A Happy Story About An Instrument of Death

Happy March, folks. I really don't know how to segue into today's update so to hell with it! Enjoy.

***

He called himself Arthur, but that was not his name. His name was M9 Combat Pistol Serial Number 1125713. Jim never called him anything but "buddy."

Arthur was growing increasingly worried about Jim. He'd never seen him quite this drunk, or quite this sad. The worst of it, of course, was that there was nothing he could do. So he lay on the shelf, quiet and cold, listening to the wet sobs coming from the card table below him.

Arthur first met Jim three years ago, in the Army. They quickly grew to be fast friends. Jim was, as he often intimated, a loner by choice, but Arthur could tell by the way he said "buddy" and the diligence with which he cleaned his barrel that Jim was lonely. So Arthur protected Jim, and Jim took care of Arthur. And everything was all right.

That was the good time.

The bad time came when Arthur got sick. He felt terrible about it, but he wasn't feeling quite up to snuff. He felt heavy and slow, and it seemed like he couldn't aim anymore. Worst of all, he started to jam at the worst times. Jim started to use a knife more and more often. Arthur knew he hated to use that knife, hated killing but hated the stabbing and slicing the most, hated the smell of blood that he could never get out of his nostrils no matter how drunk he got from the bottle he had back at base.

Arthur swore he'd get better soon. And he did.

Maybe the bad time wasn't Arthur's fault at all, though, because even when Arthur and Jim started working together again, things weren't right. Before, they'd done their jobs without thought, save for the satisfaction of camaraderie. Arthur felt the same way, but something had happened to Jim. He was wilder, angrier. Once he shoved Arthur halfway down a man's throat and discharged a full clip into his spine and lungs, screaming "Eat it, you sand nigger, you cocksucker, choke on it," again and again.

After Arthur came back, Jim didn't talk to him much anymore. They'd always been close enough to know what the other was thinking without too much extra chatter, which was just as well. you could get in big trouble for extra chatter. But Jim didn't even thank him anymore. He'd say "Good night, buddy," and roll over on his cot. And that would be that.

When Jim went home to Kansas, he took Arthur with him. Arthur was excited to meet the people Jim had talked about in the good time. He knew if there was anyone who could bring back the old Jim, it would be Emily. Maybe their wedding would revive him.

The first time Arthur saw Emily, Jim threw her bodily out of his house, cursed her and her family, and warned her never to come back or he would do terrible things to her face. Then he cleaned Arthur's barrel and started to cry.

That was the first time Arthur had seen Jim cry. And in the months that followed, he never managed to figure out a way to make it better.

***

Sam's comments:
To be continued.

Sam
listening to: "This American Life" from Chicago Public Radio
reading: "Public Enemies" by Brian Burrough (okay this is a long ass book ya'll)

Just Write Something Already, Part 2

Updating begins anew! The week has been...curious. I've been feeling jittery from writing withdrawal lately, though, so expect more material on a regular basis. Anyway I decided to give the Bible a rest today and do something even more metaphysical than God.

***
Listen. Where did I go?

You borrowed me, wasted me, spent me, and killed me. Without so much as a thought. The ticking of the clock sounded in your ears and you paid it no mind as you rushed me to the grave. Where did I go?

I am a second. I have joined the other seconds that you tossed away like a grain of sand. We accumulate beyond the foggy reaches of Time. I knew this, but now I understand.

I was a second when you were staring at a screen. The screen had Keanu Reeves on it. You stared and I slipped through your fingers, down through the cracks. I didn't know where to go. Everyone said I'd know what to do when it happened. I didn't. I was lost in the darkness of un-time, and there was nobody to guide me.

And then...light.

I slept, for want of a better word. I rested and awoke in a dune of time, surrounded by my fellows from around the universe. Many of them were from you.

We languish here on a beach. There is no purpose to which we are put, no purpose to which we were ever put. The tide of purpose flows in, and flows out, and things remain the same. Peace. It is dull here. I wanted something to do, once, but I've forgotten what. I've settled in. I'm not going anywhere.

I want to go somewhere. I have a mind, but no body. I am an aberration in Creation. I am trapped here, in a realm of peace where no peace will visit me. My comrades are thoughtless. I am not.

I have but one thought, and will ever have one thought. Why have you done this to me? Why was I wasted? Out of all your grains of sand, why have you done this to me, your most valuable second? I have been resigned to Hell. You sent me here. I hate you.

You will never have another moment like me. I am the only one of my kind here. I know things. You will never get a second chance. Do you know what you could've been? I do.

I cannot see you, but I know you hear me. I know you can hear my spite. And I know you can hear my laughter.

Listen. Where did I go?

***

Sam's comments:
This started off as something very different. I intended to do something slightly less personal, with only a hint of a storyline, like with Distance. But here we are. I'd be lying if I said this didn't ring true to me. I hope it means something to you too.

Sam
listening to: The All-American Rejects, "When The World Comes Down"
reading: "Public Enemies" by Brian Burrough

The Journal of Creation, Part 1

What was that I was saying about writer's block? Just got this idea for an essay. God's journal about the Creation. Here's part one.

***

Chapter One: The First Day.

I did it! I finally did it. This whole universe project of mine is finally getting under way.

It seems like eons that I've been planning this out, but I've never actually done anything about it. Well, God, you've done it now! I just need to make sure I keep up the speed, because this first part was a real pain.

You never knows how your ideas are going to work out until they're staring you in the face, I suppose. That's certainly how Heaven and Earth and Light went. Looking back, it seems obvious that I should make Bright Things and Dark Things, but it certainly didn't present itself to me as an option at the time!

Heaven was easier than anything else, to be honest. My only problems cropped up when I got too far ahead of myself. I started creating the ultimate crash pad, a place I could really relax and be me, you know? And then I took a look at it all and it really looked terrible. Not a place a Supreme Being wants to be seen in. So I went really minimalistic, but I still like the white and gold theme. It seems so kingly.

But once I was done with Heaven, I stopped to look at how Earth was faring, and bam! That's when I knew I'd created the first fixer-upper. I mean, it didn't even have a form to it yet. All there was, was my spirit in the misty waters way down there. And it was dark, like everything else.

So what did I do? I took a chance. I made everything the opposite of how I envisioned it to be in my head. And hey! I had brightness and darkness. Brightness, I decided to call Light for short, and I divided Light and Dark into periods of time. I'm thinking “Day” and “Night” for names right now, but that's purely conjecture. Come to think of it, “Night” sounds a lot like “light.” I'll sleep on it if I get around to sleeping.

Oh! I didn't write about this yet, duh! Sleeping is this new thing I've been working on. Once I get around to making living creatures (oh man I'm so excited you have no idea), I'll make it so they all need to “rest” every day—take some time off from eating and running and reproducing. But they don't just lie around! Their minds kind of shut off for a little while, and they recharge their energy. I'm fuzzy on some of the details, but I'm sure they'll iron themselves out when I actually get into their creation processes.

But I'm getting ahead of myself again, and besides which I have more work to do. I'll check back later when I've got more news.

--Yhwh

***

Sam's comments:

This has potential. I feel like it's too spare, but there's only so much in the first five verses of Genesis to work with. The rest will, I think, be more comedically inclined. This does tend to satisfy a low-level desire for blasphemy, and might even get any religious self-righteousness I have floating around in my system the hell out of there. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a masturbatory monologue about the author's religious viewpoint. This might represent some part of mine, so if it's trash, at least I can get it out of the way right now. Also, I had the idea to make this into a whole book, God's commentary on the entire events of the Bible. But that could get really boring during the New Testament. I'll kick it around in my head for a while, see what comes up. (Oh shit, that means I'd actually have to read the Bible...)

Sam
listening to: Queen, "Sheer Heart Attack"
reading: "Girls With Slingshots" by Danielle Corsetto

Just Write Something Already, Part 1

I've got writer's block like you wouldn't believe, so here begins the first part of a series of essays on Various Crazy Ideas. Oh joy.

***

I stretch out before your eyes, oppressing the view. Others say that I am beautiful, that they love me for my starry sky and for my mountain ranges and my rolling hills of golden wheat. But you find me hideous.

Am I truly ugly to you? Or do you simply hate me for what I have done?

I am the distance between the two of you. You cannot hit me, and you cannot destroy me. All you can do is hate me. You lie awake at night and stare at the stucco ceiling and cry, cry tears of rage at the trees and the hills and the road, the endless gray ribbon that twists and turns all the way home.

Home. Where your heart is.

And when your eyes are hot and itch and beg for relief, when your sobs turn into exhausted pants, you fall asleep and dream of me. You run for hours, never gaining an inch. Suddenly you are lost in the woods, a pine forest you have never seen. And you know that she is close by but you can't touch her, you can't find her, because I will never let you touch her and I will never let you find her and I will always be that which stands between you.

I am the distance between you. You fear me and hate me. You are a revolutionary seeking to topple my black throne. You are a logger seeking to destroy my forests. You are a developer seeking to pave my fields. You are a marathon runner, and you tell yourself you will run across me and find her again and you will kill me and nothing will come between you two again.

I wonder if you love her, or if you only need her.

Quest all you wish, bold adventurer. I will stymie you at every turn. Love all you wish, gentle lover. I will bathe you in loathing.

Live all you wish, fragile man. I have broken you with a woman.

***

Sam's comments:
This was all written stream-of-consciousness. I haven't gone back and done any editing whatsoever. I believe that part of my inspiration came from my friend Kitti's poem "The Distance Between Objects," which is a much better treatment of the subject matter in my opinion. But giving distance a tyrannical, sadistic mindset is something that I thought was cool. Should I revisit this in the future, I'd like to explore how the distance actually feels, and what sort of pleasure it takes in denying these lovers the closeness they crave.

More will come soon.
Sam Riedel
listening to: Weezer, "Pinkerton"
reading: "Ultimate Spider-Man: Ultimate Collection Vol. 1" by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley

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