midwest highways

this is very old, but it's part of a larger story, one which I plan on having resolved by July in time for the Comic Con 2008.

fiction :: she blew me away

fiction

she blew me away, everyone would turn to look at her when she walked down the street, and here she was talking to me. the first time i met her she snapped my bra and said hello. it was all this bright purple hair and rattly chains and a lock around her neck. She was wearing a plaid schoolgirl skirt and 12 hold doc martens & she was laughing because I was blushing at the bra snap, she must've done it so much it was like art to her. she told me she'd been seeing me everywhere, who was I? who was I to talk to you?

The first few weeks, I was so nervous around her, how did we start to become so close? We would sit on the edge of the river, the edge of the city almost falling in, and talk for hours. What the hell were we talking about? I can't even say. That was still back when that part of town was a little sketchy, but we were stupid, and nothing bad had happened to us yet, so we went there late at night with flashlights and beer. I was so nervous, my hands were shaking, my knees buckled when she kissed me. we were drunk and rolling around on the group, on spread out old newspaper sheets, inhaling each other's bad breath.

When morning came I expected her to be gone, but she was still there but asleep beside me. Up close she looked human. I held her tightly.

the two girls, staring out the sheer glass wall into the trinket lights of the big city. they were both small and cute with messy hair and huge china doll eyes. in one moment they looked at each other and revealed their naked love. the looks were like this: please don't hurt me, i am helpless here then in a flash they put back on their cloaks of self defense; wanting to be the one who wanted the other less, although both wanted each other with pathetic intensity.

They both had the same boyfriend at that time. He was a sleazy loser, and he had brought them here as show-off girls. His friends leered appropriately and he felt like a man. The girls clung to each other because they were just wild party girls and they weren't used to fancy places like this, where there were people paid to wipe your hands in the bathroom and the cocktails cost as much as a fancy new dress. tomorrow they would break up with him and then walk down to the river, listening to their cell phones ringing desperately.

if you look in the peephole you will see:

• 2 girls in cathead suits flapping their arms like chickens
  
• 2 girls running around the city covered in mud
  
• 2 girls climbing over barbed wire fences to go to punk rock shows on the docks
  
• 2 girls sucking each others toes
  
• 2 girls dying quiet deaths as they kiss
  
• 1 girl crying as the other is passed out with pills in her hands
  

fiction :: night shift

Shelly liked to sit there, reading. She sat through the night shift just fine eating chips or hot dogs and barely keeping an eye on the customers wandering into the store. They were usually tired, bleary men from the neighborhood. Older men with streaked gray hair and baseball jackets.

They were gruff but kind and asked her, Oh, are you sure you're OK here? So late at night? Alone?

And she'd smile indulgently and say, Yessir!

How old are you?

Nineteen, sir!

It's a crime, putting such a pretty young girl like you out here alone!

Smile. It's me the criminals should be afraid of, sir!

As the night came and came, then there would be fewer and fewer people in to mark the time. The flourescent lights made her sight go bad; she'd reread through every issue of 'Teen magazine five times. Or finger through the romance novels, but they were too boring for her. Too dense. The smell of the store which would be nauseating almost after she just walked in faded and she adjusted, and it was if it weren't there. Nothing was there.

A whole hour would pass, and then she'd glance up, blinking, and realize it was gone forever.

If there were criminals out, if there was danger out, it was outside her four glass doors. She felt stupidly safe inside, because it was light inside, and bad things happen in the shadows, not in the light.

little old ladies know more

think of 2 squat little old ladies with still-black long hair that they wrap in twisted rolls on each side of their heads. they sit at a rickety old table, the table with a plastic tablecloth with browny gray and blue patterns of flowers and babies. The ladies hold onto the rickety table pounding, pounding on their dirty gray blue linoleum floor. They hold identical coffee mugs full of pitch nasty stuff gone cold, and they stir sugar from time to time to make the taste more bearable. Everything in the room is gray and blue shadows and gray and blue flowers past their prime.


"Color, life, all that. Red and pink and green. Those are garish shades I've closed a while ago. Now I act as fits my age," the sister to the left says.


The other sister, rocking the table back and forth, murmurs, "Our hopes are dimmer, but at least we scale back. See, it's you with the problems, always asking for more than you deserve, looking outward. That's why you're so fucked-up all the time. Us, we know our places, and we know not to wear ourselves out and we laugh at you, wearing yourselves thin."


They sit there chuckling and rocking with squinted eyes.