Have some more flowers, my peoples.

Acid Drops

The buttermilk basement lights feebly pushed the murk around but did nothing to dispel it.  The walls were wood veneer on sheetrock, the ceiling more sheetrock with thin enough primer to reveal branding, the floor concrete with fuzzy green skin like a pool table.  The little window that occasionally revealed passing voles and rats in the daytime was pure void black in the night.  Nobody stirred, nobody lived among the dusty milk crates of junk and stiff little furnishings, except silverfish, wolf spiders, and two teenage girls, tripping on lysergic acid.

Linda and Caroline waited with patience and near-perfect stillness, looking through each other with dilated pupils.  Caroline had told Linda it would be safe.  She had experience, and her own sense of inner peace and control could be extended to the less experienced girl if the trip turned dark.  Linda didn’t know if she believed it.  She’d heard that it’s good to have a sober friend to keep an eye on you, but she let herself be talked into it.  Didn’t seem like Caroline would be willing to pony up a tab unless she was flying as well.

Linda could see every part of Caroline.  She was smaller, with darker hair and eyes, pale skin, and tiny pink hands. Her peasant blouse of ivory pleated linen was cinched with silky green ribbons that shone like iridescent beetles.  There was something romantic about her in a way that was seldom trendy.  A Louise Brooks fifty years out of time.  Boys fell hard for Caroline, and Linda could see why, but that body was a doll shell around something less beautiful.  Her outline wavered like a 3-D movie, in tension with the world around it.  Her enlarged pupils blended with the dark color of her irises to become as void black as the little window—a portal to that disturbing interior.

Caroline’s fingers twitched—the first movement in what seemed like an hour—and Linda startled. For a second she imagined all her hair had fallen out with the surprise, sliding down the back of her head and neck, but she realized that was foolish, and didn’t believe it.  Still, the moment sent her reeling.  The room was still spinning after that, subtly but without end.

“What did you do?,” Linda asked.

“Huh?  Same as you.  A tab of acid.”

“I mean just now.  You did something to me.”

“Don’t believe your paranoia.  You’re better than that, baby.  This will be a good trip.  You’ll see.”  Caroline held out her hands, then let them fall to her lap, palms up.

In stillness the vision of Caroline had been centering, so every movement from the first twitch of the finger had disoriented Linda.  That’s the body high, right?  Whether you have a good trip or not, that’s in the head.  In what you do with your thoughts.  Linda tried to keep it together but it kept falling apart.

She became aware of her stomach and it seemed awareness of anything shot a thousand holes in it.  No structural integrity there.  She tried in vain to stanch the herniation, but there were not enough fingers to plug all the openings.  She was losing it, somehow on the floor, on her knees, looking at the green felt with unfocused eyes.

“Linda.  Linda, what are you seeing?”

“My guts.  My guts all over.  Oh god.”

“Your high is what you make it, honeybee.  It doesn’t have to be scary.”

“What if I can never get them back inside?  I think I’m gonna be sick.”

“Don’t!  Listen.  Even a morbid experience can be beautiful.  Don’t look away.”

“I can’t look away.  I can’t, what if–”

“Good!  What does it look like?”

“Bratwurst.  Blood, big … drops like softballs.”

“Focus on the blood.  Look at the drops, Linda.  Where they soak into the carpet, like watching a flower bloom with the patience of the sun.”

Caroline’s voice was so far away, but so rich and clear.  An angel from the Fifth Dimension.  Linda tried to look at her, but lost nerve again.  If she didn’t look at where her guts fell, she might lose them.  What if the doctors needed all the guts they could find?  But she found herself obeying Caroline’s voice of experience, watching the blood instead of the guts.

The blood soaked into the green felt where it hit, turning darker than it otherwise would be, rich red deepened into near black but oscillated with its own furious identity.  The blurry edge of the pools, it really was like the delicate leading edge of rose petals.  Flowers.  She was bleeding great beautiful flowers.

Linda smiled sadly.  “I’m going to die.”

Caroline said, “No, you can take your blood back.  You can keep it.  Just pluck these flowers and eat them.”

“Really?”  She let out a creaking half-laugh.

“Sure you can.  Here.  Before it’s too late.  Take one.”

Caroline’s perfect little hands came into view, plucking one of Linda’s blood flowers out of the green and holding it up to her face.

“Put it in my mouth!  Hurry!”  She raised her eyes to meet Caroline’s.  Red pooled in the bottom of her black irises like twin cough drops.  Caroline fed her the flower.

Linda felt the petals lap at the sides of her mouth, brush along cheek and tongue, clog the back of her throat like getting a bad bloody nose as a small child.  Caroline’s fingers slipped into her mouth sometimes as she worked, a strangely erotic teasing in the slight penetration.

Linda couldn’t speak, but she didn’t choke, gulping down flower after flower, body still paralyzed with the need to hold in what was left of her intestines.  Caroline was smiling.  “Tastes good, doesn’t it?  Like salty cherry chocolates.”

It did.  But also like blood.  Linda felt the cherry taste in her cheeks, chocolate taste over her tongue and palate, the blood taste in her throat, and the salt taste throughout.  She couldn’t breathe but somehow she was still alive, eating or drinking, it was hard to tell.

Caroline’s smile crooked to a side.  “…And one for the doctor.”  She took one of the flowers for herself, inhaling the bloom like cotton candy and slurping the stem like a red-black noodle.  She licked her lips, but they remained darker than before.  Or had she been wearing red lipstick the whole time?  No, definitely not.

“Not yours,” Linda croaked wetly.

“You’ll never miss it.  Trust me.”  The inside of her mouth was much darker than before.

“I don-” Linda lost the words in the swallowing, the desperate consumption.

Caroline took one for herself, then another.  As the blood came into Linda it kept coming out, and with the dark-haired girl harvesting a tax on the flower supply, well, Linda had to be sustaining some net loss, hadn’t she?  She didn’t notice when Caroline rocked her back onto the floor, laid her down gently as possible on that cold concrete.  Holding in the guts was much easier in that position, but everything else a sticky mess.

The master had said Caroline could no longer imbibe of human vices, but he was wrong.  It just took a little more effort for a dead girl.  In the end, the high was all hers.

–

Rose Gold

Lasers from the laser boys.
The cold city ate the young and vomited heat that pierced the sky,
crested, and then drowned the people in boiling rain.
How had any of the rats survived?
Maybe they hadn’t. Maybe a city is the flower of humanity,
drawing its populace through rural roots and blossoming
into a fleshy display of perfect beauty and perfect cruelty,
before eating itself, dying, and starting again.
That’s what happened in the laser boy incident,
the city immolating itself in a savage beauty,
a pink light that settled in simmering pools that slowly drained
and disappeared into the sewers where diaphanous mutants writhe,
and deeper still until the memory of it all just ceased to be.
Laser water.

That’s what Brycine Cybernetics used to fuel Project: Rose Gold,
a nondescript corporate complex in the warehouse district,
a shell around hydroponic gardens of perfect pink roses.
They would allow human photosynthesis,
be the Seal of Famine, an end to the rolling food crises
that had rocked the world since time immemorial –
for a price, of course, and Brycine’s shareholders would be as gods.
Suck up that pink laser water, little flowers, and do your thing.

But to make use of this miracle, humanity would need to change as well.
Brycine had to find the perfect human to receive the machines,
one who could survive the initial implementation
because she was already dead.
They required a woman whose cellular processes persisted
after the arrest of the heart, just long enough and in just the right way
to allow the Rose Gold Interface™ to take root in her flesh.
Cyber ambulances prowled the city like hungry lions
cleaning up after police riots and other scenes of gang violence
for the bodies that would not be missed.
The EMTs would test the dead to see if they met the criteria,
and part them out in the usual way if they did not.
At last, at the scene of a battle between The Machete Mans
and the Garrotte Girls, they found the Chosen One.
Isadora Kors lay across her girlfriend Stuck Steppy like a lead apron,
back chopped into chunks of bone and meat,
blood sloshing in place with the rise and fall of Steppy’s breath.

They came and took her. Stuck Steppy was too concussed
to stop them, sloppy grabs at their ankles and shins,
the thick canvas of their uniforms slipping her feeble grasp.
Isadora darling dear, she thought through clotting fluids,
come back to me.
In the aftermath of the incident, struggling through sutures and gauze,
through police and punks, through the loss of it all
she thought as hard as she could.
Some people are better off not trying in the first place,
she mixed cause and effect, and blamed Isadora’s demise on the medics.
This broken reasoning by broken clock principle set her on the right path.

It was just like when the laser boys had to get their man,
a band of ragged youths against the world of money and power.
Stuck Steppy rallied the gang to raid Brycine Cybernetics
with a promise of valuable things to steal, but all that can be earned
with switchblades and pistols is a wage of chaos and death.
Death to the gang, chaos to the city,
as the monster of Avarice’s making escapes the vaults of power.

Isadora was part plant and part machine and part the lady that Steppy loved,
the one who always took a knife for her in street fights,
the one who knew how to kiss her lovin’ parts just right,
but oily black pistons drove viciously thorned vines
through everything in sight, pink roses bloomed in them
and cried out to the night sky, we have drunk deeply of the well of laser water,
and the season of rain has returned.

–

Baba Safia

She comes out of the tumbleweeds,
when you see a great roiling mass of the things
coming down the trail like a pale golden wave.
She flies like that, a little old lady,
skin the color of bone, etched with so many lines
like twine stretched over a marionette.

Baba Safia is of a people lost to history,
earnt the name of Safia in a Turkish harem,
earnt the name of Baba from living a few centuries.
Her nose is a beak, discolored eyes bulge and sink
into her skull with the vagaries of expression –
an expression deranged like a bull with an estoc in the neck,
murder in the eyes, and a beaming rictus on golden teeth.

Ask her how she lives forever; won’t do you much good.
It takes so long to learn that youth is a distant memory
by the time you know how.  For Baba Safia it was roots
that run through her native soil.
They have a little trick whereby the plant dies, dries, and tumbles away,
but the roots revive like bones in Ezekiel’s hands.
Elsewhere the tumbling corpse carries the weed’s life into time yet unborn.

Baba Safia was burned at the stake and spent a dark eon in dreaming,
woke in a field of flax up the way of the Montana Territory,
and lived in these lands ever since.

You thought we always had tumbleweeds here?
You don’t remember the time before she came?
Doesn’t much matter, can’t bottle a genie.
Can’t stop the wind, and can’t outlive a ghost.

–

On our writing discord, these entries are rewarded with a flower graphic in a big collage.  June 30th is the last day to get such a reward, so pens down for me here.  I got all of them except orange.  Not too shabby.

I can still get credit for this shit until the end of June, as befits the month of rainbows, I suppose…

–

A Deep Darkness

Look into his eyes and you will see
The vast abyss of his sexual majesty
A place to be lost for eternity
Condemned to this eldritch ecstasy

I met him walking a railroad tie
Made a million locusts and cattle skulls sigh
Said this’ll be a secret between you and I
Said it won’t hurt but that was a lie

Tied to a willow with cottonmouth hide
Made love out of hate and ash out of pride
Wish I was you now, the demons all cried
Can’t much complain with that man inside

Condemned to this eldritch ecstasy
A place to be lost for eternity
The vast abyss of his sexual majesty
Look into his eyes and you will see

–

Cinereous Mourner

The shape of fire is a triangle trailing away to a stream of sparks
The shape of ashes is a triangle mounded hill of cremnant carbon
She watched the fire steal away all that made their lives complete
She walked away left something behind maybe she coughed it out
Part of it blew away in the stream of sparks part fell to the cremains
There she flattened the triangle to make her bed
The wind blew ash across her body and tucked her in for the night

–

Have some more flowers, my peoples.

Make it Snappy

I sat in a haze of a half dozen cigarettes when she walked in, Violeta Magenta, six foot two in stiletto heels.  I could tell she was packing heat, but nothing could rouse me from the toxic torpor of that hangover.  Why did I live like that?  The only thing that could animate my sorry carcass was danger, and she wasn’t it.  Not yet at least.

She said, “Clive Cleaver,” through violet-smeared lips, “I thought I was coming to see a private dick, but all I see is a puddle of swamp water.  Should I take these hundred dollar bills across the alley to Navy Davey?  I hear he’s got a lot of pep in his step.”  No, I said.  I’ll take your money.  She said, “Find out where the thieves fenced my amethyst and diamond piece, and get it back.  Make it snappy.”  For a few lousy sawbucks? I asked.  “I’ll make it worth your while.  If you make it snappy.”

As it happened I did have a line on her jewels, and I could turn this around in no time.  I said yes ma’am and pulled on my shoulder holster to make it look like serious business.  But the only danger I was in came from that kooky dame.  Ya see, I was the one who snatched her necklace, with the help of Dissolute Capriccio.  We’d been working Violeta’s scene for months, and grabbed the goods during one of her famous trysts in the Donkey Room.

Me and Dissolute, we knew there was nowhere in town to offload rocks that hot, so selling back to Miss Magenta was always the plan.  Could I talk her up to six hundred?  She always loved purple.  I’d call her from my partner’s spot with some cock and bull about complications and extenuating circumstances.  Not a problem.

It was a whopping six blocks I had to walk.  Just to make it look like I was going through some stress, I killed a bit of time at Louie’s.  The Funny Girls were playing darts for dope.  Got so clumsy they sunk one in the meat of my right hand.  I resolved to get a tetanus shot with the payoff from Violeta, and kept on.

At Dissolute’s nobody was answering the door.  Had that rat found a fence with deep pockets somewhere in our petty little burg?  Not a chance, but maybe he was at the bus station for Chi-town.  I took the fire escape up to his broken window, peeled back the tarpaulin, and went in.  It was a bright day and the light through his curtains was this intense purple, bright like something alive but dull like something dead.  I couldn’t see jack until she turned on the lamp, already pointing a pearl-handled derringer at my grill-piece.

“Took your sweet time, Clive.  I specifically asked you to make it snappy.”  Where’s Dissolute? I asked.  “Pass me the roscoe, buddy.  No false moves now.”  Where’s Dissolute? I reiterated through clenched teeth.  “Clive, the roscoe, or this conversation is over now.”  I gave up my heater, but what did I really have to lose?  I just didn’t have to vim to put up a fight.  You were wearing them when you came to my office this morning, I said.  She opened her jacket with one hand, the necklace sparkled in the lamplight.

Violeta had asked me to make it quick, but I knew she was about to take her sweet time with me.  Better luck in the next life.

–

Horseness

Horse girls are the wildest.  Get a girl interested in horses and you never know where it’s gonna stop.  Drawings in the margins of all her homework?  Posters?  Insisting the parents get one, rent a stable, take her riding all the time?  Get with other horse girls and discuss the horse tea?  Look up in silence at the approach of human boys, unwilling to let slip their horse secrets?

Horse girls, I’ve seen ’em in school, in the fields behind the school.  I’ve seen ’em strap on the feedbag, or gather around a salt lick, or take an apple from a stranger.  I’ve seen their nostrils flare to the size of silver dollars, their manes growing down the backs of their necks.  I’ve seen the hooved legs come down out of their dresses when they don’t think anybody’s looking.

One time I fell in love with a horse girl.  Goddamn that was foolish.  But there she was, long brown hair and big brown eyes, always made me think of that Van Morrison tune.  By degrees I got her used to my presence, you know, standing around and not doin’ nothin’ when she horsed out.  No eye contact, but gradually gettin’ closer and closer, where I sat on lunch break.

We were out on the football field.  Nobody went there on lunch ‘cept to get away from anybody else.  Some kids were smoking, some were making time.  I was getting as close to Clarabel as she would allow.  The legs came down, but she didn’t pay me no mind, and I thought Yes, she knows that I know, and she isn’t afraid of me anymore.  I approached her with an apple in hand and a hopeful expression on my face, still careful to look more at the nape of her beautiful neck than through the portal of those long thick eyelashes.

But it was all for naught.  She caught wind of my intentions and was havin’ none of it.  Sprouted a dozen horse legs right down the middle, top to bottom of her body, radial formation like the bauplan of a sand dollar or a sea urchin.  One of the damn things came right out of her mouth and stretched her face out to so many rubber bands around the base of it.  I about lost my lunch and my heart.  She just cartwheeled away like that, down the fifty yard line, up the bleachers, and out into the farmland beyond.

Horse girls are wild, but don’t you dare fall in love with one.  Far as I know, she’s still rolling to this day.

–

Silverfish

What is that shining in the claws of a bird?
A six-pack of beer?  No, don’t be absurd.
Ah, I see now – a struggling fish,
Shimmering, glittering, must be delish.
Or maybe it tastes like some salty chunk meat,
Bloody and raw, not exactly a treat,
Which tells us not all that shines is a prize.
What more silver creatures bedevil the eyes?
Tentaculate beasts and chitinous ghouls,
Translucent fangs exude strings of drool.
Scaly and flaky but covered with snot,
Metallic in sheen more often than not.
Flashes of light like a shiny new dime,
A veneer for creeps suffused with the brine.
I once saw a silverfish the size of my thumb,
Jumped out of my skin and then went for my gun.
Nickel-plated semi-auto nines I did blast,
In hopes to annihilate the creepy-assed.
I didn’t quite hit the mark, not off by a mile,
But boy did I fuck up my poor bathroom tile.
So heed the warning that I now try to give,
Allow the gleaming and slimy to live.
Go ahead, judge all these books by their covers,
But don’t leave them bait in your basins and cupboards.
Keep a clean ship to sway detritivores,
And you won’t be tempted to destroy your floors.
Quoth the earwig, Nevermore.

–

I might be overstepping the bounds of my own experience a little too much on this one, but if it sucks, we can just move along.  There’s more to come.

Where a River Flows

Up a mountain in Luzon, jade vines flow down the river banks. From unremarkable leafy vines grow great leis of exotic flowers and heavy green fruits. They grow and in time they fall down those river banks, past kingfisher nests and ferns and moss and rocks into the rivers themselves. Those rivers in turn flow out to the sea.  They say water is a cycle, that the water lost from a land is returned to it in the form of rain, but is it ever the same water, or have those molecules been lost forever to foreign lands or the abyss itself?

A family comes from the Philippines to the United States, like in that Neil Diamond song, to touch the hem of prosperity’s garment, to work and make their lives golden.  They have so much in common with cultural USAmericans – particularly a blithe acceptance of capitalism coupled with a sense of desperation derived from capitalist oppression which converts to hyper-participation in the capitalist system.  The rich are just better than us, unless I figure out the get-rich-quick scheme that will make me one of them, then I will be better than those who used to be us.  Get that bread.

The matriarch Vernita does the nail salon thing, the patriarch Rafael works his way up from day labor to contractor, and the family attains middle class.  Success.  The kids are so culturally close to America in the first place that they fit right in, become no different from any other kids here.  Except for being brown.  There’s always that.  There’s white kids, black kids, light-skinned Asian kids, and then… all the brown kids.  South Asian, Mexican, Native American, Polynesian, whatever, you all look the same to the majority.  The lighter the skin the more easily you can fit in with white kids, and get some measure of their privilege over your darker brothers and sisters.

This family is fortunate to be lighter-skinned, more from Spanish and Dutch ancestors than from Fujian Chinese, and one could almost imagine little Benny was Cuban.  That’s acceptable to US neo-nazis, even though it wouldn’t be enough in Australia or Hungary.  If he hates black and jewish people enough, he gets a white pass, and starts running with bad dudes.  Little Benny grows up a middle class contractor like dad in the day time, a wide-eyed bullethead proud boy by night.

His brother Donny always used to come around, used to be tight with Benny.  He even started down that path of darkness, doing cruel things that he would grow to regret.  But he was too socially awkward, too weak, not aggressive enough to fit in with the macho.  The nazis sensed his weakness and got Benny to betray him and brutalize him time after time.  Eventually, Donny realized he was gay, and went down a different path.  But without the resources of the rich, the cocktail of abuse and despair kept him from academic success.  Without Benny’s bad influence, Donny could have been a doctor.  Instead, he ends up homeless for a few years, before settling into a lower class life as a waiter and aspiring actor.

Sister Vicky is just doing her best to get by and keep her head low.  Be popular enough to be ignored by bullies, but not popular enough to attract competitive white queen bees exploiting her racial otherness to tear her down with rumor.  Success.  She gets a liberal arts degree and an office job, marries a law student, has kids, divorces, and marries again.  She stays close to the family, and is the source of whatever continuity the parents can feel with their ancestry.  The family is a river.

But Donny’s no breeder and Benny’s kids are doomed by his viciousness.  Vicky’s kids are part of that water flow, but for how long?  Getting that bread, pursuing individualized success, the community is left behind.  This droplet of the Philippines is atomized into the abyss of Anglo-America.  Perhaps it was already disintegrating before it left an island colonized and oppressed into a shadow image of the colonizer.  What would those islands have been without one conquest after another after another?

Does it even matter to ask those questions?  The most culturally Filipino members of the family, Vernita and Rafael, are an all-American success story, believers in medical woo and MLM schemes, creationism and Trumpism.  They have no idea why Benny’s kids are suffering, and hey, out of sight out of mind – not like they come around as much as Vicky’s kids.  Everything works itself out in the end, as long as you keep your head down and work clever and get lucky.  Jesus said.

Rafael has a fall and gets dementia and doesn’t remember English as well as he used to.  He wants the things of his childhood, and moves back to the Philippines.  It’s hotter, it’s filthier, it’s fascist.  But it’s alright.  We abide until we’re done.  He dies where he wanted to die.  Vernita goes back to Long Beach, California and dies where she’d rather be.

Up a mountain in Luzon, there are not as many jade vines as there used to be, and not as many kingfishers nesting in the riverbanks.  But there are some, for now.  We abide until we’re done.

–

Here we go again.

Leaglize Maraguana

Noel had to make it happen, had to make his masterpiece a reality.  Homage to Tom Petty on his passing, or within a decade of his passing, please let it happen.  Also, homage to the plant that offered the only real meaning in Noel’s life.  He’d been smoked out since he was twelve, fuck what the people say about teens and marijuana.  Life before that was suckin’ down candies and pickin’ his nose, watching Spongebob but not truly understanding it.  Life after Mary Jane?  He could laugh at jokes, and laugh at the terrible things in life that really are jokes, when you get it.  Love was real, everything was real, if wrapped in green cellophane.

And so the project.  Tom Petty’s Last Dance with Mary Jane, the music video it should have had, not that starfucking bullshit that got on MTV.  A sexy 3d animated girl doing a pole dance on cannabis stems.  Religious icons and sex toys in oscillating colors.  A motion-blurred tour through the ferns and mushrooms and tree stumps behind his dad’s house.  Garter snakes and frogs getting peaced out together on the herb.  But the 3d animated girl was the central recurring image, the thing that tied the home video together, and it wasn’t happening.  The other guys were fucking slackers.

Boxhead and Colin were the first two.  Boxhead never learned to 3d model by any other method but spline modeling.  You’d think with his handle he’d know a thing about box modeling, but no.  One leaf was thirty-thousand polys, and that shit would not do for a forest of the stuff, for what Noel needed.  Colin’s solution was compositing – render it in front of blue, mask the blue out in After-effects – but getting the light right, making that work on a large scale?  Looked like ass, took a million layers, and still killed any computer they tried it on.  When Boxhead dropped out, he took the leaf model with him, and then Colin, and all that remained was a mediocre resolution .mov burned with a strangely massive file size on CD, and then the disc got corrupted when left in a hot car for a day.

Deonte was better.  Buddha gave him superpowers, totally cured his ADHD, and he learned all the 3d shit like a wizard.  But the later in the day, the more he’d smoked, his mind went to the mystical.  They would try to do shit extracurricular, but got lost in mutual excitement about religion, philosophy, politics – all revolving around the ganj, of course.  One time they mistook their mutual excitement for sexual excitement and had a moment of gay panic that they could never get past.  Why are we all kept in these chains?

Then there was Juggalo Casey.  That dude was not right in the head.  To him, spliff was just a way to connect the dots between harder trips.  He helped Noel shoot the footage behind his dad’s house, but lost track of time playing with a slinky, imagined he was throwing fireballs.  Acid.  He kept saying he could help with the 3d work, but it was never going to happen.

Pearla was the one.  She blew a tree with the guys on Ash Wednesday and Noel had a vision – she was going to be the face of the dancing girl.  Before Deonte had to part ways with them, he did the model, too.  It was spot on, looked just like Pearla, but more stretched out and curvy, like African sculpture.  Hot shit.  But while she was a muse, and she could move minds toward the greater purpose, that influence only lasted until she transferred to a four-year school.

After that, it was Jaden, Oliver, Diamond Nuts, Ollie, Ava, Caden, Joshua Ripper, Caitlyn, Henry, Bitchface, and Toledo Stooge.  He couldn’t remember what they’d individually done wrong, but he could feel their failures in aggregate, a hydra in his brain stem.  In his six years at the two-year technical college, the animation never seemed to pull together, out of all the strands of effort in hard drives and thumb drives and burned DVDs labeled with sharpie or never properly labeled at all.

But at the end of the day, if everybody around you is on the same page except for you, doesn’t that make you the wrong one?  The weirdo, the outlier, the misfit?  Noel wondered, at long last, if it was ever meant to be.  Life is a struggle which is ultimately all to the same end, and only a great fool would try to squeak an achievement past The Reaper’s mighty scythe.

A verdant day in early spring, before almost all of the flowers had started to grow, some trees still bare from winter but reflecting the brilliant foliage below them, green with promise.  Noel lay at the edge of a vast, mostly empty parking lot, across the hood of his dodge neon with a bag of funyuns and a mountain dew code red.  Piled between his back and the windshield were book bags full of the work – sketchbooks and CD books and thumb drives in baggies or floating loose, plus all sorts of other trash that found its way into the mix.  He had planned to haul the whole lot over to the digital arts building, but realized he’d need some kind of cart, and gave up.  Time to ponder life in an increasingly sober state.  What misery, on an otherwise beautiful day.

The brain stem shook with the hydra’s thrashing.  A rage built inside him.  Did no one understand beauty?  Did no one understand art?  Yes, it was great to enjoy leisure and creation passively, but somebody, somehow, needed to create those things one enjoys.  It had to be Noel, but how could he carry on, surrounded by mendicants and psychic vampires?  Fuck, he needed to get baked, right quick.

But he knew enough to not light up in plain sight.  The pile of bags was like a duck blind, where he could hide from campus police.  Perfect.  He got back into the driver’s seat, fished a lacy out of the glove box, and lit up.  He saw the dark, lumpen wall of his abortive magnum opus before him, sighed, and proceeded to hotbox that shit.

Eventually Noel’s eyes uncrossed, and he immediately clocked a pair of eyes looking back at him from the other side of that wall.  How had he not anticipated this?  From outside the car it looked like an unattended pile of possessions, something that attracted a sniffing little piggy.  The cop broke eye contact to head toward the driver’s side door.

In a panic, Noel scrambled to the passenger side, opened the door, and lunged out head first.  An explosion of glass behind him, and the cop snagged his leg, preventing his escape.

“Stop resisting arrest!  Get out of the car!”

“I’m trying, man!”

The cop wasn’t making sense, Noel wasn’t making sense, so it was business as usual on Mother Earth.  The gendarme clung to his leg, though in the thrashing his arm was dragged against broken glass, and he cried out in alarm.  This was not helping Noel calm down at all, and he finally broke free, spilling out onto the concrete.  The edge of the lot was spiderwebbed with mossy green cracks where tree roots fought to reclaim the land.  For a moment, the boy was distracted by the beauty of it, but the pig bellowed with blood in his voice, and the panic returned.

Noel was on his feet, but anywhere he might flee was open ground, where he could easily get shot in the back.  He froze.  Put the hands up and turn around slow?  He could still see himself getting shot.  As the cop lurched into view, he ran around the back of the car, on some Abbot and Costello Meet the Mummy kind of shit.

“Come out where I can see you, punk!”

“Nope!”  Again, neither man was making sense.  The cop should have just stood his ground and bellowed threats, saved his energy, but he ran around the car, and Noel ran as well.  Ring around the rosy.

Suddenly, Noel found himself behind the officer.  The pig had tripped on the cracks, landed face first on the ground, and lost a grip on his gun.  Noel ran over the top of the man to reach his gun – just to kick it out of reach, keep it away from the fascist.  But he tripped on the belt and came down knee-first in the back of a skull.

He lost seconds of time as the terror took over again, and came out of it standing tall, looking down at his victim.  Noel had killed a cop.  It didn’t feel triumphant, like in the songs.  It felt like the end of the world.  He could load all the book bags back into the neon, pick up all the pieces of glass from the concrete, and drive away without leaving a fingerprint or a molecule of DNA.  He could do that, but they’d still get him, CSI style.  Zoom and enhance.  Isolate the genome.  Clever interrogations.  Frenemies flipping on you.

Noel lay down on the hood of the car again, and nestled into the pile of bags, staring up at the sky.  He let his cellphone lay heavy in his hand, waiting to dial 911 and write the last chapter of his young life.  The sky was blue and, as his heart finally slowed to a moderate pace, the haze over his eyes turned green.  At least now he had an excuse for never finishing his shit.

Green and serene.

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Here comes another one…

It Was All Yellow

Anyone else remember when that song “Yellow” by Coldplay was big on the radio?  That was somethin’ else.  That shit was everywhere.  Car radios goin’ by, in the aisles of your local pharmacy and grocery store, blastin’ down on your bloomin’ onion at the Red Robin, ghost echo earbuds on the bus before sound-cancelling was a thing.

First it was the song, then the world kinda went nuts for yellow.  That singer from coldplay married a yellow-haired lady, said he did it because her hair was yellow.  It was in his vows, look it up.  That yellow-haired lady started drinkin’ her own pee, said the color yellow is good for you.  I shit you not.  Meanwhile, everybody was drinkin’ beer instead of liquor and wine.  They painted all the hospitals the color of buttermilk.  And yellow fever killed like a million people in the tropics.

Crazy times, when “Yellow” by Coldplay was big on the radio.  I gotta say, I was not immune.  Sometimes I’d sing it in the shower.  Not really sing, because I can’t carry a tune.  I’d just say the lyrics while talkin’ like the Coldplay guy.  You know, like a harmonica with cheeks fulla cottonballs.  Then I started talkin’ like that when I was at work, and then everybody else started doin’ it too.  I couldn’t stop, no matter how serious the situation got.  I was honkin’ and buzzin’ through the eulogy at my mom’s funeral, while makin’ sweet love and proposin’ to my lady.  And when she said I do?  You know how she said it.

It really came to a head when our kids were born.  It goes without sayin’ they were conceived while that song was playing.  You know, “Yellow,” by Coldplay.  But we all got sick of it eventually, and moved on.  The song wasn’t done with us yet, at least, not the color.  My twins were born with jaundice.  Poor little Chris and Gwyneth, they had to go on dialysis until they could get kiddie kidney transplants.

Anyway, glad that piss is over.  It’s time to move on, like dandelions in the spring, like canaries in coal mines, like the color that happens between green and red at the intersection, like the sap that hardens around a livin’ creature and preserves its death to the limit of eternity.  It’s sure over.  It sure is.

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