Personal circumstances continue to be extremely trying. I am, perhaps, as mentally and emotionally exhausted as I've been as an adult. The effect on my writing has been...not good. I'm just flat-out not writing a lot. It's with me every day, in my mind, but little is coming together and thinking through it has become the equivalent of summiting K2. Let's just say I'm largely failing to summit. As Mark Lanegan says, living ain't hard, it just ain't easy.
But whining about it does no good and it will be whatever it is. Below are some random bits from the last few months. Some are false starts, some are finding their way into stories, some are from actual stories, some I don't know what they are. I guess if nothing else they are proof to myself that I'm still trying to do this. Whatever "this" is...
[story in progress, no title yet]
Even in the dim light from the single overhead grow light she could see the table wobbling. Wood and screws had given away to a jellied substance the color of brackish water that gave off the odor of rotting leaves. As she moved closer to the table, dense air clung to her, warm, its presence physical. Claustrophobia enveloped her and she fought against paranoia. Stop it, stop it. She turned on her phone light and trained it on the table.
Tiny black forms coursed through the viscous mass like ants on antfarm, causing the wobbling she’d noticed from afar. The table itself was slowly, almost imperceptibly collapsing. Eventually it would be no more than a shapeless mass on the floor. She bent down and held the phone an inch above the surface. In the direct light the mass glistened. The brackish coloring obscured the pulsing forms within; she simply couldn’t see what they looked like in any detail. They traveled in no discernible pattern, but they avoided objects buried in the mass. She strained to see what the objects were, buried as they were like chunks of meat in gravy. She concentrated the light on a long, thin piece tipped upwards. She felt her stomach sink as she stared at the knobby top of the object. Bone, human. Floating next to it, a purple phone. Daisy.
[fragment]
These are the days when we look older. After you pulled the car out of the driveway this morning, I dumped the rest of the coffee down the sink. What I had drank left an acidic trail from the back of my throat to the pit of my stomach. You’ve never drank coffee, can’t stand the taste of it, and for that I love you. It’s a detail no one else will remember; at your funeral, if I’m still alive and capable of attending, I will think about this detail while everyone else reminisces over your generous nature and vibrant laugh. It’s one of the many pieces of you I keep with me every day, whether we are in bed together or at separate office functions or passing each other in the living room. Details known to only us, they weave the blanket of our marriage. When we pass on, they will pass on with us.
These are the days we look older because we are older. Leonard Cohen once sang about aching in the places he used to play, and this is us. The accumulated miles and signs of wear and tear. I once said the body was a machine and you corrected it me. Just a wagon of meat, you said, and I loved you so much then I could never find or create the words. Just a wagon of meat under strange stars. Soft black stars. You can sometimes silence my headful of traffic; no one else has ever been able to do that. Our wagons of meat, warm comfortable and familiar. We still fit, even with all the new shapes we’ve taken.
[fragment]
The smoke of your dreams permeates our bedroom, made smaller by the encroaching furniture and seasonal clothing. Once we shared a dresser, now we each have our own. Clothes we no longer wear and mean to donate crowd the closet. Dust no longer gathers beneath the bed; every available inch filled with boxes and bags of things we think we need to hold onto. The real characters lie somewhere between these objects whose shapes seem to mutate.
[fragment]
You are like Moses, patron saint of stomach acid. Exhaustion halos circle your head, your dark eyes ever closer to the singularity. Shaking, shaking, shaking. Fingers and shoulders twitching.
[fragment from a series called "red thread"]
For Cassandra, it was like this:
The hell of it is that a coffee maker choked with red thread is useless. You could spend hours cleaning it out but it got into places that you couldn’t see, places that didn’t even exist. With the caffeine headache pounding in your skull your frustration mounts and you finally fling the damn thing across the kitchen. When it hits the wall it explodes into a bundle of red thread, the same stuff that is dripping from the ceiling and leaking out the walls. You are now facing a future with no coffee, and that’s an impossible world to live in.
[opening to a story currently called "Cheeto" but that will have to change]
“Don’t wake the sleeping bag, you dumb fuck.”
Crisp thought about throwing a punch, let it go. He was sick of Text’s attitude, the bullying. He also knew he stood no chance in a fight.
“Thought Crystal might like a smoke too, that’s all.”
Text had already opened the sliding door, knowing his words of warning were enough. Crisp thrust his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket and followed, leaving his girlfriend to sleep buried in their sleeping bags in the lone bedroom.
Let sleeping bags lie, Crisp thought, stepping into a backyard littered with rusting bbq grills and smokers. Text used to sell them online, back before everything got messed up. Crisp never found out where he got the inventory and doubted Text ever made much money, but it was semi-legit, anyway. Helped keep the heat away, pun fully intended, from his real business selling weed to and buying liquor for the underage burners at the high school. Probably some heavier stuff too, though Crisp was smart enough not to pry. It didn’t matter now anyway.
Text lit two smokes and handed one to Crisp, who took a deep draw.
“Crystal is going Cheeto for longer and longer periods. It won’t be long now.”
“You’ve no proof.” He took another draw on the cancer stick, this one too hard, and coughed. He finished clearing his throat and added: “It was different for Winston and Sheila. Sheila almost came back.”
“Don’t be an idiot.” Text blew out a trail of smoke. “Just because she’s your girlfriend. I’m not going to tell you to stop sleeping with her either. Last night I checked in on her—on you both—six times between midnight and seven. She was Cheeto every time. I tried to wake you, but you drank that whole fucking bottle of vodka and weren’t moving.”
For the second time in the morning he wanted to punch Text, send him flying into his useless, weed-choked grills. He clenched and unclenched his fists in his pockets. Text was an asshole, but he wasn’t lying. Crystal might even know.
“Look man, it sucks.” Text, his attempt at tenderness, still somehow sneering. “Scares me too. But do you want her to keep suffering, like Sheila and Winston? We agreed after Sheila last week man, all three of us. She’d do it for you. You’d want her to, right?”
“Don’t start, Text. Seriously.”
“We don’t have much time, Crisp. Seriously.” He drew the word out sarcastically, knowing there wasn’t a damn thing Crisp could do about it. “I think it should be you. But if not, don’t think I’ll hesitate. Remember how Sheila screamed? I can’t listen to that again, Crisp.”
Text threw the cigarette in the overgrown, dew-soaked grass and went back inside. Crisp didn’t follow, instead removing one of the plastic lawn chairs that had once been white but were now so covered with mold as to be almost entirely green from the pile on the deck. He took it out to the middle of the yard, comfortably away from the house.
Sheila. Christ, that had been bad.
[fragment]
The hole below smells of yeast. Stomach acid drips from the walls and gradually eats away at the floor. Crawling through, it is difficult to get a purchase, the slippery surfaces denying a firm grip. Warm and humid, unbearably so. Avoiding the dripping stomach acid, one eventually faces cerebrospinal fluid pools. Looking through the clear and colorless liquid, fragments of bone are visible. They are an impossible distance away.
[from a project called "Crow"]
Crow will open up the language
Crow bangs apocalyptic fleek
Crow says all lanes must exit
Crow black belly tarantula
Crow writes poem
Crow not cat
Crow keeps the wolves at bay
Crow rides cruel highway desert west
Crow avoids the sun
Crow fosters collaboration
Crow triumphs over terror pigeon
Crow brings black pens to the late show
Crow wishes the family would wash the popcorn bowls when finished
Crow is not the only tenant
Crow switch witch
Crow replace teeth with tickling grass
Crow marches for science
Crow answers come in dreams that cause nightsweats
Crow grieves over the dead
Crow saw the ship that never sailed to North Korea
Crow thanks the inner circle
Crow sweeps hair from the floor
Crow hops on flaccid wishbones
Crow stretches the truth on occasion
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