower branches there was room enough for her to scurry to the side and let him pass but, instead, she dropped from the tree and tumbled against its exposed roots, leaving a smear that was half dirt and half green across her back. He did the same and she moved to the side so that he wouldn’t tumble into her ankles.

“So, you want to see them?” she asked. “The kittens?”

“Yeah. But I have to go to the bathroom first.”

She huffed at him. “Fine! Go to the bathroom first. Then, let’s go to my house so we can look at the kittens!”

He told his mom that he was going to Clara’s and that he would be back by supper. She called to him from the kitchen to be back no later. Outside, Clara surprised him by jumping from the bushes by his front door, letting out a banshee’s scream that made all the birds and bugs in the yard go quiet for awhile. She threw herself at him and pinned him to the ground. He could only just make her get off of him and turn her over and pin her right back. But, then, she could just do the same. Over and over again.

“Come on, you jitterbug,” she said, letting him up, “let’s go to my house! I’ll race you!”

Clara’s house was at just the other end of the street and the white soles of her high-top sneakers—boys’ sneakers she’d proudly and defensively pointed out to him, sneakers that had belonged to her older brother, which he’d never worn and eventually grew out of—flashed on the pavement that was lit almost just as white by the late afternoon sun. He pulled past her and piled on the speed. She shifted her footfalls into a sprint behind him and his mind dared him not to look back. She stayed close to him the whole way.

“Come on,” she said, “we’ll go through the side door.”

The side door was on the side of the garage and had a window in it, but the sun glared their reflections off of the glass back at them and he couldn’t see anything until she opened the door—and still he couldn’t see anything, too dark inside—and he had to let his eyes adjust.

“It’s just over here,” she said, and she took him to a cardboard box set up amongst the stuff at the garage’s back wall, with its top and one of its walls cut out and an old blanket spilling out onto the concrete floor.

He saw tiny furry bodies in the dim. The kittens all had their eyes closed and were piled into the protection and warmth of their mother’s belly. One had been squeezed and ejected from the pile and was crying as it padded its way back in blindly to suckle. Delilah looked at Rowan and Clara with what might’ve been fatigue and tracked them as they came in sight and settled to the cold concrete on their bare knees.

Clara said, “Look, they can’t even really walk yet.”

The exiled kitten moved by pushing and dragging itself along on its stomach, occasionally pausing and crying in the general direction of its mother. Its mouth seemed to be wider than its entire head.

“That one doesn’t have teeth,” Rowan said.

“Duh! Did you have teeth when you were born?”

“I didn’t know it was the same,” he explained. “Did you name them yet?”

“No. Mom and Dad says we’re giving them all away, anyway, so what’s the use? I’d probably call that one Sunshine if I called him anything.” She pointed to one of the kittens.

“You know that’s a him?”

“No, I assume.”

She made it sound like some sort of superpower.

“You want to hold one?” she asked. “Which one?”

He already had one picked out, “That one,” and she handed him a chocolate-covered body with its paws—as well as the top of its head and the nubs of its ears—dipped in white. She gave it to him in one hand and he took it in both of his, a surge of fear shooting through him. The kitten couldn’t have weighed more than a Wiffle ball and the bones in its body felt like the thin plastic bones of the fake dinosaur fossil he’d spent a week assembling on the desk in his room.

“That one’s yours if you want it,” Clara said

“I think I have to ask my parents first.” His mom and dad might not want him to have it. “Is it a he or a she?”

Clara grabbed the kitten by the hind legs and pulled it around so that she could see beneath its tail.

“Hey! Don’t do that!” But she let go before he could swat her hands away.

“It’s a girl.” Then she looked at him like he was being a baby. “Don’t worry, I wasn’t going to hurt her! I had to check to make sure. But you can’t have her yet. She has to stay with her mom until she’s eight weeks old.”

“That’s a long time,” he said. He didn’t mean to sound so awed.

“I know.”

They went outside then, and around to her backyard. There was a jungle gym back there—a slide, a swing, monkey bars, even a fireman’s pole—and a tree that wasn’t as good for climbing as his but they sometimes practiced kissing behind. The kisses felt funny and disappointing but it seemed important to practice for future boyfriends and girlfriends. Sometimes she would say that he was her boyfriend and sometimes he would say that she was his girlfriend, but the arrangement was often boring and without any conceivable perks.

She said, “I can get across all the monkey bars now, want to see?”

She showed him and he tried after her, but he only got two-thirds of the way before his hands started to burn and he had to let go.

“I’m going to ask my mom if I can join gymnastics,” she said.

He wasn’t very interested. “I wonder if my mom will let me have that kitten?”

“I dunno. You want to play ‘Astronaut’?”

“Sure.”

She went first, sitting down in the swing, and he began to push her until she was up so high and swinging so fast that he had to step back and let her pump her legs to get herself the rest of the way. She swung so high that she was up above the crossbar and the chains slackened as she hung in the air parallel to the ground, nothing to do but fall. Then she let go and lifted off, flying through the air with her arms outspread.

It was then that Clara’s mom came to the kitchen window and called Clara inside to eat. “I have to go inside.” Then a thought occurred. “Want to eat dinner with us? Hey, Mom!”

“What?” Clara’s mom called back.

“Can Rowan eat with us tonight?”

“He’ll have to ask his parents first. Rowan, call your mom first, okay, honey?”

He nodded and after they went inside he went to the phone in the front hall of Clara’s house and dialed his home number. His mom answered on the second ring and he asked if he could stay and eat there.

“Rowan, I don’t want you to be imposing yourself on those people.”

“I’m not! I promise.” He wasn’t quite sure what ‘imposing’ meant.

“Okay, then. But get home before dark, okay?”

“Okay.”

He hung up the phone and went into the dining room. “My mom said it’s okay,” he said, before Clara’s mom set down a plate in front of him. They had lasagna and green beans and garlic bread sticks. Afterward, he followed Clara into her bedroom, which was the last door at the end of the hall. The sun slanted in through the blinds and cast long shadows on a build-it-yourself marble rollercoaster. She also had a chemistry set with the little bottles of chemicals lined up in one corner of small bookshelf. Sometimes he helped her to make fake snot.

“Let’s look at the kittens again,” he said, “before I leave.”

They went back out to the garage and she flipped the light switch because by then it was too dark inside to see anything. Delilah had moved from her place into a corner of the garage where a bowl of food and bowl of water had been set out. Rowan took this opportunity and scooped the chocolate kitten up in both hands and held her to his chest. Right away something was wrong. The chocolate kitten didn’t cry in his hands when he picked her up and he didn’t feel any futile tensing of the forepaws extending tiny, feather-like claws that might as well have been invisible. The heat was wrong, the chocolate kitten had been so warm before, but now it felt like a cupcake hours after it had been taken out of the oven.

Even as he tried to set it back down he flinched from it, and the kitten spilled from his palms and landed near the edge of the blanket on its side, mouth open and its tongue lolling out. He was crying before he even knew he was crying, and he hated himself because he was crying, especially in front of Clara. She was a few seconds realizing what just happened and her face smoothed as if she were about to start crying, too. But, instead, she leaned over and wrapped her arms around him in an embrace.

“You killed it! You killed my kitten!” he screamed.

He made her let go of him.

“What? When?”

“When you pulled her legs! You killed her!”

She looked at him as if he’d just stuck a safety pin into the meat of her hand.

She screamed back, “I did not! You can’t kill a kitten by pulling its legs! That’s stupid!”

He rubbed the tears from his eyes and wanted to make them stop. Clara stood up and there was floor dirt on the front of her dress where the fabric had been pinned between her knees and the concrete. He refused to look at her and she wanted to kick him, but didn’t.

“You did,” was all he could say.

She stood above him and kept making her hands into fists over and over again. “Go home! I don’t want to see you anymore!”

The garage door slammed as she went inside and he was left there alone. She turned the light off too, so that the kitten disappeared before him.

He ran back and he didn’t want anyone to see. His mom was in the kitchen, at the sink, doing the dinner dishes and she asked him if something was wrong as he passed but he didn’t really hear it and didn’t want to answer. He went into his room and crawled onto his bed and wrapped the covers around his head, breathing in the smell of his tears and snot and the hot air that moistened the material at his face.

He felt his mom sit down and put a hand on his stomach.

“Something wrong?”

He choked back enough of his crying to answer. “No.”

“Did you have a fight with Clara?”

“Maybe.”

“What about?”

“Something stupid.”

She laid down across him, pushing all the air out of him in one long breath into the blanket. “Well it can’t be that stupid if it’s got you so upset.”

“It must be since she got mad at me.”

“Why did she get mad?”

He loosened the blanket on his head.

“Do kittens go to heaven?” he asked.

“I think so. Yeah, I’m sure they do.”

“Even ones without names?”

“Of course.”

“Would you love me even if I killed a kitten?”

“Did you kill a kitten?”

He thought about it. “No.”

“Then I love you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re worth loving.”

He uncovered his head so he could look at her. “But what if?”

“I think I’d still love you.”

“Why?”

He felt her shrug. “If it was a mistake and you were really sorry I don’t think I should be allowed to stop loving you, do you?”

“I guess not.” Then he added, “It was a hypothetical,” in case she didn’t know. He said it ‘hy-po-thet-i-cal’.

She stretched across him. “Well, if that was all that was bothering you. I still have dishes to do.”

“That’s it.”

She kissed him on the cheek while she still had him pinned, and he wiped it off when she wasn’t looking. She closed the door when she left and he laid in bed watching the wood grain of the door. He felt a weird feeling in his stomach like he was hungry, but he didn’t want to eat anything. It was dark enough, too, that he could sleep, but he didn’t want to do that either. So he stared at the wood grain of the door for a long time until it began to look like nothing at all and he wasn’t aware that his eyes were no longer open to see.

"Societal Terrorism"

The spray-paint cans rattle in your backpack as you round the street corner, Maggie in the lead, the pale skin of her arms like spears swinging from the sleeves of her t-shirt. Both of you skirt the puddles of illumination washing down from the streetlamps, straying into front yards, and--somewhat comically on your part--lobbing yourselves over low fences and hedgerows, which, you think, just makes the two of you more conspicuous among the brass door knockers and botanical lawn sculpture, but she doesn't seem to mind. Even your very presence here is nothing short of societal terrorism.

"Taking the Dog to the Park"

He drove the Dog to the park and let it loose there. The animal bound about with pent up energy, swinging its body around the structures of the jungle gym and tearing through under the swings. He’d given it a can of food back in the motel room and then led it into the backseat of the car. The sun had completely gone from the sky and the Dog was a gray blur fading in and out of the darkness, coming back toward Dillon and then turning away, and if it weren’t for its heavy breathing in the still air he could’ve believed that it had gone for good. Some part of him needed to lose the Dog, needed to retake the highways and interstates, and put a little more distance behind him.

Light poles stood around the basketball court that was tucked into one corner, making it the single portion of park that was lit, and beneath the lights dark figures stood beneath one hoop in a tight congregation that expanded each time a small flicker of flame appeared among them. He watched them to see if they were watching him as well, and decided they weren’t. He approached so that he would come into the light at the opposite end of the court and held his hands open at his sides to show that he had nothing. The figures, a group of young boys, turned to stare and one palmed something away into a jacket pocket.

“Can I have a hit?” Dillon asked.

He could feel the high coming off them like electricity, dancing in their toes, and thought he might like to trade places with any one of them.

“Can you take a hit?” one of them asked, and laughed. “Depends. We ain’t got no fuckin’ pot if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Whatever.” Dillon stepped forward until he was almost all the way inside of their group. “Just give me whatever you’ve got.”

The one who’d spoken before turned to another and said, “Beast, man, you heard the dude. Hand it on over.”

Beast-man fished a modified light-bulb from his jacket pocket, a plastic bottle cap screwed and melted at the narrow end with a straw stuck through it. Inside the bulb wisps of white fumes still hung against the glass and tiny crystals stood un-melted and stuck to the bottom. Beast-man handed Dillon the strange device whose function wasn’t so strange along with a disposable lighter that had been modified as well to allow for a larger flame. Dillon feigned ignorance so that he might take some time to admire the artistry of the boys and their make-shift pipe.

“Don’t hurt yourself, dude. Shit’s dangerous! Do I need to show you how to work it?”

Dillon held the bulb up near his chest and flicked on the lighter, holding the flame close to the underside of the bulb where the glass had browned and distorted. Wisps of white began filling the chamber and Dillon wrapped his lips around the straw and began to pull, releasing the button on the lighter but still pulling as the fumes kept rising. Then he took his lips away and counted, 1…2…3…, and blew the smoke out and into the boys’ faces. Their leader regarded him with a grin.

“Motherfucker’s fuckin’ mad!”

Dillon wished that one of the boys had brought a basketball. He would’ve really liked to shoot some hoops right then.

He handed the bulb back to Beast-man. “You kids be careful with that stuff, it’ll fuck you up.”

“We’re not kids, dude.”

The Dog stood at the edge of the court and watched them all. Dillon felt a little paranoid. Was the Dog watching him and passing judgment, or simply watching? The boys nodded at it and nodded to each other, then laughed. Dillon didn’t know what they might be laughing about but he stepped from their group and walked to the Dog, who did a few bunny-hops away but then stood still. Dillon wanted to bury his face in its coat, but at the same time to run with it, to chase after it, until the high wore off.

“Boy,” Dillon said, but then couldn’t think of anything else to say. His heart beat in his chest and under his hand where he put it, unusually fast for standing still. “Let’s go home.”

The drug would carry him into early morning and then put him to sleep as he came down.

One Nation Under God

Please state your name, age, and occupation.

My name is unimportant, my age is misleading, and my occupation is of no significance.

I am at once everything and anything. And nothing. I encompass it all but hold no control. I was borne out of human misery and gained resilience through the comfort of their pain. I began as an idea and gained a core, and from that core I became self-aware, and from self-awareness I was able to reach out to manipulate, and from my manipulation I was able to cement the idea of myself until I gained form and was able to separate myself from the ether of consciousness.

Please state your name, age, and occupation.

I am eternal. I have no beginning, middle, or end. I am indefinable. The primitive human consciousness that I was borne from can no longer comprehend the vast and complex workings of my being. Where I was once a slave, I am now the master calling to the Dog to fetch and heel and attack. I have the will to make entire nations fall under my thumb, and then rise back up from the dust once more.

I can bring about your destruction and salvation. Try to overthrow me and you will only be punished.

Please state your name, age, and occupation.

I have seen my nation crumble since its inception. What I have created, through force of my own will, to be the absolute form of purity, has become an infected wound on the land. I have seen my own image deform and take on an ugly shape despite all my actions to set things right again.