(a short story in two parts)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Him<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In the sky the moon buzzed. And in the alley behind the diner so did I. Around the mess of a girl I had dropped on the pavement. I held her as she struggled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My voice, a fly-size whimper. I\u2019m not okay with this.<\/em> The roar and the whistle. A desperate soft negation. A train, once it gets going, can\u2019t be stopped with a word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A fanged wind snatched the two promises from my mouth and chewed them in its own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And so grinding went the old machine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Until suddenly it crashed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the trembling wrist, a wound like a chunk of bitten dough, dripping only — and this is the miracle! — dripping only with my own discarded moisture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Impossible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I plied the neck. The probe of tongue. The application of suction. Still — no rubies from this treasure chest. No fluid but tears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My own, I think. I had reason to cry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lifelong, this terrible affliction had savaged all my hopes of happiness. And now, here, finally I had found my bloodless cure. This girl, this body, this parched and perfect vessel, she was my recompense, my compensation for the swats and cravings, the flicks of conscience, the racketing of want and want-not, the pain, the shame, the shadows, the somber empty places inside of me which I could only fill by forming them in others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In deafening waves tears dropped to the pavement. All soaked and slippery with them, the dumpster, the bricks, the cardboard. And I, sliding among it all, romping with her, tried to tell her all about this newfound joy, this promise of redemption, and all the things her body meant to me. Whispered hoarse in the tangle of limbs, screamed in brazen crashes, lost under wordless wails.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Everything is going to be okay<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A rift formed in my pain, soft folds of suffering peeled back, and I emerged as something new and clean and pure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her skin cooled slowly like stone, and then I was embraced by a rain of arms, wet-slap caresses, and finally the whole of humanity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But before all this was the girl on the train.<\/p>\n\n\n\n * * * *<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was dark outside. But inside the train car the little electric lights buzzed. So did the flies around the mess of ice cream someone had dropped on the clanky rubber floor. It was vanilla ice cream. You weren\u2019t supposed to eat on the train.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She sat three seats up from me. She had black hair, short like a boys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was no one else on the train.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I pretended not to look, even though there was no one there to see me look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maybe if you were very hungry, starving maybe, they\u2019d make an exception to the rule. There was a sign that said it. No food or drink<\/em>. But some people don\u2019t need signs. They wouldn\u2019t break the rule anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I wouldn\u2019t break the rule. Not because of the sign. But because I was strong enough not to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But then again wasn\u2019t it perfect? One last time for old times\u2019 sake?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thoughts started racing through my head. I watched them like someone in the night might watch a speeding train. Mechanical thoughts, thoughts with engines and rails, thoughts thought so often they no longer need a thinker because now they can think themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I tried to ignore them. The train rattled across the bridge. I stared through my reflection into the black of the river. The oily city twinkled and vanished. I forced myself upon the moment, the empty, calm moment. I held it. It shattered. And again there was the girl.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I slid off my seat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She didn\u2019t notice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I wasn\u2019t thinking anymore. Old thoughts were thinking for me and I was just a puppet of past mistakes, of thoughts planted in my brain like weeds which can be pulled one or two but not all. And all it takes is one and then there\u2019s more than one, like how a train car pulls another car behind it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I took a step forward. A tendon drew like a marionette string.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the train kept on pounding down the track farther from the city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was standing right behind her now. Her body flowed like the bend in a river, the soft arch of her legs, the pulsing curve of her neck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No<\/em>, I said aloud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She didn\u2019t hear me. Not in such a noisy train.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You promised yourself.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I closed my eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You don\u2019t need a sign to tell you how to live your life.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Then, as fingers cupped like a gag, the train clicked and jerked, and I tumbled through the aisle, falling on my knees next to her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For a painful eternity my eyes were locked with hers and there was nothing I could mumble or gesture in explanation or apology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then, a metallic grinding, a swift swoosh of air, and I was gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n * * * *<\/p>\n\n\n\n There were flies in the diner. I didn\u2019t mind. But I didn\u2019t want anyone to see them crawling on me, endured and unshooed. So I waved my hands, grimaced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They circled and returned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I counted the few crumpled dollars left after this last trip to the city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That very morning my mother had rooted the bills out of her cheerful purse. I took the money carefully so she wouldn\u2019t have to touch me. My face was a dull lump in the little mirror behind her. I molded it, like a child shapes his toy putty, into the face of a son or something loveable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDon\u2019t give him more money!\u201d my father shouted from the living room where he sat half dozing in front of the TV like a pharaoh being mummified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My mother made no answer but instead a certain kind of face, silly and conspiratorial, for me and only me to see. Before acknowledging her, I had recourse to the mirror, adding an arc of affection to the lips, a furrow of fun to the brow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou spoil him!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n My father\u2019s voice was like the Great Pyramid, something old and strange, massive and powerless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe should be grounded and you give him money and send him out god knows where.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n She ignored him. I could feel her hand on my shoulder, five ineffectual fingers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPlease don\u2019t stay out so late again tonight,\u201d she whispered, her voice like new-baked bread. \u201cIt\u2019s a school night.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n She was right. It was a school night. Tomorrow I would be in school again. A succession of desks and sidelong stares and nameless faceless friends who are not my friends but are my friends anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI promise, Mom.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I broke that promise. But I didn\u2019t break the other two. The important ones. The promises I made to myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not in town. That was the first promise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second was never again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But still, I went to the city. Even for nothing. And still, the girl on the train. Even for nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It occurred to me that my father might have been right. Maybe I should be grounded. He meant because of my grades though. Not because of the other things. . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n A slender shadow fell across the table, handing me a menu. I smiled for her, not at her, shooing the flies off my arm and out of my hair. She obscured the neon and midnight of the windows, and I traced that thin river of shadow to her face, just for the blink of an eye before she turned and walked away. She was that certain kind of pretty like a thing you eat not because its delicious or you\u2019re very hungry but because it\u2019s there and you can\u2019t see any reason not to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When she was gone I raised the menu like a shield, spied over its brim, and stole a quick glance around the diner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I could hear it in their faces:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Criminal. Murderer. Monster.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n It went silently, psychically, from table to table, diner to diner, like when I sit down in English class or math class, when I walk down the halls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They didn\u2019t look up from their plates. They didn\u2019t turn from each other. They ignored what they didn\u2019t want to see, as people always do. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The waitress returned. She smiled at me. A jagged, imposter smile. A smile all mouth and no eyes, like a bridge about to collapse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I smiled again and as before not at her but for her, begging her to read the secret message in my smile, that message which dissolves all secrets. I pleaded, lips arched and trembling, but I knew it was hopeless. She had made up her mind about me, as she had every right and reason to. What does it matter if my face shows what I am when it also shows, a thousand times more clearly, everything I\u2019ve done?<\/p>\n\n\n\n She had said something. It echoed indistinct and meaningless in my ears. A threat perhaps. An insult. More likely an insinuation, a degrading innuendo. As if to say, \u201cI know but I won\u2019t come out and let you know I know. Just try to acknowledge it. See what happens. I\u2019ll deny it and you\u2019ll look like a fool. I don\u2019t have to hurt you. You hurt yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I tried to love her anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She stabbed into the heart of her notepad, slowly and deliberately. That smile like a train wreck across her face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI\u2019ll give you some more time to decide,\u201d she said calmly, carefully, as though tying some dainty knot around a fly\u2019s microscopic leg. I understood the cruel secret message in her words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I had already decided, though. I had made up my mind. I had. The promises. I had kept the promises. Even if only barely. She couldn\u2019t know that though. But I could show her. By sitting here and eating nicely, without looking at the other diners, without thinking anything cruel or unkind, I could prove to her how I\u2019d made up my mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But then my eyes rebelled, two eager minions of a weary master. They always find what they\u2019re looking for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A girl sat alone at a booth near me. Rivulets of red hair poured over her shoulders in dreadful, bitter, luscious, anticipatory simulation. She was staring at me through circles of frozen flame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I quickly looked back at my menu. I brushed the fly off my arm. I read without reading. Then slowly I peeked back at her. And she was still staring. A fly landed on my nose. Another on my left ear. I covered my face with my hands. I was about to get up and run from the diner, but she got to me before I could move.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the darkness, I could smell her perfume. She smelled like a garden full of flowers. The scent was like a trespass. Her voice was like a tangle of briers and violets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou were on the train.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It meant she was too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ll make myself small,<\/em> I thought. I\u2019ll make myself fly-small and fly away. I\u2019ll fly to some peopleless place. I\u2019ll be a good fly like no other. I\u2019ll be a fly that doesn\u2019t bother people.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Somewhere in the shadows, had she been watching? Cool-heartedly observing? Letting instead of stopping?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why wouldn\u2019t she have said it at the time? Why wouldn\u2019t she have come out? Shot me a look of disdain? Even just a cough? I wouldn\u2019t have tried it if I had known she was there. It would have been enough just to have her there like a guard or a strap or a cross.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt wasn\u2019t what it looked like,\u201d I told her, opening my eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She cocked her head the way people do when they want you to know they are examining you as an object instead of a person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I felt fleshless and spinning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI saw you fall,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Terrible significance. A phrase overloaded with meaning, like throwing some twisted unlookable carcass on the table in front of me, festered and accusing, and calling it not a crime but a dinner. And still she stood there observing me through those circles of flame, like a wide-mouthed Venus taking her time before the spring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI fell,\u201d I admitted. \u201cBut I\u2019m okay now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI\u2019m glad you\u2019re okay now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was something in her voice, some meaning I couldn\u2019t unravel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She slid into the seat across from me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI\u2019m Cynthia,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She was pretty. Pretty in a way different than the waitress. She was pretty like something you defer forever because it\u2019s never the right time for something so perfect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A shadow fell over her as the waitress placed a setting and a menu on the table. There was something conspiratorial in it, something orchestrated. What could I say? The waitress with her accusing smile, provoking me to humiliation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was stuck now. Cynthia had trapped me. So I told her my name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I have a pair of magic glasses that let me peer into the lives of strangers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A young woman struts along. She wears a spearmint summer dress which the wind tries to remove. Her pink panties say hello<\/em>. She has the kind of breasts guys have always wished I had. She has a Tinkerbell tattoo on her ankle. We make brief and comfortable eye contact. Then she looks at the cherry blossoms and picks a petal as she passes. My glasses do their trick. I see that she was once called a stupid slut and worse things which I (who am generally not squeamish) bristle to imagine. She was called those things a few days after she was sexually assaulted. The man who committed the crime wasn\u2019t the one who called her those things. The city police advised her not to file a police report. She did anyway. She is on her way to a support group. She\u2019s been going for three years. The support she needs comes from providing support to others. Ten years ago she was informed that her little sister, age six, was the victim of a drunk driver. The little sister\u2019s nickname was Tinkerbell. Since that day she has refused to cry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Next, a man walks past. He wears a sleeveless T-shirt, the neck of which permits visual access to the v-shaped plateau of his pectorals. His sunglasses are aerodynamic. His arms are mountainous. His pants are spandex. You would think he sells his girlfriend\u2019s mouth to his friends so that he can buy protein supplements and gym memberships and coco butter. But that\u2019s all appearance. In fact, he\u2019s just gotten back from a camp for deprived children where he\u2019s been volunteering nearly every weekend for the last five years. He is an active member of his church. He believes in God but doesn\u2019t care much about doctrine, which he sees as too uncertain. He is certain only of one thing: God would prefer to see us all get along rather than argue over details. He thinks service to the less fortunate is the truest worship of God. On his back is a large tattoo of a crucified Jesus. Jesus\u2019s chest muscles are colossal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here is a bent man in a grey suit. The suit hangs from his body as would the skin off the bones of a starved mule. His cane clicks like a one-legged horse. You might think he practices casual pederasty. But not so. He\u2019s never cared much for children. He has always been painfully self-aware of his inability to tolerate anyone — whether child or adult — who demands so much attention. He considers this more of a quirk than a personal failing. The people who love him think likewise. The judgment of people who don\u2019t love him doesn\u2019t matter. He and his husband collect Japanese art. They have lent their pieces to museums. They have a cat named Hokusai. Hokusai was the ugliest cat at the shelter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I swiveled my vision away from the street, and there, opposite the teeming thoroughfare, in an imperfectly transparent cascade of storefront glass, I beheld a right-handed imitation of both the view and the viewer. A young woman sits there. She is in her late teens but allows — we won\u2019t say cultivates — overestimation. Her hair is the hue of a certain chemically isolated amino acid. Her skin is a fine layer of something that resembles crushed chalk even when palpated, unless with cosmetics. Her lips are the exact shade of her old copy of the Good News Bible but seldom say the same thing; when they do it is with an embarrassed sense of defeat and the consciousness of an antiquated provincialism she attributes to her parents, whom she loves nevertheless. She is wearing a tank top which is too recently purchased to have this hole in it. You might think that right now she\u2019s got every reason to be angry (oh, who doesn\u2019t) and to show the world a face as sullied and wrinkled as a used tissue, but–<\/p>\n\n\n\n I took the glasses off. This was enough spying for now. There was a rain of cherry blossom from the tree across the sidewalk. I placed my hand over the rim of my tea cup, feeling a circle of warmth forming on my palm. The cherry blossoms drifted down around me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There were no lenses in the glasses. I had popped them out because, of course, they had been Jim\u2019s and the glass, being prescription, blurred what I saw. I had always liked the frames. They were wide and graded shades of orange, resembling the pelt of a glass tiger. I don\u2019t know if Jim had been aware of their magical powers. . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n A stranger suddenly asked me:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDo you mind if I sit here? All the seats inside are taken.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I looked up at her and remembered with regret that I had removed my magic glasses. She added:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAnd they\u2019re playing some garbage on the stereo.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I returned her smile (having myself recently overheard the garbage, which however I found tolerable enough), and offered her with a silent, open-handed gesture the empty seat opposite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My hand, with its mission accomplished, crept toward the glasses (which were sitting cross-legged on the table), but stopped short, as if it were too bold an intrusion to spy into the life of a person who hadn\u2019t merely meandered into one\u2019s purview but had instead willfully and with permission taken up residence there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So instead, I tested, mentally, some friendly ice-breakers, and thence for each one composed on behalf of my unwitting interlocutor a witty and spirited rejoinder, to which I subsequently tried out, on behalf of myself, numerous possible responses. After a minute or two down one particularly felicitous route, we were off and running, having the sort of free and easy conversation I imagine most people in the real world have when they find themselves sat down next to a complete but perfectly harmless looking stranger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then, before I had a sense of wither the whole thing was tending, all this secret small-talk gave way (maybe suddenly, maybe gradually) to the awkward and inappropriate gush of a shared soliloquy. I was silently speechifying to her, giving freely, inly and unbidden, everything that friends and family (those persistent well-meaning snoops!) had been, these three days, so eagerly and unsuccessfully attempting to extort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I went on, unconscious of the fact that for at least the last ten minutes of the external world\u2019s inexorable time I had not written a single word in my open notebook. Neither was I aware, until they suddenly overflowed, of the tears that had been pooling in my lower eyelids. (Eyelids thankfully unpainted with the false face of mourning, thus no melodramatic streaks). Consequently, I had to dab my cheeks with the dainty caf\u00e9 napkin, giving, additionally, my chin, forehead, and neck a good conspicuous rubbing, so that I might pass off my noble tears as the common facial produce of a profusely sunny day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then, after a few casual swipes of her cell phone, my tablemate returned her book to her bag (as patched and pinned and tattooed as its owner), drained her coffee (similar comparison) to the bitter proverbial dregs, and stood. I looked up fully as she passed (as opposed to the furtive and fugitive nature of my previous observations). She smiled again, nodded, and then was gone out of my life, leaving me with a senseless sense of loneliness that is weirdly and disproportionately stronger than the loneliness occasioned by the stupid death three days previous of a friend whom I had known and loved for many, many more than twenty silent minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of these twenty minutes, what can I say? I had the chance to meet this person, to make a friend, to actually say everything that had gone through my mind. Maybe it would have done me some good. But maybe even better would have been to listen to someone else speak. Not to unloose the verbal vomit of my own sad sappy despair, but to listen to a person talk about their own life, with whatever happiness or sadness, grief or joy, their life contains. And in so doing, even if for only a moment, to lose my life in someone else\u2019s. I missed that opportunity just now. A life has passed me by, and I\u2019ve killed wordlessly a whole friendship by not even giving it a chance. But I think I can make amends, even before the day is through, because the world is full of people and possibilities, and of less sorrow (I think — I hope) than joy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (a short story in two parts) Him In the sky the moon buzzed. And in the alley behind the diner so did I. Around the mess of a girl I had dropped on the pavement. I held her as she struggled. My voice, a fly-size whimper. I\u2019m not okay with this. The roar and the … Continue reading Reflections<\/span>