Sister,
I just want to keep myself from whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing, I guess. Sometimes it feels too big: The things I know I should be standing up for. Maybe not protesting with you and your friends but killing off all the people who stand against you and the ones who will never be able to change themselves anyway. You know, something blunt like that. Those political candidates. Those police just waiting for an excuse to touch you. They wait just to feel your bones break beneath them. Their weight and their hands slapping your hungry mouth away.
Oh, that pleasure! To crush their skulls. To take a baseball bat to their kneecaps! To kill them simply by hitting them too many times! Uniformed, bloody pulps. Officer down! ”Take it to the streets.” I know you think it’s wrong, but you can still take advantage of this time where people are not physically preventing you from saying what you want to say.
Meanwhile, I simply want to stay so far away from the pain that I forget where it hurt and I start to think I was exaggerating. Until I make myself believe I’ve faked the whole goddamned thing. Oh, my hurt! I guess it must not be quite like your hurt. I’m here for you, though. I love you, little sister. Fight the good fight. I need someone out there to say what was in me that never came out. My blood in your blood, pumping through your body. Delivering a message.
- c.
John is a 48-year-old man who works for a major fast-food chain. His shift just ended and now he is walking home, but no one is waiting up for him there. It’s a house depleted of life. He has no pets, just boring furniture. He’s never been married either. He doesn’t get responses from the online dating sites he joins. John could go anywhere without attracting attention. He could sleep on any park bench or even in someone’s unlocked car in a shopping mall parking lot. No one would say a thing to him for it. The owner of the car would just call for someone to pick them up. They’d check back on their car periodically until John left it, but that’s all. John could go on a killing rampage, and no one would come after him. People would mostly feel indifferent about it and say that everything happens for a reason. Then they’d move on.
Less than a block away from his house, John walks off a bridge and drops into a river. He keeps his eyes shut, and he ignores the push of water against his insignificant body as boats pass above him. He sinks slow to the bottom of the riverbed. John waits there to starve his lungs of oxygen so he can lose consciousness and drown, but his last breath doesn’t run out. Death has forgotten him, too. Fish swim in and out of his mouth as he drags along that river, unknown to life, until the world finally ends.
I held my arm out like an offering, then I stabbed at it with the nail I held tight between my fingers. I punched holes through my skin so meanly with that spike and the hot hate I felt. I grabbed my box-cutter and sliced myself up real good too: The look of fish gills breathing and throbbing. Skin flaps that filled up and then flooded over my arm with blood:
My dad’s blood. My grandfather’s blood. My mom’s…all the people that were there from the birth of me and all the people, I’d never met, that had led up to me. I wanted them out me: The hereditary ghosts and curses that kept getting passed down. ”No more influences,” I thought. I was cleaning myself up and draining the the bad oil out. It streamed down the floor of the bathtub. A tiny river of personal demons sinking into an open, black mouth. I was that flower in the swamp that only bloomed in the night.
I found that house I grew up in as a kid. I ran to the tree line and saw what looked like her grave marking. I got on my knees and dug my hands through the leaves and spider webs until they reached the cool moistness of that dark earth. I dug more, dirt crumbs packing beneath my fingernails. They no longer bothered me. My arms were in a hole past my elbows when I felt something unnatural. I yanked my hands out quickly. Then I thought of what it could be:
I remembered my father putting her body into a black garbage bag all those years ago.
I gave my hands back to her grave and tugged at the plastic until it came loose. I pulled it up to the surface. I was surprised that the weight of the bag still seemed so heavy. I was almost too nervous to open it up and look inside. I closed my eyes for a second to focus on where I was and slow my breathing down. I then cooly untied the knot at the top of the bag. Untangled, I spread the bag’s mouth open and pulled its lips back to the ground.
There she was, sleeping soundly. She seemed untouched by death and decomposition. She looked just as she had that last day with her fourteen years ago.
Had she really died? I reached my hand out to nudge her head. My fingertips touched her hair. Her ears shot up at attention. Her eyes opened and her head bent towards my face. She was alive!
I got dizzy thinking about the dead and their spirits, the spinning of the planet, the orange glow all around me, how clouds really felt, my grandmother’s face, the way riding down a hill on a bike makes you feel and what it all meant. I stood up and slapped my hand on my leg. Then I ran, out of the woods, down the hill. She followed close behind me like she used to when I was a boy. I stopped in that backyard to catch my breath. She danced on her hind legs beside me and wagged her tail in excitement. I picked a basketball out of the grass, and I shot it towards the hoop of the basketball goal that my father and I had put up years ago.
Bodies fail and the souls inside them go into hiding. They wait for you behind trees, around headstones or at the tops of staircases. They are anticipating that sudden right moment in your life when they can say hello again.
It’s scary how many people end up on my tumblr from googling “sleeping pills and hanging.” Stop thinking about killing yourselves.
looking out, past this dark, to that tunnel of light: pushing my face closer to the computer screen. looking around for anything that’ll give me the kind of dream i want to have instead of just these wasteful lapses in memory. a pink-skied morning. God breathing life back into this body. and these first reactions i get from other people when i walk sidewalks and grocery aisles are all based on the flaws, imperfections, and overall attractiveness of it. waking up to a life that’s been stripped a little more of feeling. a few new things that have come up missing, and i can’t ever pinpoint what they are. but notice their absence. hearing birds. i don’t understand. hearing the children waiting for their bus to arrive, and i’m trying to remember what it was like when i was as young as them, but that seems like another life. the dead child that left me in his place, i see. he went into the woods and didn’t find his way out before dark. he took his tiny boat out on the water. a lake with stars at the bottom. and i am here, trying to remember my past so that i can build on something, but i have to make things up to fill the gaps. and now i’m mostly lying about everything.
