October 2008
23 posts
super halloween
Lois knew he wouldn’t dress up. The same curled lick of hair, black frames, white shirt, and dark slacks were tucked behind a desk he made look tiny. You look awful nice, Lois, he said.
And just who are you supposed to be, Clark?
Oh I’m just me, he said.
insomniac
Pat lay quiet in the still dark. He could make out strange shapes in the fuzzy blackness: the old pipe radiator looking melted to the wall, shifting drapes, the clutter of books and papers. He held a trembling hand to his head and felt cold blood surging through his palms.
life of the party
From his chair in the corner, Gray observed the false smiles of the hipster dilettantes with a genuine glower. One in particular, sporting a self-indulgent pom-pom beanie that bobbed to the spoon-fed one-liners he fed to many others while reclining ridiculously on the mantlepiece, he saw and frowned at jealously.
this song
He stopped, his colored shoes between the dots that looked out to pins small in the distance, and listened. The spinning lights slowed to the guitar, wandering into acoustic havens he’d seen in better days. He sighed into his upheld bowling ball, resting his face there tiredly. Oh this song.
spin
I took a long ridiculous drink of your cold hard facts and washed it down with the punch of pathos. The room began to shine with both noble sentiments and blunt truth. I lay down to stop the world from spinning, but how could it? The ceiling fan always spins.
jfk
The city was a purple-gray sheet of rain that he watched from the tall windows at JFK. His layover was ending soon and they’d take him away, this time for good. Oh to walk the streets and eat a dirty hot dog again! But the doctors would never let him.
the viewing
She was, somehow, young again. Her hair lay rich and black, framing an oval face with ever-sleeping eyes. He remembered her smiling at him in the dark; he remembered a lot of things. Her lips were red, her throat pink and delicate. He held her clammy hand another moment more.
dreamed
He dreamed foolishly of something he could never have. They were together again, talking into the night, arguing about silly things, looking at stars through his moon roof. When he awoke he was sleep-stained with impossible ideas, with the potential of something that couldn’t be, but it wasn’t his fault.
encore
We play this game, see, where the band waves goodbye and disappears into the dark, pretending to leave us. But then we do this clapping hollering thing and—like it was a big joke—they start to play again, only this time it’s the one song you came to hear.
yoshimi battles the pink robots
Unit 3000-21 sighed—or his grid of hydraulic valves fluttered and made it sound so. The black-eyed girl in the gold dress was a lovely looking-up speck in his readout. His systems processed her tiny clenched fists—and in that moment an unforeseen mechanical anomaly decided to let her win.
hitchhiker
And so he began to walk.
Bother them and their haughty ideas, their rude sentiments, their impossibly big heads, their angry hearts. He started to sing a made-up song about loving someone you can never ever have, and he waved his thumb at the birds flying overhead, just for fun.
lost
The streetlights looked ominous, they with their gnarled latticework and bright beams, casting deep shadows. He fell across the city in loping lines, looking in every pocket of darkness, every rain-stained window, every stretch of battered building blocks. Stay right where you are, he’d told her. I’ll be right back.
toad
Your princess is in another castle, you said, but I didn’t mind. We sat against the gray stones and drank hot cocoa, pretending the Mushroom Kingdom wasn’t being threatened by a giant dinosaur. The lava bubbled in the distance, the wall-scars from fireballs fumed, and you offered me another marshmallow.
eloise
Eloise reached out. Her thinly veiled skin seemed to pulse with weak blue blood. The hospital room was white cotton, pressing upon her until only sheets would be left. Where she reached I do not know, but we caught her hand, all of us, and made her light as air.
ringmaster
The wind rushed at Harold Crick, robbing his breath into the autumn twilight. One dirty hand gripped a worn top hat against the breeze, the other a cane. He looked up at the sky, blotted with stars, and smelled stale popcorn in the cool night. He couldn’t wait for tomorrow.
being beethoven
When he woke up that morning, the melody was ringing in his head like a distant bell. He lurched to the nightstand and scribbled loops of notes until the sun spilled over the sill and made everything golden. He stopped and marveled at the shimmering rays, forgetting the deafening silence.
new kid on the block
Everyone was so tall here. His rectangle of sky framed their antennas, reaching out to city pigeons and the chatter of a thousand voices. One day he’d grow up. The birds would roost on him, the elevator would climb his insides, and the people would fill him to the top.
underoos
He was, as they say, knee-high to a grasshopper. The mirror held him in miniature: wrinkled jeans, striped button up, white Keds and freshly parted hair (courtesy of his mother). He heard the bus rumbling outside and thought of his Superman underoos. He was ready for the great wide world.
mrs. loring's secret
Mr. Loring was in the business of secrets. He caught and kept them in jars until their symmetrical wings went still, then arranged them by color on corkboards in the attic. Whenever he saw the secret that was Mrs. Loring’s, though, he let it fly. He didn’t want to know.
reality
Look how sad you were.
I know.
They were rewatching season three, the episode where Rachel throws her drink at him and deconstructs their relationship in front of, well, millions, according to the ratings. He had a beard then.
Your life is so much better this season.
I know, right?
dreaming in sunsets
He was dreaming in sunsets. People he loved were closing their eyes and never opening them again. Girls were leaving with his heart and not coming back. The sun was a thick red snake on the horizon, the finish line where every good and bad thing came to an end.
scars
This one was from a dog he’d run from (and been caught by), and this was from a launch ramp (he’d fallen up it). This was from his girlfriend’s nails (a harmless hair flip) and this was from punching a wall in mock anger (but then he’d gotten real angry).
carny
Wrinkle-faced Jeremiah Jarvis had pushed and pulled at the rusted controls for years without even looking up. But when he saw his teenage self, all elbows, climb in next to what could have been his first pigtailed love, he stopped them at the top and gave them front-row firework seats.