Polite Fictions

Jealousy

When I talk to other people, I say things like "it's such a blessing for the children," and "it's so much better for her to be with family." Which is not completely a lie.

The kids know that their great-grandmother sometimes thinks they're her sisters. It doesn't phase them. In fact, they've begun referring to themselves as Charlotte and Penelope. She has no idea who I am and usually thinks I'm the housekeeper. She says things about my housekeeping under her breath when I'm in the room. Ninety year old women have no volume control, so "under her breath" is arguable.

It would make me crazy if it weren't for my best friend, who lives across the country taking care of her eighty year old father-in-law. We compare notes. I am a little luckier because when Louella throws things at me, they don't go very far. Charles is an all-star baseball player in comparison.

She's luckier than me because the things Charles throws are all physical and can be dodged.

We call each other when things get bad. She called today.

"He's gone," she says. I know by her voice that it's not the usual call signaling a neighborhood search and a trip to the parking lot where his favorite bowling alley used to be. 

"I went to wake him for breakfast. It happened in his sleep. I'm just waiting for someone to come and... you know."

I think of her sitting in an empty house, waiting for the body to be removed. She'll have arrangements to make. I figure I should fly out and be with her at the funeral.

"I'm sorry," I say, but she knows that's not what I mean.  I only say it because jealousy is a sin.

Chastity

He said if I was,

I would get there -- to Heaven.

                     She said we should shave our legs.

 

Another He told me he loved me.

I believed him and

Let go everything in a breath.

A breath!

        a sigh a slither a touch a shiver 

I forgot everything.

 

The line between me now

and the holy me,

the one  

he says

God says I should be:

                            It is so fine

a razor’s edge even.

It cuts when I touch it.

 

No unbitten apple, no snake,

no nothing --

Can undo what I did.

 

I wake in the arms of a man who is not God.

 

I shave my legs and

Move on.

 

Diligence

The dog entered on the south east end of the Experience just as the evening show was starting overhead. Little knots of people, t-shirts clinging to their backs, gazed up at the LED lights, not noticing the dog as it slipped between them, tacking back and forth up the Strip.

Darryl caught the dog on monitor 05 as it crossed into the camera's field of view. The dog had its eyes on the people, alert for danger, watching the families - for someone it recognized, maybe, or just on the lookout to avoid potential threats. Children, cops, all unpredictable.

Check this out, Darryl said. Aaron swung his chair around and they watched the dog together, a wolfhound from the size of it. Something big and rangy, with tongues of grey fur streaming from its legs, a long lean snout like the barrel of a carbine testing the desert air.

You think it's one of those dogs from the news? Aaron wondered. Darryl knew what he meant, had seen the stories about the animal shelters filling up with dogs from foreclosed and abandoned houses. Some people walk away from the mortgage and they just leave the dogs and cats behind. Assholes, thought Darryl, although he also knew that sometimes a person got tossed out by the bailiff and the pets were left to roam the neighborhoods. Sometimes your life just broke and your dog is one of those broken pieces. Nothing to be done about it, but sometimes the animals were a problem. This was the first he'd seen it with his own eyes. Better call the cops, Aaron said.

Darryl nodded, but what he really wanted to say was Let's hold on. Hold on just a second. For what, he wasn't sure. For the dog to cross through the grid of monitors as it made its way up the block? For a child to reach out and pet some lost animal with crazy marbles for eyes? Maybe just to see where the where that dog thought he was going.

The dog zagged out of monitor 05. Darryl switched his eyes to monitor 08 just seconds before it trotted into view. This time it stopped in front of a woman in a motorized chair. Darryl sensed its alertness, the active processing of the woman gliding down the street. The dog skirted a wide crescent around the woman, who barely acknowledged the animal beyond a glance as she motored on. She pushed the joystick on the armrest, and the chair picked up speed and moved off, bound for monitor 07.

The cameras implanted along the edges of the Fremont Street Experience captured everything that happened on the street below. All the people who stopped to watch the LED light show with its resolving and dissolving images of guitars and chorus girls, or sat at a bench and gazed at nothing with the reflective, interior gaze of the disastrously broke, or just ignored the show above altogether and passed along, their faces and shoulders dimpled with points of light. The camera collected them all. The ones who didn't bother to look up had somewhere to go, except there was nowhere in particular to go in this part of town. A hotel room, a casino, a Walgreen's. Sometimes Darryl caught his father wobbling along the street, clutching a plastic yard of neon-tinted booze, on his way from a bar to a casino or back again, throwing Darryl's mother's money away in small and large chunks, peeling off the whole family's future, one binge at a time.

Darryl hoped that his dad would be walking down the Strip at that very moment. Darryl hoped that he would find the dog and take him home, and maybe the dog would keep him there, keep him from straying from his place out to the Strip. But no, that wouldn't work, Darryl's dad had been keeping all kinds of places, motel rooms here and there, apartments belonging to various women who worked at Nevada's or the Palace or wherever. He lived in between: jobs, houses, women, families too probably. One day he'd die in between, and his body would be divided between all his lives. But putting that pisser in the ground: that job, Darryl knew, would be handed off to him.

Darryl switched his attention back to the dog. A man was petting the animal, and for an embarrassing intstant Darryl thought it really was his father. The cracked red corona of skull with white hair flaring away down the skull, the reddened shelf of forehead and the belly bulging out against a plain white shirt - it was all dad's. But the man was almost certainly a tourist - just something about the way he was taking in the sights. Just the way he looked at things told Darryl everything he needed to know. Darryl twisted the camera joystick clockwise, zooming in on that sunburned bald spot, closer and closer until it seemed that he was almost touching the top of the man's skull.

Sometimes Darryl felt that boring in this close to the surface would give him access to what was beneath the surface, as if to approach so smoothly and invisibly was to penetrate. In those moments he felt - believed, even - that he could see with the eyes of the people he watched: that man who was stroking the dog, the dog looking back, ceasing for a moment from darting its gaze back and forth, for a moment relaxing into the man's affections, believing briefly that this might be home. Go on then, Darryl thought as he picked up the phone, go on and take that dog home.

Envy

Her fingers arc out, stretching. Trying to span the distance between who she's been and who she's becoming. To hold it within her hands, to feel the weight of this new world and know she will be able to bear it as her own. She closes her eyes, feeling the brush of cotton against her fingertips, imagining it skin on skin... 

A tiny shudder. We both feel it. Excitement and revulsion. The ecstasy to come.

A ghost of a smile flutters across her lips - an unspoken promise, the tiny half-crescents that carve her cheeks translating the primal elements of language into the gentle, rhythmic pulses of galvanic response - and her shoulders press back, deep, against the welcoming slope of the bench. She works through the groups, one by one: neck, shoulders, upper and lower back. Abdomen. Quads and hamstrings, long and limber, tapering into calves that seize and clench, tight and strong, then flow loose — muscle memory vivid with years of long runs, how the miles slipped away with the steady course of blood and breath, impact and release. And her fingers, arcing, farther and ever farther, feeling their way across this undiscovered country, tracing the anatomy of hope and desire blindly, carefully, protectively.

It is an intimate braille; a mother tongue coded in protein chains and the silent barter of oxygen. A syntax of pheremones, there to be heard and understood by any who might listen. Who might learn it as their own, capturing nuances and inflections. Studying. Absorbing. Preparing for that moment of recognition: a native speaker?

A tiny shudder. I wonder if we both feel it. The anticipation of something wonderful drawing near.

She luxuriates in this thin shard of sunlight, the oblique angles of late October belying the warmth of a summer that lingers, reluctant to let go. She closes her eyes as her lungs fill, air tasting of pinesap and distant woodsmoke. Breasts swelling taut beneath thin white cotton. Saturating with warmth, and the knowledge of loving and being loved. Her fingers, stretching, arcing along with the lunar curve. And then she smiles - no ghost, this - and whispers, "A harvest moon" and the sugar maples tremble their leaves, a fluttering of wings in the warm autumn breeze, and the sky is a tumbling riot of reds and golds and in that moment ripeness is all and she cannot help but laugh and her voice

rises

twisting along the dry edges of falling leaves, leaping upward from one to the next, spiraling and spinning and soaring, joy lighter than air, and

I shudder, chilled by the breeze and this deep shadow, secreted beyond the sun's reach. But I do not make a sound. I never make a sound.

A crow settles in a nearby tree, and cries once. It listens, carefully, for a reponse, and she honors it by doing the same. It is quiet, save the rustling of brittle leaves.

We wait. For now, we wait.

Lust

He craved touch. The feel of hot, supple skin sliding against skin. If he only closed his eyes he could feel it. The invisible rasp of tiny hairs bending as nerve endings lit up like a pinball machine on tilt, blood vessels singing as they pumped harder infusing a warming flush, it made him dizzy just to consider.

Then again he felt the same way about waffles. He really did, though his friends laughed when he tried to explain. The feel of hot batter in his mouth, mixing and playing with the cold syrup and melting butter… it was too much for him. Everything was far, far too much. Always had been, truth be told. So he went to doctors and sought professional help only to be told the problem was in his mind. More doctors, more tests and experiments and he learned, over the years, to expect the sad shake of a head that doctors tried to hide from him right before they shrugged their shoulders and sent him to talk to someone else.

He tried to live alone for a while, eliminating as much of the world as possible. He tried to control his urges. Even then, he would get out of bed in the middle of the night to pee and the feel of the chilled hardwood floor under his bare foot - the grain of the varnished wood just hinting up along his heel - sent chills through his spine.

Blind desire filled his every waking moment and yet somehow, maddeningly, never dulled to the point of the far-too-well-known. Twenty years into his personal hell he gave up. Five years after that he gave in. The doorknob's smooth brass slid against his palm like the whispers of the universe and he grabbed it tighter, turning it. The door opened and a warm breeze licked at his neck, making him swoon. The sun prickled along his face, like the kisses of a thousand needles and he smiled into it, stamping down the urge to run and hide. Where could he go, anyway? Bed? With its soft sheets and warm covers? That wouldn't be better so why not just enjoy it, embrace it and run in the grass?

And so he gave in. To all of it. He made it as far as the driveway before dropping to his knees and rolling around in mindless pleasure and desire. They found him that way, two days later - dew covered and sleeping with a huge smile on his face. Back into the house he went, drugged so that he wouldn't wake up and feel the hands of the people carrying him. Back into the fake house, past the fake lawns and neighborhood he could have seen if only he had been able to take twenty more steps. But none of that would matter in a while.

Their experiments were almost done, after all. Soon they would know enough about how these desires worked in humans, to launch the first attack wave.

Soon.

They couldn't wait. They wanted nothing more than to board their attack ships and feel the smooth Hrnjds-skin seats against their backs while engines purred like lovers and…

"Wyksboh?" Gskri asked, "Did you spill the klrtht'ing formula on us? Awwww jhraso!"

Wrath

"When I whet my flashing sword and my hand takes hold in judgment, I shall take vengeance upon mine enemies and I will repay those who hate me"
-Deuteronomy 32:41

The weight of it inside the sleeve of his coat felt good. Solid. Comfortable and righteous. It felt like a phantom appendage that had long ago been amputated. Back now for purpose. It didn't hurt nothin that he had, over the course of ten years or so, become a fucking conductor of classical pieces with the thing. Racking shells of .00 in as quick as he could pump them out. Full precision. And today would be a fucking ticker-tape parade of spent, contorted plastic tubes. The prodigal bastard son. Returned.

The tables of Ninnie's Dinner still held the same sticky condiment rack -frontside of the same greasy menus- on the wall side of the booth. Years of wiping down bottles with cold, day old dishwater had left a build up. He raked his fingernail down the side of the ketchup bottle, looked at the grime and wiped it on the leg of his jeans. Bile rose in his throat and made it to the back of his tongue before he could swallow. And, who the fuck was Ninnie anyway? Before he "left" he'd been here his whole life and never did meet a "Ninnie". Ninnie? The name bounced around in his head like names of far off places he'd never visit. A curious thing, like music you can ignore. But ignore he did as he lined up the cast of characters that were, as per usual, congregating at Ninnie's for the lunch special.

There was Sheriff Branson who went first. It was fairly close range, and all that was left of his left shoulder and neck after was a pink mist that sort of hung like the sunset from last night then settled on the filthy, sticky condiments there on the wall side of the booth. Swing steady and level to the left, some had ducked behind the pleather backs of their booths, but he knew Ninnie's like he knew his own bones. Mr. Tackett, the owner of the Savings & Loan and head of the City Council, was sitting in number sever like he always did. Only now you could see, through the wide hole in the back of his skull, the soup d'jour as he lay face first into it. Clam chowder I believe it was. Possibly Manhattan style. Now it was, anyway. "Big" Bill Foreman worked the grill. Actually, it was "Big" Bill's joint and I reckon running the show in the kitchen gave him a proprietary hard on. Now, "Big" Bill, sizzling on the grill, with his left leg in the ether somewhere and the kitchen knife he went for right before the Conductor pumped round after round into "Big" Bill still in his hand...the harder they fall and all that shit.

There was pure, white panic now. They remembered now. They remembered the injustice, the complete lack of tolerance. How they had done what they did for sport. As they shrieked and pleaded and ran amok in and through the booths - it was like watching static on television after three a.m. There was a chaos theory to it as he pumped another round though the chest of Coach Talbot completely vaporizing that annoying fucking whistle. Fucker. The symphony had come to it's climax and he thumbed 12 more rounds into the chute. He jacked the pump up and pulled down, fixing to bring it home. 'Where are you, Tommy Paul Shipley,' he mumbled under his breath. 'Theeeeere you are.' Tommy Paul with his stupid two first names. Tommy Paul started it all so very long ago, and now, Tommy Paul had soiled himself and was a blubbering hot mess. He walked over to Tommy Paul, said, "shhhh, now. shhhhhh...it'll all be over soon." Taking a sticky menu off the table, our Conductor held it fast to Tommy Paul's face with the business end of the Remmington and rocked the cradle, painting a rose on the wall behind Tommy Paul's head. Now, Tommy Paul was beautiful.

"Thank you for all of this." A voice from behind and under the counter. "Beg pardon," replied the Conductor. "These folks had this comin for a long time now. So, you know, thanks. One thing though - who are you?" The Conductor thought about this question. He thought abut the voice behind the counter, that cotton voice, the face hidden but all too famliar. "I know you, boy. My name - my name is Wrath. And I'm your new best friend."

"I been waitin for you," the disembodied voice replied.

"Don't I know it."

Patience

He’d been waiting for twenty two years, five months, thirteen days and fours hours. She left in the early hours of Christmas morning before he’d woken, the presents and the child in hand, and was never seen again. He knew the day would come, if he simply let time run its course. This is the way the universe operates; it taketh away, it giveth back, in its own time. He could have pushed the issue, he could have searched, but then it would be forced and awkward and he’d have to admit some level of culpability. He knew that with enough patience, everything would resolve itself. And so he waited.

Twenty two years, five months, thirteen days and four hours isn’t a lot of time in the grand scheme of things. He kept himself busy with his guitars, his career and Star Trek reruns – the trappings of his average life. His hair had turned gray and flat, but the orange hair he’d carried his whole life sat harshly against his pasty, Irish complexion anyway. Perhaps the gray would soften his features enough to make their reunion less intimidating. And so he aged, and waited.

For twenty two years, five months, thirteen days and fours hours he reminded himself that she had taken him away, that it wasn’t his responsibility, that the best thing he could do was wait for his son to find him when he was ready to. He understood that children grow into men, and that men are capable of choosing, and that his son would find him when he was ready to. And so he rationalized, and waited.

Twenty two years, five months, thirteen days and fours hours later, his telephone rang. He answered the call, from a number he didn’t recognize, and waited. The voice on the other end of the line choked and sputtered, and the man grew restless. He bellowed into the phone demands to know who was calling, answered only by raspy gurgles. Twenty two years, five months, thirteen days and four hours later, he grew tired of waiting for things and slammed the phone down onto the receiver.

Twenty two years, five months, thirteen days, four hours and one minute later, his son released his final breath into the empty end of a telephone. And the man kept waiting.