Bored in the Breakroom
by Jay DiNitto
Edited by Matt DeBenedictis
Cover design by Jay DiNitto
Copyright 2011 Jay DiNitto, Smashwords Edition
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Table of Contents
Introduction
Bored in the Breakroom is a compilation of flash fiction and slightly longer stories that I have written, most of which had already been published on my blogs as well as blogs run by others.
Originally this collection had no theme and was instead just a glom of everything I thought worthwhile. During the editing process, Matt DeBenedictis mentioned the strong presence of academic and office life in many of the stories. We decided to do much pruning here and add some detail there to make the content less burdensome. The result is a more cohesive narrative about the lives of academics and young, urban professionals.
This book serves as a shot in the dark for me. I’m inexperienced in the publishing business and I’m just learning about the industry. My goal has been met, however; if the adventurous reader, taking a chance by spending time with an unknown writer’s first e-book, is a little less bored in the breakroom.
Prologue: Takeover
Ida handed over her tax forms to the uninspired HR rep in the early morning and escaped the depressing reagent of the crumbling building. She walked back to the satellite office on 5th, bundled up and unstylish against the frozen, barren morning. A dozen or so staid Japanese executives, unaffected by the cold, carried their briefcases like coffins and plowed past her without consideration.
At the elevator banks on the 14th floor she met Jim, who was heading down with a cardboard box of his personal affects stuffed to the edge. He shook his head as a greeting, and Ida quickly slipped back into the down elevator. On the way down she began to cry to Jim’s discomfort because she didn’t even get the chance to decorate her cubicle.
Light Up Night
I met Alicia, who was new to the city, near Macy’s windows after the crowds got their fill of the new display. We had planned to meet at the monolith at PPG Place, but she texted me that she couldn’t find it, since it transformed into a Christmas tree.
Understandable, but I rolled my eyes when she wasn’t looking; she lived right next to it. I wanted to make a Kubrick reference but the vacuous look in her eyes told me she wouldn’t have caught it.
Alicia looked good bundled up besides the unflattering blue and pink scarf horizontally bisecting her face, and she was weightier than her profile photos let on. No big surprise there.
We made awful small talk for a few minutes before she begged me to accompany her to our original rendezvous point so she could ice skate.
At PPG, a gaudy crystalline castle set in the middle of the steel scrapheap of the rest of the city, she “bladed up” and took to the ice. After she fell down – laughing hysterically, of course – for the fifth time before her third lap, I recalled the claim in her profile that she was a semi-professional dancer. Strike three.
I lit up my last Treasurer and began checking out other prospects. With 200,000 people flooding the area there’s bound to be a good fit flitting around somewhere.
Rescue Dog
Smith hated illustrating clothing. The nuances of shadow and wrinkle, conceived in the ideal, escaped the intermediate deft of his digital command in practice.
Professor Leary, patient by nature, was secretly exasperated.
The mid-term assignment involved the rendering of black and white, stylized trousers: pop kitsch, realism. Smith finished off his sketchbook with unsatisfying drafts.
Fed up and with no recourse, he submitted a four-panel gaudy damnation of the color wheel, depicting the snout of a bullmastiff breathing and drooling on a flattened scrap of stonewashed denim. Professor Leary failed him but Smith’s linguistics professor had a good chuckle.
Civil War
One of the Bow Street Runners, being more intrepid and enjoying the fortune of having taking up residence near the disturbance a month before, found a complete series of letters in the house, the perfect order of which was almost completely derailed from the donnybrook a mere half hour earlier. The letters, held in two separate plain pine boxes and smelling of the halo of some kind of combustible residue, were found undisturbed right near the fireplace and were unusual in that it held correspondence from either post-end.
The start of the correspondence was written by a young spinster schoolteacher somewhere in Hertfordshire, to her father in London. Both were diligent grammarians and experts in the realm of linguistics, though the inspector had strong presuppositions that the father held a slight advantage as a prestigious university-level department head and held various scholarly titles of the highest-sounding order.
The letters were filled with questions and conversations on comma usage, dangling participles, the correct deployment of the pluperfect tense in Victorian fiction, the authenticity of loan words, and predicate logic. The correspondence on both sides got progressively more contested and personal, as evidenced by the harsher glyphs, hasty ink blots, and meticulously crafted curses and insults. The inspector, with the trained scales of his internal and informal jury, blamed such hotheadedness on the daughter’s upbringing by her father’s spoiling hand, which instilled an excess of presupposed and deposed royalty (the family’s pedigree was assuredly not royal, much less overthrown).
Wishing to move on from their professional differences, the pair decided to reunite in person at the father’s estate – the scene of the crime – and to symbolize the reconciliation they planned to surrender the evidence of their lengthy exchange to the flames of the father’s fireplace.
But academic passions prevailed once again, it was concluded, and made the injudicious and injurious leap into the physical realm right there in the study. Much afterwards, the case was settled with nary a barrister’s inclusion (or intrusion, if the reader prefers) and the perpetrators went back to their own professions and lives as it was before the start of the entire protracted disputation, but it took the inspector an entire month to shake the fright and mental agony of ever etching out a simple sentence onto paper.
Truth Repeated Enough
William gazed at the sun-baked street, sideways-sipping from a straw, his gaudy Neapolitan Root Beer Float…
“It is a really sunny day,” he said.
Louisa looked up from assessing her Nuclear Chocolate Brownie Detonation and raised an eyebrow.
William, still affixed outside, attacked his float again, this time rudely bypassing his straw and going straight for the glass’s edge. The cold fluid sugar galvanized his train of thought:
“It is a really sunny day.”
“It is a really sunny day.”
“It is a really sunny day.”
“It is a really sunny day.”
“It is a really sunny day.”
Louisa looked down at her brownie, then over at William’s float, then back again at her brownie. After a moment of thought she stared at him and spoke up in protest.
“Nothing you said was true.”
Rush Week
The debates were preambled with the traditional low-key festivities and solemn procedures. The raucous, bright promise of the preliminaries had passed and was replaced with the Master finals and the somber presence of the dean and department chairs. Their gray heads regally brought order to everything.
It was a disputable tie between the incumbent winner and the freshman, who would only be known years later not for his arguments but for his fluorescent braces.
The freshman burned all his books, quietly renounced the towers of university life, and returned to his parents’ home in rural Maine. The loser’s fate was always unofficial, but had he been proud enough to look his classmates in the eye he would have read undisguised sentiments of contempt and rejection.
Paper Trail
As a matter of habit Gil carried a pen and small pad of paper – Fran’s habitual behest since the accident.
“Next time,” she would say in the mornings over muffins and jam, “Someone may be as unlucky as you were.”
As a be-caned Gil limped off the sidewalk he could sense the approach of a thought in profound broadcast. After six steps with his bowed head (the ground assisted in reception), the signal struck. He stopped on twin yellow lines and scribbled words to a terrible yet unheeded chorus of screeching tires and screaming pedestrians. He casually surveyed the accident scene and wrote a postscript.
“Misfortune, it seems, is very hoppable,” it read.
Mall Zombies
Mike and I carefully washed our hands in the bathroom.
“Lots of walking this year,” I said. “We did, what, forty laps?”
“Yeah. Something was missing this time. Not sure what.”
We gave ourselves the once over. Mike checked his bloody headshot, now crusted dry. My three-piece was torn and muddied in all the right places. I was pleased to see my tongue and teeth still flashing bile-black. Our paled, sallow faces were matchless and authentic.
We lumbered to the paper towel dispensers with stiff knees and wet hands held out in front. Even with those hands, the healthy remnant of our living selves at the end of our arms, we were finally the walking dead.
Undo
I picked the wrong cube before our move.
I signed for the wrong workstation.
I printed out some project requirement document on the wrong colored stock and on the wrong printer.
Minor flubs, surely, but it conglomerated into a larger monster of error that loomed above the humming fluorescent lights.
Mary-Louise
dropped off the new floor directory. Positioned incorrectly was my
cube, my workstation code, the printer supply closet, and the entire
printer network.
I pinned the directory up anyway. It swayed and
hung crookedly; instinctively my left-hand
ring and index fingers mimed ctrl-z in the air in front of me.
Everything stayed the same.
Surprised by Wire
Jack rode alongside his brother Warnie, who was at the pedal. Jack admired him for allowing him the sidecar when they were both on break from studies. It gave Jack license to drain the eddying waters inside his head without having to concentrate on negotiating the Oxfordian traffic.
Then without warning, a metallic string strung across the road beheaded Jack. The world he thought so familiar and so settled and decided spun around and around: the sky, the horizon, the street fell over each other over and over in a tumult of reorganization.
When Warnie parked at the zoo, Jack grinned with enthusiasm and a faint tinge of apprehension.
The string was actually God and Jack’s head was his old way of thinking, now left behind on the side of the cobbled road.
Coffee with Rousseau
Tim searched for a way to continue the debate. The heady air in the coffee shop was archetypal for that kind of commemoration. Katie reprised her role of the Dostoyevskian idiot and opened her mouth first.
“I just don’t think humans are basically good,” Katie said.
“Neither do I.”
She fidgeted. Tim pictured her naked to pass the large tracts of time between her fumbling declarations.
“I, uh,..I – unless we’re in our natural state,” she said.
“What if our natural state is, say, in an unhindered free market?” he said with the over-affectation of one musing aloud. “It could be that man’s always bad but a capitalist system makes the most utility out of our badness.”
“Goddamnit!” She spilled coffee on her bare leg. Tim knew it was on purpose.
They left without paying.
The Philosophers’ Guild
Theoretical axioms, immutable propositions, and solipsistic proofs appeared at the back door after supper. Dr. Hathaway brought them inside and set them before the study’s fireplace, in the middle of our circle. We attacked our pipes with vigorous abandon while our anecdotes issued forth in whimsy.
Dusk to dark, and we attended to metaphysically unpacking our guests. The grounded lot of them was woefully impotent: pale, unmoving, timid. They broadcast signs of life and spectrum when we offered ourselves to one another in cautious discourse. They unfolded — blossoming — nearing the cobalt-blue midnight as we consorted with Reason and argued with mirth as our cloak, as friends often do.
Demolition
Chris gazed down at the streets below from his office window. The block a few streets over had been cordoned off for at least a month now. The barren gray building yawned higher into the low-floating dark clouds which threatened to unload with no warning.
He went back to his computer and started deleting the stripped-down directory structure on the abandoned app. When the last few files were being erased, there was a loud series of muffled booms outside and his screen turned blue.
He swore profusely and returned to his windows in frustration. The clouds over the debris had vanished.
Moses
With purpose she watched the ice cubes in her Manhattan, her fifth in the last half hour. They were made disgusting-sweet as nearly a quarter of it was maraschino juice, which the bartender dribbled into the glass with a laughable level of professional intent. If she didn’t know any better she would’ve thought it was badly-mixed Kool-Aid – a loose analogy for the reason for tonight’s plans.
She glanced over her shoulder. The stage was at the opposing end of the hall and there was unofficial lull in the awful renditions of drunken pop standards strung seamlessly end to end by the teeming hundreds of rehearsal dinner sycophants. They filled the floor in front of her like high tide. Three-fourths of them had no business being there despite being officially invited. Any other time it would be an irksome sign of Darrel’s chronic ostentation but tonight was the time to use it against him.
He was their good ol’ boy, a career collegiate of noble stock and respectable upbringing who held captive the virginal daughter of the wealthy small-town business owner with his shining valor. Suspicion of his reputation was automatically ruled out, but what she saw with her own eyes of his undergrad years – the drug-fueled parties, the womanizing, the payoffs to professors – went beyond suspicion and into established fact. It was knowledge that acted as devious social credit, credit that accumulated even up to the last minute the night before when she followed him to the strip club a few towns over.
Her glass trembled and she turned back around. A corner of one of the ice cubes, succumbing to room temperature and the warmth of her hand, dissipated and shifted the entire ecosystem of her drink. She smiled and regarded it as a welcome invitation.
Giddy, she wheeled around on her stool and raised her glass high and proud, staff-like. By some fortunate and theatrical freak of circumstance the glob of unaware people slowly split in two and provided a clear path to the stage, a black shiny road littered only with stray dining furniture, nutshells, and torn napkins. The mesh head of the distant microphone gleamed like fish scales in the light of the bloated, spinning disco ball.
With imbibed courage and her glass still above her head, she took the first shaky step off the stool and into the gauntlet, her past regrets and unspoken grievances following her like an unseen bridal train. She’d let everyone know exactly what kind of cheating, self-aggrandizing bastard Darrel really was.
Famous Last Words
The writer was thrown in prison on vague charges – charges born from reprehensible laws that were passed in questionable legislative circumstances, the kind that everyone had broken at some point and aren’t enforced until someone in power wanted an opponent discredited and removed.
In previous writings she had promised in explicit terms that in such circumstances she would take her own life. The jailers, cautiously familiar with her treasonous invectives, allowed her a small blade and wagered in low voices on her sincerity.
After an extended and unsupervised cigarette break, the guard on duty found her unmoving without drop of blood surrounding her on the grimy floor. Though all of her books were burned, the eulogistic words written in dark red on her prison’s walls were not forgotten by the guard, who kept a hidden journal of forbidden convictions.
Part God, All Ape
The chimp could give no visual indication that he understood what was said to him, though inside he apprehended most of the words spoken by the nice young man in the white lab coat. Sitting there, quietly excited, the chimp examined the pen tied to his hand and the lined white paper in front of him, tacked securely to the table. The nice young man in the white lab coat left the room and a wave of intense concentration caught up the chimp, and a simple story began to assemble itself, coherent and conclusive, in his mind. The fluorescent light winked without end, eventually slowing in the chimp’s eyes as the story took written form and dragged his perception of time. Its increasing delay was only subconsciously noted – after the story was finished he went back and forth in the narrative’s chronology, changing small bits here and there to his satisfaction. He truly felt like he appeared, as told by the nice man in the white lab coat that left earlier: like a god, traversing measured spans of time at his discretion to alter the course of history and the lives of men.
The Pennyfarthings
Dusk arrived and I stole into the study to tend the fire and perform some perfunctory housekeeping while Emma stalled them in the kitchen. My weekend excursions into the Empyrean had taken their toll: the clutter was an accurate indicator of the depth and intensity of study. The laughter issuing through a few rooms and a few oaken doors was a good sign that she was their master, with her artful housewifely chatter about the perils of domestics and an early offer of provisional teas and biscuits. I finished up and watched the blueness of winter night settle onto the newly-fallen inch of snow.
Inexplicably, perhaps through a mental run off from being waist-deep in Dante for the last month, I had retained the vision of a callow flower in my mind’s eye the entire day at university. It was green but not verdant; exhibiting signs of life without full attainment. The flower did nothing the entire day but remain in its suspended, inanimate, state, despite my imaginings to nudge it otherwise. Its immobility in this regard itched me inside the ear but caused no figurative pain, a phenomenon that sprouted through to another manner of annoyance after taking lunch. I trained myself to dismiss the discomfort thoroughly, but not completely.
Within seconds they poured in (the wife could sniff out a freshly organized room from miles away). Rank and file they were, a respectable parade of herringbone jackets and tobacco patches stuffed in breast pockets. Emma was in tow with the remainder of our after-dinner comestibles.
My guests took their usual places and I followed in fashion after properly reassuring myself of their comfort. Immediately the pipes emerged, spoons clinked sprightly against porcelain, and a week’s worth of classroom anecdotes and mild grievances against the university’ board of directors were lobbied back and forth. Though I was quite noticeably their minor I waited like a tolerant grandfather for the chatter to fade before broaching this week’s informal business.
“Did anyone catch a glimpse–” Henderson said in between sips, “–of the Stations coming out of Westminster today?”
“Mmm!” Radcliffe grunted, leaning forward. His ridiculous drop-step puffed out affirmation. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world, Hendy. Amazing the way they drudge through the same ol’ game year after year with such diligence.”
“I saw it as well,” Christoph blurted. “I was at the Hare. Abigail was lead soprano this year. The Hare: that’s – how far is that, Jonstone? – not even half a kilometer, sure?”
“Little over, little over.”
Old Jonstone was the eldest of us, and he said very little except when his sagely faculties were called upon by us, his admitted intellectual lessers. He was stooped over more than normal at his traditional seat closest to the fire, cup and saucer in hand and pale bushy eyebrows knitting together in simple pleasure.
“Right, right, that long,” Christoph said. “It was the third stop, where He first falls. Or the second? Not sure. Well, let me tell you this! Poor Abby was so deathly bored of the whole affair it appeared as if she would be taking His place.”
The jab elicited a few hearty chuckles all around, except Jonstone. He merely maintained his gaze on the floor and sipped his tea intermittently. Then, expressionless, he turned his face to the fireplace.
The spectral flower in my mind bent upwards. I tried, perhaps unsuccessfully, to hide my startled reaction. It was fortunate for me that everyone else was still tending to their laughter.
“What say you, Jonstone? Did you catch it this time around?” Henderson asked.
“At long last, yes. I must say I quite enjoyed it.” His voice was smooth and gentle and he did not break from the flames.
“Come now, Harry, sport,” Henderson said. “You must’ve gone through that whole bit for decades. Not doubt took part once or twice. You can’t possibly get anything out of it now, eh?”
“Why is it,” Filbert said, with his toad-like fleshy jowls bouncing with gathering mirth, “That the Archbishop Bidwell still keeps going up Vincent and then to Greycoat? Surely he remembers what happened five years ago. He was presiding then, wasn’t he? Blasted green clergy and their stubbornness.”
“Yes, yes,” Radcliffe said. Puff-puff. “I remember that. He was indeed leading. It was those gabby boys that disrupted–”
“He does it every year,” Jonstone said to everyone. It was not a shout but his words were firm enough to grab attention. “They do it every year, like people everywhere do similar, because it’s something we need to see and hear.”
The fire snapped and crackled while we waited. The flower moved again.
“Thomas,” Radcliffe addressed me. “It appears as if the Missus has over-treacled the good Doctor’s tea.” He turned to Jonstone. “We’re cutting you off, sir! We–!”
“We need to hear it,” Jonstone interrupted again and slowly stood up. “Like this, without fail, because we must hear it one way or another. If not voluntarily, it has a nasty habit of making itself known to us. When it does show up unannounced it’s not nearly as damned pleasant as a procession.” The oath escaped his lips with astounding affection.
Despite Jonstone’s emphatic but unantagonizing speech there was an unsettling silence. After granting a decoded smile, he gingerly sat back down and resumed sipping.
“Well then,” I said. “Shall we begin?”
A few hours of spirited critique and debate ensued. No other mention of the procession was made. After our meeting ran its course Emma and I bade farewell to my colleagues, and she retired for the evening.
As for me, I returned to my window view of the lighted streets and soft white ground. The flower, at some point in the evening, had come full bloom. The outward petals were a deep cobalt blue, the inside bore the visage of flames: orange, red, cathartic. More prominent, however, were the scores of other young flowers surrounding their mature counterpart, waiting for their season in which they’d match its blazing countenance.
American Premonitions
The nightmares began a few nights after Chris murdered his boss and perhaps one or two other people. He would find himself in a large empty room with only one other person. This person was dressed as a police officer, wearing an oversized pince-nez, powdered wig, and a cravat stained with what looked like Thousand Island dressing. Chris couldn’t remember many other details but the nightmares ended all the same: the cop’s face would sprout a fleshy trumpet bell (or was it always there?) and shatter Chris’ ears with an otherworldly blast. It was always at this point that he woke up.
Chris had tickets to a dinner party and opera that he had purchased discounted via his company’s concierge service; a nice parting gift to which he treated himself before jet-setting to Portofino for holiday in the environs. He noticed the tickets disappeared from his nightstand one night after awaking from his usual bad dream. He strongly believed that he ate them in his sleep, but close, uncomfortable examinations in his commode were silent on this issue.
He didn’t attend the opera and he didn’t end up getting arrested when the police came looking for him at the dinner party, right after the salads were served.
Bringing Out the Dead
“So you want to live forever?” she asked at last, handing me one of the small square pamphlets. Then it all fell into place like the click of an unlocking door.
The Halloween party had spilled as a blob out onto the Ellsworth and Negley corner and eventually onto Walnut, with a good ninety percent of us thoroughly buzzed and rapidly approaching blitzed status. We all mingled with the amoeba: I was in my Karate Kid-inspired red shower curtain, mounted on the showerhead overhead like a halo gone awry; John with his Cyclops eye and trident thing; Chris with the gray bodysuit, helmet, and Program’s blue neon strips and modified Frisbee; and finally Jesse, missing the entire point of the party’s theme, in the stock, unimaginative cat suit.
Then the zombies flooded our area like a bodied sunrise alighting the streets. Their initial lurching gait and gore makeup was flawless, I will admit, but my admiration became infested with superstition when they began to corner everyone, man to man, and launch into an animated undead monologue – as if a long-forgotten friendship was rekindled on only one side. Then at last it was my turn to fall prey. She approached me with the guns of her mouth blazing loudly with a fake compliment on my shower curtain, extolling the benefits of whatever-church-she-goes-to and the efficacy of spiritual devotion.
Through the layers of expertly-plastered corpse paint, crusted blood, and tattered clothes – and even through the unseen armor of prudish religiosity – there was something deeply sexualized about her. The deadened eyes sparkled with untamed aqua, the mussed hair was still lustrously thick, a tattered and soiled silk blouse was held up by two ample mounds.
I coughed to cover up a quick glance around the area. John was being verbally pummeled by a porker in a ripped sundress, Chris was held in submission by a guy in a smudged blazer who looked old and big enough to be bouncing at Diesel (probably the youth leader), and Jesse was nowhere in sight. All were locked in battle. I was on my own, like everyone else.
The girl recited her rehearsed lines with an alarming degree of sincerity and I just couldn’t feign interest for protocol’s sake. I blanked out and imagined all the carnal wisdom I could impart as her elder: that vampires would be a more apt literary creature to adopt for their purposes, that the mind-numb of religion is too farcically suited to their current brain-consuming costumes, that her parents want to divorce in the near future because of her, that she would most likely abandon her idyllic mores the second she hits the soil for freshman year abroad (or when the next horny asshole convinces her he loves her). But her glaring innocence – those sky-colored eyes projecting total vulnerability and somehow successfully masking the living, functioning mind behind them – killed the urge, the fact that I may very well have misjudged the character of her fanaticism notwithstanding.
Now here she was, the square pamphlet stuck rudely under my nose, with its stylized rounded corners and minimalist orange-flecked design aesthetic. The church’s address was crudely dot-matrixed on a rectangular sticker, nonparallel to the bottom edge of the paper. She certainly was a looker; perhaps more so under the rotting facade and outmoded belief system.
I took it from her and pocketed it. We exchanged smiles. Maybe I will take her up on the offer.
Light Up Night, Part 2
Roger’s personality description on the site labeled him as “down to earth” but the minuscule photo threw up red flags in my head as to its veracity. I didn’t have high hopes for our meeting so I gussied myself up unflattering on purpose – I don’t consider myself top drawer but I’m also not one to throw pearls to swine.
We met after I had texted him with full intentions of implying stupidity on my part (he would think a conspicuous landmark near my apartment passed by my attention). The affected turtleneck and the haughty downturn of his cold gray eyes sealed the deal, prejudicially, for me. If he didn’t mean to come across as arrogant in his profile he was certainly that way in real life.
There was one way to easily dissuade a pretentious deep-thinker like this specimen: public disingratiation. This would not be difficult. I think I impressed upon him unfavorably, which was my aim, judging by the quick flickers of disdain that often ran across his stubbled cheek. I wanted to make this as quick and painless for me as possible.
I bugged him without mercy to go with me back to PPG place so I could skate. I actually had already gotten my fill the night before as I returned to a routine I used to do in high school – with surprisingly good results. He agreed to come with me but refused to accompany me onto the ice. It was of no consequence.
My plan would still see its end, because once on the ice I did all that one could do to loudly embarrass someone in a crowd from ten or so feet away.
After perhaps ten minutes of forced, raucous un-skillfulness, I noticed that he was gone, overpriced cigarettes and all. “Good riddance,” I thought. I did a few victory laps and finished with a rather flawless double axel.
Returning to my apartment overlooking the rink and the Crystal Palace – the first building I really noticed in the city after going the wrong way on 3rd (or was it 4th?) – I made some tea. With a random new book purchase in hand I sat at the frozen window in my bathroom and kept intermittent watch over the teeming crowd well past the midnight hour.
Eating Trash
Jim, beckoned by emphatic winds, often sought out signs of intelligence from inanimate objects hiding in the untried paths of the city’s in-between streets. The smoky swirl of newspaper pages around his knees spoke to the chaotic nature of last-minute journalism and the stress veins on the foreheads of grizzled copy editors.
Once in a while an orphaned page would fly straight for his face. It would annoy him for obvious reasons, but the sense was augmented by his awareness that the pages’ enumerations were two sets of two consecutive numbers and not one set of four. He wished his breath was fire so he could make ashes of the mental discomfort.
One time this happened, he could read the headline and subhead as it approached his face, hovering and creeping closer like a cold, slow slap. It told him something he didn’t know. He relished the quite literal act of knowledge chasing after him for a change.
God of Fire
She stood before the comatose building, armed with a red canister and a back catalog of scenes gleaned from recurring dreams. Those images tucked themselves away in the conscious parts of her brain and fell into slots of their own volition. They formed a narrative, disturbing yet coherent, that sought fulfillment in the material world.
The unfolding of those scenes into sense-localities made her tense. The crickets chorused their encouragement. She wanted to shut them up with a daggered scream (she fancied knife-throwing as a satisfying release). She was afraid they would obey her: silence under the stars was an ill-omen.
Her mind crept past the decrepit front door. Twenty feet, ten feet.
It’s right behind her. There she would see the faceless men in suits, gesticulating frantically with ringed hands and bumping into each other, deformed dogs, walls of blood...the whole typology. Then the rotted stairs and the well-lit kitchen and clothy table arrayed with the stock elaborate foodstuffs. Her mother would be there, picture-perfect smile, whisking blissfully, unaware of the nightmarish goings-on in the other rooms. It would make the girl cringe, not because of its phantasmagoria but because of the overwrought imagery. She thought her mind to be made of more singular stuff.
One element would finally break her into a smile. In the blowy atrium sat the stacks of greenish candy-like blocks, one side of which bore a babbling-nonsense mouth that appeared as though it met mere minutes ago with a sizable ham-fist, several times. Her father is there with a suit jacket covered in crosses made of beef jerky. He would be urinating without end. His sloppy aim would alternate between a corner of the room and the tongue of the stack of blocks, which would stop its declarations of nothingness to lap up the golden stream with abandon: an apt analog of her sizable trust fund.
The “Uni” above the door was worn away, leaving only the “tarian” as a dead giveaway of its most recent use. This was another dream, her father’s. They were all always full of it, more her father than anyone else, which was more than what she needed to simply walk away. He still held out hope for the building’s reanimation, and tonight’s vulcanized proceedings would script a nice ending to his tragic-comedy.
But something stayed her arms and the lighter in her back pocket. A useful revelation. Images of teetotalling men in suits and their wide-hipped wives in ankle-length skirts, speaking in tongues, giving mock birth to the Spirit in near-pornographic displays of their clothed crotches. The ritual plate passing with grace and calm as if none of former chaos broke into their bodies.
These were those “others” that her father swore against; a mutual enemy she could purchase into her unspoken service. She knew those people and how they would gladly take the blood money. What better revenge than constructing what your enemy hated the most in the place of his dead vision?
Her smirk turned her heels around. The decision soldered the new revenge into her joints. Her accountant’s number was on her cell’s speed dial (voice command: “moneyed asshole”). Less than a month, tops. She would make this happen.
She concluded that God existed after all, and she was the willing consort. It was Hephaestus, and He was about to flick the embers of His Most Flavorful Cigarette right onto kerosene of her perfect plan.
Divine Right
“‘My father scourged you with whips; I will scourge you with scorpions.’”
-1 Kings 12:11b
The cafe next to our hotel handed out weapons with every order. The proprietor was a short bowling ball of a man with an unpronounceable name and a drooping pushbroom mustache – the only spot of hair above his neck.
The cafe tables were standing-height. Most customers were dine-in and stood around silently with the morning paper and, like mercenaries awaiting deployment, their weapon hung on their belts, slung on their purses, or sitting right on the tabletop. When they left they deposited their weapons in a basket near the counter.
The busboy would fetch the basket and dump its clattering contents into some unseen bin behind the counter. We saw him do this when we entered and we tried our best overlay our surprise with nonchalance. Martha almost turned right back outside if it weren’t for my firm yank on her sleeve.
The man in front of us purchased a small cappuccino with a shot of something, and with it on the saucer came a pair of previously used brass knuckles. They clinked dangerously against the porcelain as he taxied to a table.
Martha ordered a medium Americano. “Ah,” the owner said. His bristling facial hair sensed our nationality. “You get wheep of cords. Ess good choice.”
She received her drink and draped the whip over her shoulder carefully to avoid self-mortification. The whip gave her blonde, short-haired head the look of an off-center, discolored ponytail.
“Ah,” the owner repeated with a proud demeanor and brightening Arab eyes when I ordered a large Americano. “You the first. I grant wheep of scorpion.”
It wasn’t the first time I knew I had a rex regina-complex but it was after we downed our beverages and fled the cafe that I resolved, in a world of republics and symbolic regencies, to actively pursue the monarchy after graduation.
The Pickup Line
She
arrived at the bar with her friends, and he made his emerald-envy
eyes peel away her self-security like an onionskin. It didn’t
bother her because she expected him.
After an hour he approached
her but his words flew out like bullets aimed straight down. She
rolled her eyes and ignored him while he burned in stunned silence.
She left, alone and prematurely, knowing that he would follow soon after. As she purposely entered a dark alley a few blocks down he grabbed her from behind with his sharp voice. She turned around and opened her clutch. He started with some excuse and she began to pull out the snub nose when the hammer got caught on a hook of fabric and discharged.
A grin on her face replaced a flinch of her shoulders. He was shot in the foot twice in the same night.
Reese and the Recliner
Gordon waddled and heaved his overfed frame onto his usual park bench. The painted wooden slats, already curved from weeks of scheduled weight, creaked under the returning stress. Without wasting another labored breath Gordon delved into his expansive lunch.
Out of the corner of his eye he spied the new hire on his floor bouncing through the field and onto the pedestrian path that snaked through the park. What was her name? Ruth? Irene? He couldn’t recall but it was something of a shock to see her in a tank top, running shorts, and sneakers, the shell of business casual clothing sloughed.
She was moderately attractive and slim, the sinews in her thighs and shoulders creasing and tightening with the tiniest of movements she made. Any prurient interest Gordon entertained at that moment dissolved on the sight of her unnatural bleached-blond ponytail. Her hair bobbed in front of a colorful mosaic of a chaotic aquatic scene etched into her skin, a permanent mark of artistry of which he had only saw hints in the workplace.
Gordon tended to his lunch, besetting the warmed contents in his large bag with a focused fury. He kept an eye on her even during the moments of intense concentration and subsequent pleasure, as when he ripped into a cheeseburger or stuff a tortilla chip into his mouth. She stretched and did a bouncing warm-up trot then began her sprints – speeding down a straight away section of the concrete path, slowing down as the path began to curve, then jogging back to her starting point.
By the time he started his second cheeseburger she had finished close to a dozen sprints. Gordon could sense in his viscera the pneumatic flush in her cheeks and the strain of her breath all the way from his perch, and it drew out a similar response from his respiratory system.
He belched to shake away the sympathetic reaction and lit up a cigarette – his preferred digestive aid. By this time it seemed that she had reached her limit as halfway through a sprint she slowed her pace and trailed off the path into the grass.
She collapsed onto her hands and knees and began to heave, and with an uncontrolled retch she vomited, spreading the contents of her stomach between her hands. When she finished she sat back on her haunches with one palm on her furrowed brow as if forcing back tears.
Gordon summed up her doctored hair, the array of tattoos spreading like a disfiguring virus across her shoulders, and the humiliative composure and position of her body.
“Why would someone do that to their body?” He cast the question to rid her from attention. He reached into his breast pocket for another cigarette and patted the hanging obesity of his midsection.
Epilogue: Ecumenopolis
Ida and Jim, speeding along in her crude compact, crested the hump in the highway and marveled at the emerging jagged pattern of buildings so many miles away. The late spring haze shrouded the concrete panorama in mist, and with each successive hill the pair conquered the mist would relent and reveal the expansive sprawl with increasing clarity.
The highway stretched out into a straight run up to the grand wall of a low, long mountain. The satisfying exercise of depth perception created between the buildings behind the mountain and those situated on the mountaintop was abandoned once they approached the tunnel entrance. Hewn straight out of the rock on either side of the tunnel stood a pair of faceless angels, each holding up a miniature globe; twin Atlases affording tribute to a mythical divine androgyny.
But even those statues, too, disappeared once in the darkened canal of the tunnel. It was a short time in the gradual curve of the mountain’s womb before they were released out onto a street running up its side. To their right the city gleamed like a single jewel among the crude valley landscape.
They reached the top and parked somewhere to watch the countless white nimbus clouds sailing slowly above the top, like a fleet of victorious ships returning to home ports. Somewhere, in the middle of the teem of millions of people making their own way, tucked away in a corner of one of those structures built by the common majesty of human hands, was their new life and a new purpose. There would be a season of toiling for its uncovering but everything now was so far removed from their despair mere months ago that they foresaw it would become a glorious labor just to seek it out.
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About the Author
Jay is a web designer and freelance writer living in the Pittsburgh area. He currently writes for indie music blog Buzzgrinder, and has written for Noisecreep and various print zines of past times. Besides being active in his local church he rides his steel-frame Trek bicycle almost every day, is smitten by Austrian-style libertarianism, and lives off of coffee more than oxygen.
At the time of this e-book’s release he is finishing up a manuscript for a full-length novel, A Season Underneath, about a young woman who isn’t a prostitute.
Jay is married with two children. He can be contacted via email at jay@jaydinitto.com, or on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jaybreak.