Polite Fictions

What Happens After Summers End

The clouds staunched another breaking dawn that found Charlie staring through his kitchen window, his finger absently circling the rim of the hard plastic bottle he had grabbed from the counter.

This had been his ritual for the 17 sunrises since Charlie and Maggie had returned to the house. Some of the leaves filtering his view had withered and curled on their branches; others crept into their fated yellows, oranges or chimney reds. The air steamed silver that grew vaguely more tarnished silver in each passing day's struggle with the sunlight's braising. Otherwise, little had changed.

When the newness of morning had but all been steeped away, Charlie turned. He took his usual circuitous route through the hallway shadows to Maggie's bedside.

She lay under layers of blankets. He had given up trying to wake her these past few mornings. In fact, he had spent the past several days avoiding contact with her at all. It had been Maggie's last idea. She had told him, quietly, that she had nothing more to say.

Charlie returned to the kitchen. As he was about to place the bottle back onto its rubber coated spindle in the rack by the sink, a flash cut through what had become his vision. Charlie froze. Like a gust of wind reviving a bonfire ember, the climbing sun had momentary set something on the counter ablaze. When Charlie's eyes finally focused, only a cold luminescence remained around the set of keys crisscrossed on the countertop.

He stepped up. Bending at the waist, he let his fingers fall over the imitation brass handle of the cabinet drawer. He slid it open, but didn't wait to see where the clear contoured baby bottle landed among the debris.

The car door opened near silently and he didn't think to close it. He felt the car shiver slightly when his wrist turned over. Charlie pumped the gas pedal once and held for several seconds.

He rested his head on his chest.

Moments passed before Charlie opened his eyes again. In the dimness of the dome light, Charlie saw sparkling on the carpet of the driver's well.

He reached and felt the grit of sand along the ridges of his fingertips.

For the first time in 18 days, Charlie wept.

The Lie of After

Truth is, there is no "after". Time, and any measure or adjunct or by-product, is man-made. The concept, the instruments by which we calculate, all of it. Slaves, sheep, lemmings to a fallible - and if man is anything, fallible and affable would be the very definition - ideology. And we've bought it, hook, line and sinker. Not only have we bought it, we relish in it. The thought of After, as it relates to a measure of time, is, well, it's bullshit.

What happens after you almost kill a man after he pulls a knife on you in some ass-crack bar where the smoke lingers like forgotten cobwebs in the corners of the high ceilings and everyone smells of despair and life gone stale as their beer? Nothing. Everything. After is a tragic concept. That angry, overly lubricated, twelve-toothed man is still holding that knife. He's still coming at you, still crying at you to let him up. He can't breathe. He's turning a sunset violet. He's sorry. So, so sorry. You? You're still howling, growling, primal. Vengeance is your right hand. Your body is the factory of reactionary justice and you are open for business. And brother, business is booming. Those things never go away. There is no after. There is only deciding how much you can live with forever and ever, Ms. Jackson. Amen.

Time is not linear. Time is a dimension, a vapor, a mish-mash of particulate matter that lights up the horizon at twilight. Time has no origin or destination, no X, Y, or Z axis. Time only is. Much like energy, time is not created or destroyed, time simply changes forms - moving on. Downstream. 

So, what happens After?

Nothing. There is no After. It goes on and on and on. Until we die.

Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. And then it keeps going. Time don't give a shit about you.

So, pass the bottle, can I have a light(?) and laugh, cry, fuck, fight, create and destroy. Inhale, exhale. Make war, cry for peace, save the rain forest and fire up the chainsaw.

It's all now.

It's all yours.

If'n you can abide it.

What Happens After Impact

And in that instant

I am aloft in a way I've never known before, a growing cushion of air rising to fill the space between my skin and my seat, the wheels and the road, my head snapping back with effortless, eyeblink ferocity and colliding with the headrest (the crush of my hair against leather, pressing through the foam to touch the steel within) then a whipcrack snap forward, vertebrae compressing and releasing like pistons firing at neural speed, the engine still running strong and loud and my heart surging with adrenaline and

in the periphery of my vision I can see the earth spin and turn, as if the axis of the world has shifted

I think: how odd

and the sound, the sound, it's incredible, that terrible squeal and crush of metal bending and tearing, iron wrenching from iron and glass and the compression of air in my lungs and those seconds - one, and two, and the long heartbeat stretch to three - when it all dissolves to echo and gravity fades to myth and I become aware that I am still pressing down on the accelerator, as though I might catch up to this impossibly swift rotation of earth and sky and in matching its speed slow its pace and return to the world I'd known and all I hear is the engine the wheels freed from the restraints of physics straining to catch hold on this cool evening air and

then a corner connects - I cannot tell which one, and in not understanding I lose some illusion of control - and there is a new eruption of torque and velocity, of moving so many different ways at once, and I am the tail of a kite arcing and spiraling in a strong wind, diving and soaring and fighting against myself and this thin brace of fabric that cuts deep across my waist and the forgiving skin where neck and shoulder meet

where you had rested your head, seeking solace and comfort and this

is all

it's all happening so fast

and the adrenaline fills me with strength and fury and my arms and chest swell — with will, with purpose, with terror and defiance and

something catches

and I feel my leg twist and churn beneath me, the thick muscle of my thigh stretching and turning upon itself and in a flash I think of the nest of tendons and ligaments like ivy wrapping 'round a trunk of bone (I imagine it wood, bending but unbowed) and then something breaks free and I feel it rise through my chest that insane rush of pain desperately escaping my body and

the windshield

the glass dissolves into shooting stars

and it is beautiful and I am screaming and

...

What Happens After Antiquated Notions of Virtue Are Turned On Their Collective Ear

Afterward, when she let herself into the apartment, it was with a great sense of satisfaction. She felt easy, taut, sated; all her senses were heightened in a way that made her feel triumphant. She sure did have a knack for the During, but the After always made everything so delicious to her. The gentle music of her keys against the inside curve of the bowl by the door gave her pause, for instance. Why, imagine! Such a marvel that things so simple as door keys and her grandmother's silky white bowl could come together and make subtle, pleasurable sounds!

Everything, every one thing in The After was pleasure; she drank in the tactile, reveled in tastes, lingered over sounds. Today she had sung 'Mannish Boy' to herself in her head the entire ride home, looking doe-eyed on the press of bodies. The jostles and jerks (and the smooth forward momentums  between) were just the natural extension of their prelude back there fourteen blocks away.

He had been possessed of exquisite taste in linens. She appreciated that in a man. Also appreciated was his lack of worry at where those fine linens ended up; not every man wants his stupidly expensive sheets ground into the wall of a stairwell. She adored a sporting attitude.

Icy orange juice to slake a thirst: There was no hunger, not yet. She still felt full in that tender way, her stomach not inclined toward want for a little while longer.

She took her time in the shower, lollygagging there in the light steam, greedily enjoying the smell of her sweet almond soap. Someone had made her a present of it five or six years ago and she'd been using it since. The gift-giver had moved far away; she didn't miss him when he did. If they discontinued the soap, she would search high and low for bars of it for years and years and probably a couple minutes after that.

When she turned off the spray, she paused for a moment, getting caught up in the sensation of a drop of water on her eyelashes. It executed a perfect dive onto her right foot, splashing messily there, ending itself and beginning four more droplets. She thought about this while wrapping herself in a downy robe, while pouring herself a cup of coffee. She grabbed a book from the stack of six or so she was reading (she was always paying her attentions to several concurrently) and headed for the reading nook she'd crafted next to the window. After placing her coffee and book on the tiered table next to it, she settled into her overlarge chair, propping her heels on the seat's edge. The orange velour kissed her arches and welcomed them home.

She pointed her toes, she looked out over the city. She admired the light. She smiled as she thought about the fact that she was always the leaver and never the stayer; she wrapped her arms tightly about herself, dropped her head and grinned like a giddy fool, pleasure emanating from her every part.

What Happens After You Leave

After you leave me I clean out the fridge and think about someone else to fuck. Old collapsing peppers, a carton of mold, an order of szechuan beef that tasted of heat and sugar. Someone's out there, someone on whom I can unleash the tired months, the framed Klimt poster, the little midden of shoes in the hallway. The poster is gone. The cheese is pumpkin orange and the texture of paraffin. I pinch off a crumbled little corner and run it over my tongue.

After you leave me I move through the apartment, plucking out everything that marked our life together, photos and jewellery and bus tickets and the expired passport that took you to Europe and back. I put everything in a banker's box, except for a stray pair of dust-covered heels pinned against the back wall of the closet by a broken fax machine. I put those in an actual shoe box. The fax machine I throw into the dumpster. I stand at the dumpster and stare at the anonymous lumps and angles inside the bags other people have thrown in. The fax machine looks out of place on that bed of taut biodegradable plastic, and I wonder who I'll fuck next, when that will happen, whether we'll be in my bed or hers when it happens, or a car, or a hotel. Wherever it is people are fucking these days.

After you leave me I wonder who'll be next, the woman I find and fuck for days until I tell her that I love her, just as the silent moments begin to corrode the stretched surface of sex. She'll stay, bound by the shock and power of the word, until she understands my love more clearly. After you leave I wonder whether you'll be back, and I return the items in the box to their original places throughout the apartment. They wait for you. I drop off the shoes at a thrift store on my way to work.

What Happens After the Kiss

On Monday she couldn't look at him.

Despite months, possibly years, of being friends, she couldn't look at him. She wasn't convinced that he would brush her off but she also wasn't going to take the chance. In high school there is no room for logic, only decisive first strikes.

He'd had knee surgery just before hockey season and although he was still on the team (she still doesn't understand this, years later), he didn't play and preferred to sit in the bleachers with her. Or at least, he sat in the bleachers away from the rest of the team and she sat with him.

Yes, he was cute. Yes, he was a hockey player. But that wasn't it. There was something grown up about him. There was something that made him unlike the other high school boys. He was always a little apart, a little above. It was this apartness that made him approachable to her. She knew all about living apart from the rest of the team.

Friday was the last game of the season. They put him in for the first time and the team won – also for the first time. They celebrated. For the first time all season, she and he were part of the team. They played quarters, which she turned out to be quite good at. All that time in the physics lab finally had a real-life application others could appreciate.

After the last quarter splashed, he walked her to the car. With her hand on the door, she thought to herself “if I turn around now he will kiss me.” And so she turned around.

By her senior year, she had been kissed by a few random boys. It had made her want to throw up. The boys were, how to say this kindly, grossly unqualified. Messy, clumsy and unbidden. They were exactly what this kiss was not.

This kiss, from the minute she turned around, made the hairs on her neck stand up. She felt his breath on her cheek and wanted what she couldn't fathom with the clumsy ones. His hands were in her hair, his lips on her eyebrows (if the other boys had kissed her eyebrows it was because it was dark and they didn't know where they were going). And then his hands were around her and she wanted him close, so close.

She heard the car start. They were shoved into the back seat by someone else on the team. There was a point where they were supposed to stop, but she didn't know exactly when that was. She thinks it was somewhere between the party and her driveway but again, her only experience was with the unexperienced and she simply did not know. When she got out of the car, she was not sure what kind of girl she was.

She hoped he would call over the weekend, despite the fact they had never talked on the phone. All their meetings had been mutually accepted chance encounters. Hockey season was over and there would be no more chance encounters.

And so on Monday, she did what she did best. She put up walls. She pretended it didn't happen. She did not go out of her way to avoid him, but she was unable to meet his eye when she felt him near. “Near” being “in the same hall.” She always knew when he was in the same hall.

She was tall, thin and had the excellent posture insisted upon by her mother. Her body did not read “I'm scared” as much as “I don't have time for you.” She was almost always scared.

She doesn't know what would have happened if she had turned around to meet him in the light of day, in front of the entire senior class. She still wonders if she would have felt his hand in her hair and his breath on her cheek. She wonders if the two of them would have continued living apart and above. She wonders why she has never felt electrified since that first kiss, no matter how qualified the boys became.

These are questions she couldn't answer in the physics lab, where no one ever came to sit with her.

What Happens After The Happiest Day of Your Life

She picked up the glass, twirling the crystal stem in her fingers, holding the paper-thin bowl up to the light. They were the perfect glasses--Baccarat, not Waterford, as everyone knew Waterford was too fussy. All those facets, she thought bitterly.I don't want to drink out of the Chrysler building. 

She remembered the day they picked them out--well, the day she did, anyway, whirling around Neiman's with the glowing red gun. He resisted initially, insisting that they were too expensive. 

"Babe, I don't want my grandmother forking over $300 for a single water glass," he said. "Can't we get these instead?"

He'd pointed to a display of Lenox glasses. Goddamn LENOX. She rolled her eyes at the memory. As if I'd be caught dead entertaining with a $36 glass. She won him over by insisting that the glasses were an investment. 

"An investment in a lifetime of memories," she cooed. 

Stupid. I'm so stupid. 

She turned the Baccarat upside down again, watching the light bounce off the rounded stem. She put it back on the table and twisted her hands for a moment before letting them fall into her lap. They rustled in the folds of her tulle slip, and she realized with horror that she was still wearing her wedding dress.

Her hands smoothed the fabric as she glanced down at herself admiringly. 

Well, no one can say I didn't look fabulous. 

She almost snorted. Of course she looked fabulous--she was wearing a seven-thousand dollar dress. She'd loved it immediately--made of the softest silk, it was strapless and perfectly fitted to the waist before cascading into a million tiny little ruffles so fine they looked like delicate feathers. Monique Lhuillier herself probably hired twenty thousand Filipino children to hand-stitch each individual fold in the fabric. 

That, too, had been an argument -- this time, with her father. Her parents were generous to a fault, but even they were less than thrilled with the cost of the dress. They'd asked her to stay under three thousand dollars -- a perfectly reasonable sum, she now realized -- but she'd wheedled and begged, insisting on its critical role in the most important day of her life. It was her father who finally caved, and when he'd written the check, she was oddly triumphant. She'd known he wouldn't refuse her. 

She sat back in her chair and picked up the glass again. The day had been perfect, she realized. Precisely what she'd always wanted. The flowers -- cascading orchids in the deepest velvet purple -- were of a dream. The cost of those, too, had been staggering, fueled by their purported rarity. 

She buried her head in her hands. All those details, she thought. The centerpieces. The dupioni silk custom chair covers blended of the subtlest of colors -- a light cream and the softest pearl. 

She lifted her head and looked at her engagement ring. Nine months later, and it still took her breath away. She twisted it around, remembering that just yesterday it had stood alone. Yesterday, when things were completely different than they were today. Yesterday, when she was happy and warm with the anticipation of her wedding day. 

Yesterday, before she realized this was all a horrible mistake. 

What Happens After The Leaving

"We'll name her Moses," Marla said, grinning.

"We will do no such thing!" Dan replied.

The basket sat on the doorstep, no note pinned to a blanket, nothing. Just a basket, with a prize inside. Marla's first name choice had, in fact, been "Cracker Jack." Dan gave her a negative on that. Or as he put it "Ixnay on hatyay."

"You mean atthay, Dan," Marla put in. She smirked as she said it, not sure why she took such pleasure in knowing pig latin better than he did. "Hat yay is when I find a really primo fedora in a used clothes store for, like, three bucks. Canadian."

Dan laughed and reached into the basket to run a fingertip along the prize inside. Small little thing though she was, she still knew when attention was being given to her and lifted her chin helpfully to accommodate the finger. "Canadian monetary deals or not, we aren't going to name her Cracker Jack."

Which is when Marla came up with Moses. The entire time this went on, there wasn't a peep from the basket. Both Marla and Dan thought it strange but decided to not think too deeply about it just yet. Thinking deeply would mean that the basket was theirs for good now and as long as the basket, and its contents, were separate from Marla and Dan, then it would be something that simply got accidentally left on their doorstep.

Which was, thought Dan, rather odd to begin with. Who left living things on other people's doorsteps anymore? Who did that? And, for those few who considered themselves desperate or unfortunate enough that their circumstances warranted something like that - who took the time to choose a basket?

Maybe the basket was pre-owned. Perhaps there was an Easter accident that left the owner with an extra basket and that basket had sat in a closet for years, waiting for something useful to happen to it. And now here it was, the star of the day, with only some cotton swaddling as padding and a live, squirming thing in it that was oddly quiet.

Marla took one look in the basket and knew there was no way in the world that basket was not coming inside with them. In fact, spending a minute or two pretending that maybe it wouldn't was funny. Spending five minutes pretending was starting to feel creepy and evil to her. She looked at Dan and nudged him with a shoulder.

"Hey! Don't make me drop the..."

"Oh, come on, I only kinda nudged you, Dan."

"With your freakish strength you might've broken my arm. Medic! I think I need to go to the hospital. At the very least I need to go take a nap and think about what you've done."

"What I've done? Dan, who did this? How can they... can you imagine? Standing here, a basket with a baby inside and staring it down? Staring down your own morality, your own life that way? Knowing that there was no going back? What was that like, can you imagine?" Marla took a deep breath to steady herself.

"Well they could come back."

"No, come on, in years, fine. But I mean fifteen minutes from now. Think of it."

"Oh man," Dan wanted to laugh, "that's terrible but yeah, how would that even play?"

"Badly. So we keep her."

"Do we?"

"Can we not?" Marla asked. "Is there some situation where we don't?"

"No."

"No. Exactly. And we can name her Bingo. B. I. N. G. O."

"We are not naming her Bingo."

"But Bingo was her..." The need to laugh spurred her on, and she knew that Dan knew it.

"It was never her name-o, it is not her name-o and it will not be her name-o," he said, wondering if they would keep the basket forever, as a reminder, as the only thing left from before.

"Spoil-sport."

"Let's get inside and call a doctor, we should make sure she's healthy, she's really quiet."

"Tough little girl, but yeah, let's." Marla took the basket in hand and smiled down into it. "Silly little Ming. We'll get you fixed up. I'll be mom."

"We're not calling her Ming."

"She's gonna be merciless. Look at her."

Dan looked into the basket as he held the door open for Marla. "Not Ming," he said. He let the door close behind him and couldn't help but smile.

What happens after she (sort of) decides

“There are worse things that can happen to you in life than getting divorced.”

My mother pushes a box of tissues across the kitchen table, waits as I destroy four with devastating blows engineered to take out my frustrated tears, and then leans back in her chair to deliver her state of the potential dissolution of the union address. I can’t help but be reminded of another day she’d found me crying. She walked up quietly, leaned in, and whispered, “You do know you don’t have to go through with this, don’t you?” On that day, I thought about how she’d yelled at me six months earlier that she’d never once heard me say I loved the man I was now, years later, considering leaving. I loved him then. I love him still, truth be told. That’s why reaching this point where trying on an ill-fitting word like ‘divorce’ brings another exhaustive round of tears. I imagine my mother is president of the world’s most depressing fortune cookie company (“Our motto is ‘We told you so!’”), but she’s the only divorced woman I know, and by all indications, her company’s benefits program has helped her live up to her words. Of course, the last fortune cookie I received attempted to temper its horribly stale state by assuring me “It is not in your character to give up,” as I spat soggy remains into a napkin. An ironically fine how do you do for a life now clouded over by anger, exhaustion, and resignation.

Can there possibly be anything worse than getting divorced?

There’s war, of course. No battles waged between two could ever be so great as to compare.

Being ill-prepared for divine retribution? Don’t think I haven’t thought about it.

Finding myself in my early 40s and still looking to my mother for guidance? There are no words for that other than quiet ones of annoyance that I mutter under my breath while thinking about how often she’s right.

Maybe a zombie apocalypse. Yes, in the category of “Well, isn’t this a shitty state of affairs,” a zombie apocalypse might actually trump a divorce. That, or, hey, what about being married to an actual zombie? Isn’t that exactly what my marriage has become? When we’re together, we lumber through the house, shuffling from room to room to escape the other. We’re incapable of saying the words that need to be said, and when we’re forced to address the other, monosyllabic grunts seem to be the only noises we can produce. If I were the heroine of a zombie movie, I’d have by now given up weeping in fear and steeled myself for the fight for survival. The reality, though, is I see only one potential direction to take in my marriage to achieve that, and it leaves me wondering if that’s one of the reasons zombie movies seem to have so many sequels. My only hope now is this man I’ve spent so many years with doesn’t attempt to eat my brain, because, let’s be honest, the bitter thoughts that race through it would likely force him to spit out the chunks.

“There are worse things that can happen to you in life than getting divorced.”

I let my mother’s words race toward me like over-eager acrobats, the “ooohs!” and “awwws!” of a wide-eyed audience below help push them further up, up, up the seemingly endless ladder to their fate. It won’t be until they finally reach the top and rest breathlessly in front of me that I’ll join them, peering over their shoulders to look down into the black space below where the once fearless have now come to hesitate.

This is where I either find the courage to close my eyes to the blinding spotlight and step off the tiny ledge I’ve been clinging to and decide whether to grab hold of the outstretched arms of the one I used to count on, or be suspended, untethered, in mid-air, realizing within seconds that he, too, is as tired of the act as I am. The former still sways me and fills me with hope. The latter means plunging violently to the ground. I can imagine it no other way. Yes, there may be worse things that can happen to you in life than getting divorced, and one of those things may be realizing too late that the safety net that’s always been there has been rolled up and put away when I most need it to be in place, leaving me splattered across the hay-strewn dirt, my heart shredded and dripping off the rim of the ringleader’s top hat.

And what about the children? You think 20 overzealous clowns throwing confetti, tossing buckets of water and honking horns as they spill out of a tiny car isn’t scary? Then what about breaking up a family?

The choice might be easier if the reasons for considering it were stronger. There’s been no infidelity, but there has been rejection. Apathy has settled in to spaces where arguments would have been better served. “I don’t want us to be over,” he sometimes tells me, but he doesn’t want to do the work that ensures the story we started writing long ago has a happier ending. I, on the other hand, want to get angry, to scream into pillows, kick at lines I’ve drawn in the sand, and sink his battleship. Perhaps things would be clearer and decisions less difficult if we lived on a fault line, a ragged, obvious edge where the earth would rumble under us as it split us apart, and blame could come crashing down around us along with the sturdy pieces of Pfaltzgraff dinnerware we’d picked as our wedding gifts. No fine china for us!

There’s been nothing fine about us for a very long time, which brings me to this table, seated among these tears and clotted tissues. Maybe there are worse things that could happen to me in life than getting divorced. Surely I wouldn’t die without him if that’s what it comes down to, but honestly, I’m not sure how I’d live, either.

Perhaps it really isn’t in my character to give up.

What Happens After You Check In

I hate this rug.

It's just so round. I hate most things that are round, now that I think about it. There's an abject hopelessness in circles that gnaws at my insides. Everything should have an end point; a place where it just stops. Circles refuse to stop. I hate circles.

And this rug is going to sit here staring me back in the face for I don't even know how long. 

*wiggles in seat* This chair. They could have at least given me a new chair, one that didn't spin around in circles. I have no idea how I'm going to do this every day. 

*paces around room* Even the freaking walls make a circle. And these windows! What's the point of big open windows that look out onto big, manicured courtyards if I can't open the fucking windows? I get that they have to lock me in this room, but do they have to rub it in my face that they're locking me in this room? A little bit of fresh air never killed anyone, seriously.

Well, except John Kennedy.

I really should have thought this through.

It sounded like a good idea at the time. I thought it would help. I thought I could make everything better. I thought it would mean a better life for everyone I knew if I just said yes but now I'm here and there are circles everywhere and this room is too big and the silence is going to kill me and why won't someone knock on this door and talk to me?

*knock at door* Your lunch has arrived. 

Turkey and cream cheese bagels. With cucumber slices. OF COURSE. Round, round, round, round. It's all a circle. Ev. Er. Y. Thing is a circle. 

A HA. That's the point! That's it's all a big circle and I can't do anything about it so I might as well get used to it. Well, that's not very inspirational. No, I'm not buying it at all! That's not why I signed up for this shit, to lay back and resign myself to a world full of hopeless, soul-crushing circular patterns, oh no. I came here to make change. I came here to break cycles. I came here to do something, and my first order of business is going to be to make this bagel sandwich a square so I can eat it.

Anyone got a knife? *crickets*

Oh, of course not. Don't give me a knife, oh no. You know what? I'M HERE VOLUNTARILY, PEOPLE. I can have a goddamn knife if I want one. I have to CHANGE THINGS.

*glances over to change jar on desk* The change is even round. This is going to be a lot harder than I though.

I just don't understand why no one is here to talk to me yet. I have been listening to people tell me what to do for months. Everyone kept yapping about how much I needed to go, how much they needed me to make everything better, how important it was that I do this.

Opinions are like blogs, man. Everyone has one.

And you know what? I still have twitter. They can't take that away from me. *pulls out cell phone* c-h-a-n-g-e c-h-a-n-g-e - send. That could be a whole blog post actually. We can't change anything until we change change. Until we get rid of change, the world will never be a better place. I'm totally onto something here. CHANGE IS THE ENEMY.

*0 replies*

Where the fuck is everyone? Was there a fucking zombie apocalypse this morning and no one told me? Goddammit, zombies are gnawing at my mother's brains and I'm trapped in a round room and the circular rug won't stop staring at me and there isn't even anyone on TWITTER to comfort me? Fine, I'll do it myself.

*lights cigarette*

*door opens* I'm sorry, sir, there's no smoking inside. 

Now someone talks to me. What, do they have this room bugged? I'm going to find the cameras and I am going to crush them right here in the middle of this big round rug and then they'll see. Then they'll know who they're messing with. It would take a nation of millions to hold me back! HAHAHAHAHA!

*knock at door* Mr President, it's time for your first address to the nation.

Can you make sure the camera lens is a rectangle?

This Is What Happens After: To Anabel, Anti-Hero

In the months after I turned in my lover, a large cosmetic company offered me my own nail polish line. My father’s lawyer declined that and also the 64-ounce Guzzler or something or other that a mini-mart in Pennsylvania wanted to use my image on. He declined another fifteen other things, maybe more. Once, when the requests were at their height, my mother slammed her wine glass on the table so hard it shattered: “We will not make a mahk-ery of this fahmmily’s name evahhhhrrr,” she wailed.

After TK was sentenced and my information-for-innocence deal settled, I did every interview I was asked to do, because I wanted to and also because my dad’s attorney couldn’t say squat about it. I wasn’t ashamed to do it, but I let my guilt linger. I held onto it not because I had him busted, and not because of all the trouble I caused my parents, and never about my role in the robberies. (Sorry? Yes. Guilty? Not really.) I agonized because I knew with each tape-recorded magazine feature, with every live taping for television, I was lying through my chomping-at-the-bit teeth.

Too many people believed me. They all believed me. They wanted to. They needed to find a reason good enough to explain why it happened and how it ended, and so I became everyone's field hockey player, everyone's Brownie, every mother's baby girl gone bad who did right. I entertained them and relieved them and was worshipped and forgiven.

Tomorrow, I will give my first interview in over eleven years.

It’s been that long since Thomas Kentwell Livermore, son of those Livermore’s, went to jail, and in two months, he will be released. I never tell the story anymore, not because I don’t think people will care (I know they want to ask), but because it’s too awkward to tell that dirty tale in someone’s stainless, perfectly perfect suburban kitchen. When the journalist called from Manhattan, I obliged immediately.

I have not told my husband. I marked the date on the kitchen calendar with a message only I could understand – the words all strung together so that they said nothing. It doesn’t really matter, my sneakiness, because he never reads the thing anyway. I face weekends of yard work, talk radio and all the typical non-drama that makes up a child-less marriage out here in the Everyday. I make the plans now, buy the groceries, pick the paint colors, worry about the money and spend most of it. He complains about never getting to control the remote, about his gut getting bigger, about the market this and the politicians that. We make love every Tuesday, sometimes Saturday. I think I always knew this is how my life would play out.

I have decided this interview won’t be like all the others, though I will start the way I always do, because, frankly, I like best that part of the story I made.

“We shot nine ball at the bar like pros, drank like pros. I’d hear a song on the radio and buy it at the record store; he’d come home singing it,” I’ll start. “We hid out in our walk-up on the lam from school and expectations. We’d hover over Indian food for hours making our ridiculous, hilarious plans.”

(I have it so memorized that sometimes I think maybe I read this whole thing somewhere else and didn’t actually say it the first time, out loud on my own.)

I will crank out the facts for her. TK got the costumes from a friend who distributed programs at the repertory theater downtown: velvet cloaks and plumed hats and belts so heavy with fake jewels they hurt. I’d quote real lines I remembered from Shakespeare or Ovid or event Mamet and TK would improvise. Sometimes, the people in the mini-marts or gas stations we’d hit would throw us tips. When TK would politely, and always in some horrible accent, demand the cash, the attendant always gave it up, kind of smiling, kind of bemused maybe. We never used weapons; we never even scared anyone; we blew the 50 bucks (or less) on restaurant food, French cigarettes and cheap beer. We’d make love for days on that high. We told no one.

The interviewer will ask me vague questions, but I will know already what she wants: our blue blood, my dreadlocks like dirty snakes that fell around me, his mother’s Persian carpet where he lay when the cops came. She will then ask me to tell how I turned on him, so righteously flipped on him, when things went so horribly violent. I will take a deep breath at this part, a breath so deep I might never exhale: I will hold on to it so long she might think I am no longer on the line. I will hold my breath until every last ounce of oxygen is absorbed and swallowed and drowned in my own regular blood. And then I will tell her the truth. 

I turned in my lover for one reason alone: I was jealous.

If he hadn’t snuck out on his own, hadn’t ditched me that day while I showered, hadn’t taken the wooden prop pistol that I had banned from the get go, then maybe it would have been obvious that fools like us swaddled in velveteen capes and hideous pantaloons, part Penzance part wizard, did not carry real guns. If I been with him, if he hadn’t taken my keys and left me home and alone, then maybe the man behind the counter wouldn’t have fired his real one: the bullet hurtling from his shaking hand, smashing through the window, busting the cage of propane tanks and shattering the belly of one.

I heard the explosion all the way on the East Side. Three cars were filling up; one was mine. Three people died. In the confusion and smoke, TK got away and ran all the way home, past my car that had burst, past the burning bodies he must have seen; he ran miles.

When I saw him in our kitchen, I knew right away that he’d done it and I gagged -- not just from his shedding skin but from my own pitiful knowing: I’d been rejected.

He lay on the ancient rug of his mothers and I covered his face and shoulders in water-soaked paper towels – my final gesture of good will – and then split to call the cops from the payphone outside. The swat arrived, vested and armed, and without any rebuke, carried him tenuously down the stairs.  

I stood on the sidewalk, detectives at my side, lights flashing, noise everywhere, and I stared at him in the back of the cruiser: even then when he knew what had happened, what I had done, he had this look of peace on his scorched face, his face still so crisp, alive, unafraid, and beautiful. I just stared. I stared and stared until I could see him no more, until he was no more to me. My dear Thomas, who lived his life under columns with buildings that bore his grandfathers’ names, would soon be as drab as those pillars, costumed by his family in the suit and ties he hated, muffled forever. 

I have an old table in my kitchen and it’s the best place in the house.  I sort the paint chips here, read mail here, put my left foot on the chair and inject the hormones in my ass here.  I’ll probably be in the same spot when the interviewer calls from New York.

I’ll explain that I never did one thing that was just or right. I will confess that I am a wicked, scarred woman like any other. I ruined him because he ruined me. I will tell her what I have been wishing to tell all along: that great love affairs are like petty crimes. They are selfish at best and despite all good intentions, they get terribly ugly and eventually catch fire, then burn, then melt and finally, disappear.

But anger, grief, envy? Those things stay, and they turn a person to stone.

Alphabet of Regret: Z is for Zimbabwe

Professor Ezekiel Alphonse Horatio McFlurryphontos studied his maps. His plans to take over Zimbabwe and thus assume his rightful place as the world's preeminent scientific mind needed adjusting. Mozambique looked like an easy way in on first glance, but with each subsequent pass, the Professor reconsidered.

Now, to some, it might seem odd that taking over a small African nation would confer superior scientific status upon an individual, but Professor Ezekiel Alphonse Horatio McFlurryphontos knew that he was right. He generally was, if you only looked to him for the current score. If anyone had asked, the Professor would have explained that due to his recent time travel problems, he had ended up being revered for his genius - no matter what havoc he wrought. He enjoyed it at first, but grew to despise the fawning and interruptions. So, instead, he would show the world who was boss - quite literally.

Respect was good. Respect was key, even, to the Professor's mind, but too much of a good thing turned out to not be such a good thing after all. Regardless, Pfah!, the Professor settled on Zimbabwe as his target. Once he controlled a country nothing could stop him.

He discarded the Mozambique plan and settled on an air-based attack strategy. Everything went according to plan. It was, the Professor thought, quite simple, looking back. Step one was the hardest, building an aircraft capable of flying over Zimbabwe while simultaneously spraying the entire country with a shrinking liquid. Covering the country quickly enough, and in a proper pattern was key. Without managing that everyone, their buildings and possessions would have shrunk unevenly. Lumpily, even.

Once the plane shrank the country the Professor stepped in, carefully - so as not to step on anyone, and swept up. Literally. The Atomi-broom gently, but emphatically, gathered up the buildings and people and extraneous pets into a holding unit. The unit itself was the size of a compact car, and within it, tiny robots went about pushing buildings into place. The robots, though tiny, were easily the size of busses, to the people now in the holding unit where they would live and prosper, albeit shrunken to the size of insects..

Zimbabwe taken care of, the Professor turned his attention to setting up shop. The world raged, but the Professor ignored them. Their respect quickly turned to horror and the Professor merely smiled. This, he felt, was more like it. Sometimes a certain state of mind is required for the best creative endeavors and, after achieving what he thought was his goal, the Professor had learned the true mindset needed for his own abilities. Certainly the success of his recently-trashed status was accidental, but it was still his, was it not? And as such, it was also his to upend gloriously, as befitting a genius.

And so Professor Ezekiel Alphonse Horatio McFlurryphontos settled in to his new home. Populated by robot minions, curious wildlife, experimentations, twelve monkeys that were working on the recipe for perfect fried chicken, a collection of harmonicas and the Professor himself, the country felt perfect.

Until that one fateful day. A thundering noise shook the countryside. The Professor awoke from a dream and fell off his bed while trying to work out what could have possibly exploded. No one dared attack him, not after the first time the U.N tried to invade. They were still trying to find the attack force they sent in. And good luck with that, the Professor thought as he pawed around for his glasses. Good luck indeed, trying to find an attack force that was currently nothing more than scattered atoms on the wind.

Whatever attacked him now would certainly suffer the same fate. The Professor grabbed the Imagi-fire helmet, the same thing that reduced the monster Gargantua to less than a problem, and strapped it on. Outside the robot sentries ran in terror, screaming something or the other that the Professor couldn't make out. He made a mental note to redesign the robot's vocal chips to convey English when they panicked instead of binary. Binary screams were quite annoying and went on far too long, he felt.

In the distance, but growing quickly closer, he could see a large shape. It waddled as it approached, yelling and booming. Something about the shape looked all wrong. It looked for all the world like a badger given energy form and physical mass. Perfectly impossible. The Professor unleashed the power of the Imagi-fire helmet, a helmet fueled by the strength of his own imagination, and then turning that power into atomic fire. The energy-badger absorbed the blast without slowing down.

Soon the energy-badger was upon and he could see, in the center, floating and wearing a tiny helmet, was Harry. Harry the badger, the lab animal left being when the Professor first launched his campaign against Zimbabwe. Harry the badger, who never showed any promise of heightened intellect, now stood on the very land the Professor called his own.

"Harry! My word, the experiments took! Let us work together!" the Professor tried.

"Not a chance!" roared Harry, "I shall crush you and then claim Zimbabwe as my own. Your time is through!"

Well the Professor would have none of that, thank you very much. Still, Harry's energy/mass field would be able to resist almost any attack thrown at it. No, the trick, the Professor realized, would be to extrude the badger from his burrow, as it were. Running back into his lab, an action Harry mistook as cowardice, Professor Ezekiel Alphonse Horatio McFlurryphontos set to quick work.

He would have to grab Harry from his womb of energy and them keep him still long enough to remove his helmet. Yes. Some suction, some… yes this would work! With only minutes to spare the Professor gathered up his invention and aimed it out the door toward Harry.

"This is your last chance, Harry," the Professor told his once-and-possibly-future-subject, "power down and we can work together. Refuse and be dealt with."

In response, Harry threw two monkeys, still holding fried chicken, at the building. Well, that settled that. The Professor threw the switch. A giant wind started to form, sucking everything it could in through the door. It howled and raged and sucked. Oh, how it sucked. It sucked up plants and fallen monkeys and their fried chicken. It sucked the dirt from the ground. Finally it sucked one hyper-intelligent badger from his energy womb.

Once inside Harry found that he was stuck to the sides of the device, other debris whizzing past him to stick along other bare spots on the wall. Turning the machine off, the Professor reached in and plucked the tiny control helmet from Harry's head. The energy creature outside dissipated and the badger frowned.

"How did you have time to create this?" he demanded.

"The Bubble Yum Wind Tunnel," the Professor said archly, thinking up the name on the spot for a machine that sucked things with wind and was also sticky and pink-walled, "is a simple application of my boundless imagination, you tiny fool. Like a spider with a straw against its web, I have trapped you."

"And now you'll kill me?"

"No," the Professor said, "I truly would like to work with you. But you are too dangerous and wish to kill me. Still, Harry, I am sorry I left you behind, before."

"Because I am now a threat?"

"Because you were never deserving of abandonment in the first place." Professor Ezekiel Alphonse Horatio McFlurryphontos cleared his throat. "If I have one regret it is turning you into an enemy by mistake. I have found that I need to think these things through a bit more before I go ahead with my plans. Wouldn't you agree?"

The badger sniffed. "I would. But do not think this makes us even."

"Well, how about you take Zimbabwe?" The Professor offered.

"For my own?" Harry squinted and struggled against his sticky prison.

"Including the robots," The Professor said.

"But what will you do?"

"Mozambique might be nice." The Professor said, realizing he truly meant it. Zimbabwe was nice and all but it didn't have a "q" in the name. A "q" might be fancy to have.

"Aren't you worried I will attack you?"

"Worried? I look forward to it! Why, I have already begun to think up a schedule for when each of us could attack the other! Working together, attacking each other, we should each advance our science by leaps and bounds! It will be glorious!"

Harry the badger thought Professor Ezekiel Alphonse Horatio McFlurryphontos a loon. But having a friend to play with would be nice. And between the two of them, the world would come to regret many, many things.

Except fried chicken. The remaining ten monkeys did work out the world's perfect fried chicken recipe, Professor Ezekiel Alphonse Horatio McFlurryphontos' final gift to humanity before he resumed blowing things up for science. With a friend.

The Alphabet of Regret: Y is for Youth

Glass by glass, Benny Ostrogoth was reversing his position on drunk women.

“I dunno,” the drunk woman said, her head dipping briefly down to the bartop, “You’re funny – and kind of cute?”

“Kind of, yes,” agreed Benny. He made a circular motion over the bar with his index finger, the universal sign for two more of the same.

Drunk women, Benny was coming to realize, formed a vital part of any bar’s ecosystem. They took in desperation and, by an invisible chemical conjunction, emitted a faint aerosol of hope. Eventually they would wear away – and sometimes the reaction would catalyze explosively, a tangle of limbs and breath and a hastily snuffed out light – but then, Benny figured, so would he.

“What do you do?” the drunk woman said.

“I’m a young man from the motor trade,” said Benny. “Care to keep an appointment with me?” He flipped a card out from his palm.

The woman’s name was Sheena, of all things. Out of habit she kept it in reserve, partly because giving out her name in these situations was like dropping a key into a man’s palm, but also because most men, ever since her preteen years, would start singing a few lines from Morning Train. She was beginning to find that fewer and fewer people were making the connection, which meant that the bar’s demographic was tilting ever younger, while she was rooted in the same spot.

So far no one had ever sung Sugar Walls for her. So there was something to be grateful for.

She looked at the card: a heavy rectangle of paper, gold embossed script, a logo watermarked into its centre.

“You sell cars”. Sheena gathered up the fresh drink in one hand and tipped some of it down her throat.

“You should drop by some time. Any time”. Benny kept the card out, clamped smoothly between index and middle finger. Sheena plucked it from his hand with her nails and dropped it into her purse.

“I don’t just sell cars,” he said.

She watched the heavy drops of alcohol and syrup roll down the slope of her glass. A cone on a stem. Whatever this evening brought, it would need more cones, more stems, more talk.

She lifted her glass to the bartender and gestured in Benny’s direction.

“My name is Sheena,” she said.

X. And, Marking the Spot

He had dirt in his hair and in his teeth and when he cried for her there was a trickle of mud on his cheek for the dirt in his eyes.

He was always dirty. Always.

Ever since he found the map.

Ever since then, he'd been digging.

The only problem was that the X on the map kept moving around. And sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes that fucker wasn't even there at all.

So that was difficult. Being a treasure hunter had it's drawbacks.

But, he had faith and perseverance and balls. Obsession is what she called it when she left. And when she came back, she asked him to take his things and leave.

Since then he has been following the map and the ever changing location of the X. When he wasn't digging, he was sleeping in the pockets of giants and he hung his clothes on the sharp, upward sloping edge of the crescent moon and book marked his shovel and maddox between his dreams and his doubt. 

And his tears were mud and his eyes sparkled with flakes of mica and fools gold.

So he would dig. He would take one, two, three.....four-hundred and twenty-six paces east by southeast, and dig. Sometimes he would hitchhike and the presence of a strange man counting off footsteps while riding shotgun would always be too much for the driver. So, he would walk again.

And he would dig.

When he got to where the X lived on that particular day, he would dig. He wore no gloves and his hands were hard as axe handles, big as pair of catchers mitts. He would excavate topsoil and clay and rock. Sometimes there was asphalt or concrete. Sometimes other things. Once, the map took him to a cemetery. That was a hard day. Fuckin A.

Those were hard times. Hard as fuck.

It was always hard. All the goddamn time.

He didn't like to think about it though. He only cared for the digging. Some say it was the Hope that kept him going. Some say he was crazy as a shit-house rat. Others didn't say anything as they took up there own shovels. Followed their own map. And when he saw them - the ones with their own map and shovels - his heart would feel like activated thermite and ribbons of mud would run down his cheeks again.

Because he knows. He knows what they don't. He knows.....and he digs anyway.

He knows.

The X. The one that keeps moving all around his map. The one that sings him to sleep with it's lullaby of promise.

The X?

May never have been there in the first place. And that map may very well be an old, coffee stained Denny's menu-mat.

Still.

He digs.

He really has fuck all other options.