Inaugural Post--no pressure, chief

Welcome, welcome! Welcome to the twisted and fascinating world that is my psyche. I like it here, and I hope you will too.

To kick things off, here's something I wrote not long ago and am pretty pleased with as a piece of flash fiction.

***

Every day of my life has been spent with these fucking cats. They wake me up at my first signs of life in the morning and beg for food, tiny furry refugees made of naught but skin and bone and begging for a mild kindness. I give in easily, trudging to their kitchen and setting out cans of wet food. They feed, noisily choking down the odious glop while I linger over a cup of Maxwell House coffee. I am soon sitting on the couch, watching the Hallmark Channel and weeping as the cats lick the tears from my face. It is only those moments that reassure me I am loved.

Each of the cats was named after someone who broke my heart. I currently live with ten cats. I am always finding more. I never run out of names.

After I stand up from the couch, I always shuffle into the bathroom to shower. The cats do not always follow me, though sometimes I can hear them walking past the thin door and falling to the floor with a muffled "thud."

I emerge from the shower promptly to feed them again, this time with dry food. I try not to look at them now. Their wide, accusing eyes would break me. Instead, I pour out equal rations and leave their kitchen the way I came. The mail drop sometimes has bills in it, and sometimes my welfare check. Every time I open an envelope my knees ache with phantom pain. I often entertain the thought of breaking them again myself, to teach them a lesson.

In days gone by, I would write letters to the editor or poetry, my pen blazing across an empty page as I poured all my excess emotions into its handy receptacle. I do not write now. This is the last thing I will write, I think.

Instead of writing, I turn the television back on and look for signs in the news reports. I don't give a good God damn about the Virgin Mary on underpasses or grilled cheese sandwiches, no, I look for signs of life. I look for small kindnesses and gallant men and brave women and trailblazers and people who make me smile and forget that I cancel them out.

I can't remember the last time I found one in the news reports. I can't remember a lot of things.

The cats always join me in my activity. They yowl at the screen, a mournfully hopeful sound. I don't think they care about my searches, they just watch to see the world burn. How do they feel about that? I wish they'd tell me.

After I get tired of searching, I put a record on the turntable and start to clean. I never choose what record to put on, it chooses itself. But I always hope that the record os something by Frank Sinatra.

Frank Sinatra kissed my cheek once. I was nine.

One those occasions, when Frank Sinatra chooses to put himself on my turntable, I dance. I grab my broom and feather duster and swing through the apartment and all of a sudden I live in a Technicolor world, with Vaseline on the lens of the camera that records it all.

When the record is finished, my apartment is clean. I put away my broom and duster and shuffle back into their kitchen to feed the cats and prepare my only meal of the day. We all eat the same thing, except for Scott. He's a Siamese and will only eat albacore.

Scott's name comes from Scott MacIntyre, who broke my kneecaps and gave me this disease and left me after a year and three days to live in Los Angeles and fuck porn stars.

We all eat together and listen to the sounds of the big city through the window I always leave open in their kitchen. Heavy bass notes and screaming babies and car horns and doors and arguments. I hear everything and understand some.

After dinner, there comes a knock on the door, which is my cue to slide ten dollars under the crack and retrieve the food and whiskey standing on the other side, replacing the whiskey with the empty bottle from under the table. Once I have the fresh bottle, I return to the couch. The cats follow me. The Hallmark Channel. I weep. They wash my face. Love.

I'm not certain, but I think it's almost time for me to die. The sores are spreading across my skin, and what isn't red is transluscent. I think Scott knows it. The others only suspect.

The bottle gets emptied soon enough. I might spill some on myself, I might knock it on the carpet. I never seem to be done crying, though. After that, the cats usually lead me to bed, make sure I'm tucked in, and fall asleep beside me.

I wish I could purr.

My name is Genevieve Alice Marshall. Today is January 13th, 2009. I'm certain now that I will die soon. I will kill myself when I've finished this last letter.

I'm eighty years old and my birthday is tomorrow. Scott MacIntyre broke my kneecaps forty years ago and they never healed right. I have a history of not healing right.

I live alone in this city of millions with these fucking cats and they are the only things that I can even pretend that love me anymore.

I have not been outside my apartment since 1998.

I am writing this to you to thank you for knocking at my door every day after dinner, for bringing me whiskey and albacore, and for being the sign I could never find on the television news. I love you.

I suppose what I'm really trying to say is, if you are reading this, I am dead.

***

Sam's comments:
I really have no idea where this came from, but rereading it almost a month after it was written, I like it a lot. The first draft was written stream-of-consciousness and has undergone a few changes from its original draft in my notebook, but the vast majority is identical to my orginal story. I deleted a few sentences for being too ham-fisted (at one point I wrote "In fact, I might kill myself when I am done" at the end of paragraph five, which made me cringe on rereading) and a few more for being unnecessary and blockading clarity. The only thing that I'm at an impasse for this story is a title. I'm thinking "If You Are Reading This." But that's tentative.

Sam Riedel
listening to: MC Frontalot, "Final Boss"
reading: "Legion of Super-heroes: Teenage Revolution" by Mark Waid and Barry Kitson