The Nature Of Pain

Pain demands remedy.  It demands attention, it creates an end.  Ends are found wandering down many paths. 

Little by little I felt like dying.  I drove home up the 15 degree incline that went on for seven miles from the ocean to the mountainous woods.
The late afternoon sun was bright and hit my shoulders, browning them slightly.  The heat came in through the window and he sat next to me, a 200 pound man with the potential for artistic expression and a capacity for miserable effort and run-ins with the law. 
As I began to reach the peak of the oak covered meadow before a curvy 2 mile long descent into wooded Felton, I felt overwhelmed. The man had a multitude of chemical addictions and twenty nine years of pain that needed to be dulled and a father that had just died.
The family would not wait to hold the funeral and as a result, the tattooed addict beside me would never, as my mother said, have closure.  She could see what was coming more than I could, that girl I was with firm round breasts and idealism that had somehow sucked her into a cave full of murky water.
My tattooed addict, sitting in the cushioned chair beside me had a history of minor crimes and outstanding warrants in a few states and credit debt that would haunt him until death.

Each one of his problems fell on my shoulders. I opened my arms to them and held them.
For a time I hoped that they would get better or change or that he would change or that his jail stays would alter him or that visiting the county hospital would at least provide him with methadone or some legal compound, but none of it changed.  He took the methadone and then went to the streets moment later.  Even after the doctors finally approved a physical therapist and a reason was identified for his unbearable back pain, he never stopped mixing and injecting, he never followed through on the recommended exercises. He was in a cave of his own.
He let me carry all his problems. I took him to the appointments and to the streets. I went to work and then handed over my cash to his open hands that were like magnets. I picked up his cigarettes and cringed every moment he stood at the doorway smoking, wasps of pungent odor coming right back towards me, covering my clothes and books with their stench so that one day I would have to throw them all away. 

His problems were my problems. And his problems where too big for me and I wanted it all to end.
I remember saying: “but I haven’t made my mark on the world yet.”  And he agreed.  And so there was no double suicide.
But every day he got worse and I felt the dark cloud grow bigger and thicker and so strong that I could not see light beyond it.  Every day his tolerance grew and he needed a little more black tar.  Every day he needed a little more money.  Every day he sunk deeper and I watched from the edge, teetering on the side, looking in and then beyond. 
I went to work, I went to school.  I brought him money and he took it to the beach flats and got small brown goo wrapped in pieces of plastic. After disappearing into the bathroom for hours and poking in every vein he remembered having he would emerge all sweaty and pink. 
For a precious moment he would be free of pain, he would forget about his dad and the mounting legal problems and his back and the mountain of darkness that hung over our heads. Then time would slip and we would remember and the rattle would begin once again.

Dinner For Alice

The hunger was undeniable. Alice would awaken in the dead of the night, stomach growling, feeling stretched as though it might break into pieces. At first, always at first, she would try to be quiet, she would try not to wake up Ben, then she would remember that Ben was gone. She was alone.
It was the cold hard fact of this singularity that drove Alice into the yard, into the victory garden that had fallen into fecund disrepair since his departure. After a day spent in tears and rotating cycles of hair tearing and screaming, she would fall, utterly spent upon the bed and almost forget his absence in the dark desperation of sleep. Until her stomach called her awake, gurgling, forgotten and denied during the regularly scheduled emotional storms of the daylight hours.
In the endless torrent of wishes for her own death, for the death of Ben’s new flaxen haired lover, for Ben’s death, there was no time or motive to take sustenance. But in the darkness, after the exhausted blackouts, her appetite would take control and lead her barefoot into the yard. Under the pale white face of the moon Alice would kneel in the dark soil between the bug eaten chard and rhubarb. With one trembling hand she would scoop up a hand full of dirt and greedily thrust it into her mouth, wriggling worms and all. Turning over rocks she would lick at the scurrying surface, swallowing things that were still moving.
She fed with urgency and abandon, alternating between unturned bricks or stone and fistfuls of cool moist dirt. And when she was satiated she would return to the house, crawl with dirty fingernails back into bed and sleep until dawn, whence the appetites of the night would give way to the convulsive grieving of the day.
The nighttime excursions came to be extended. Rather than returning to bed Alice spent the rest of the night walking through the neighbors' yards, skirting around the edges of houses and tool sheds and compost bins, sometimes stopping to feed in a freshly tilled flower bed. In the early hours of morning before sunrise she would creep home, entering through the side gate, back into the yard, through the back door.
Pleasantly tired, she could sleep away the hours of the day. She tacked cardboard over the windows to keep the light out. As long as the sun was barred from the house, grieving could be suspended. Alice rested peacefully in her dirty bed, a layer of soil accumulating between the sheets. Waking after dark, her stomach crying with pain, she came to rise instantly with the knowledge that she was alone, that there was no one who could see her, no one who could stop her from doing what she wanted to do, no one to stop her from eating what she most craved. And what she craved for a time was the earth itself and the things that hid within it.
The change was gradual. Her skin first developed a certain sheen. It darkened. Then it began to harden. Her legs and arms had grown just a little longer. Her movements during her nightly excursions were quicker. There was a sound that her altered feet made over the concrete and asphalt, a soft skittering as she moved fleetly into the shadows along the walls.
Alice herself, resigned weeks ago to dying, accepted the changes unquestioningly. With a goal as simple as death, anything that happened in between was superfluous. As the changes came, however, as Alice pursued her appetites without regret, the death wish diminished, even vanished. Alice no longer thought of herself at all. She simply followed her instincts.
Her new form demanded greater sustenance. Neighborhood cats began to disappear. Soon the power lines bore pitiful photocopied announcements of reward for the safe return of a handful of different family dogs. One night Alice went out into the garden and spread her new pair of shiny black wings. In the city she kept to the alleys, terrifying the homeless drunks hidden beneath papers and soiled sleeping bags.
They had nothing to fear however, Alice had a hankering for something particular. She found it around the corner from a popular new nightclub; a young man laughing and wobbly with intoxication tugging a pretty young woman into the alley with him.
“What was that?” the young woman asked sharply peering into the darkness ahead of them.
“Nothing, nothing baby.” he cooed. Alice shuffled closer.
“Uh uh, no way, I’m out of here.” The woman broke free and hurried out of the alley, back to the street and its lights.
“Mary hold on.”
He called after her, but only managed to lean against the wall catching his breath. He laughed a little as he started towards the street and lost his footing. Alice scurried forward and took hold of him, mandibles sinking into his soft pink flesh as he screamed. The sound was drowned out by the beat from the club next door. Soon it ceased entirely, transformed into the gurgling of his own crimson internal fluids as they spilled from his lips.
Alice thought that he reminded her of something called Ben, although she could no longer quite recall what Ben was. Nonetheless, she felt sure that Ben was what she wanted, and this was almost it. She found it deeply satisfying.

The Spheres of Galia Part 5

Violent skirmishes raged across the Spheres between the supporters of Olslo and the warlords they accused of trying to stifle the revelation of magickal knowledge. There were fires upon the grounds of carefully tended manors and several of the largest squares were littered in glass, metal and blood. Amidst the panic and smoke, the Chamber of Windows lay melting. Once a glory or architecture, it bubbled in a pile of iridescent goo.

Beside the molten walls, wooden stakes had been erected on the scaffolding where condemned criminals had once been humanely vaporized, but now, the heads of councilmen from both the Red Hat and Yellow Hat parties oozed their blood. Smoke rose from the smoldering ruins of the capital city and lines of refugees marched towards the forests of Avin where temporary dwellings were being established.

The Lady Rob, along with other surviving council members found herself sequestered within the safety of the Towers of Ral, the sanctuary of the Kingdom’s most powerful magicians. Many of her fellows were distracted beyond reason. Grown men, including Philip the Old, were reduced to sniveling wretches. Most had not noticed the terrible inconsistencies of the reports that blamed the Lucen Scribes and Vitnutian terrorists for the attack on the Chamber of Windows. The Lady Rob herself had met the resurrected leader of the Lucens, Olslo, and found it impossible to believe that such a person could be responsible for the violent attack. His eyes shone with something alive beyond the simple need for violence. He was not a creature of quick reaction or anger, there was no need in him for sticks or guns. There was something else that reached out to her, coming out through his eyes and into her, something so fierce and wild and wise that it could only turn into itself, becoming soft.

Having been present during the attack, she had seen with her own eyes the strange creatures with shiny black armor that tore the heads from Council members. Her account of the event had already been written off as the results of hysteria, but the Lady Rob knew her mind to be sound.

Exploring her thoughts as she wandered the white halls of the towers, she made her way into the forbidden western tower where the magicians were gathered in the Kingdom’s defense. Here, she overheard the warlords and magicians making preparations to cut off the magickal energy necessary for Olslo's work with the Lucens and others throughout the Three Spheres. Listening, she was filled with a sense of dread.

In many ways, Olslo and his ideals of freedom and equality reminded her of her father and his disgrace. As a young woman, she had been devastated by her family’s loss of status. She had been little moved by her father’s lofty dreams and had worked her whole life to repair his name. Now, picturing Harrold’s head on a stake and remembering with pain her father’s own vaporization on the same lucite platform in front of the Chamber of Windows, she felt her hands begin to tremble. The hot tears she had never shed over her father’s execution fell from her eyes. Her body began to shake, a cold terror began to move through her, starting in her fingers, toes and back, and moving inward, journeying quickly towards her chest and the heart that lay protected. With each falling tear she released the locked thoughts and visions of the kingdom. It was not as pure and true as she had pretended it was, as she had wanted it to be. It had not been her father who had failed so many years ago, it had been her own heart and the heart of The Old Kingdom.

The Lady Rob made her way to one of the public communication portals, tears flowing unabated over her reddened cheeks, hot salty tears dowsing the velveteen fabric of her dress. She established a connection with the Lucen Scribes and relayed to them all that she had learned in the west wing.

Councilman Argus had not been present at the Chamber of Windows. Now a guest in the house of Lord Avin where the King himself was taking refuge, he expressed surprise at the scale of the astral attacks that had targeted major astral compounds of the Kingdom within the last 8 hours. Many high ranking guests of Lord Avin were convened in his dining hall, still dining on game hens and pudding despite the violence.

"It's truly what the scribes would call an astral war. What is happening is just astonishing," Councilman Argus said from behind his dark glasses. Lord Avin shook his head, “they’ve had the power to do this sort of thing all along. This is their response to the attack of our magicians on their Lucen pools.”

“You mean their counter-attack,” Councilman Argus corrected harshly. “They used brute force to destroy our capital city.”

“We have reports coming in from reputable sources that the attack on the capitol was launched by a third party,” Lord Avin said firmly but softly.

“You mean the account of the traitor Lady Rob.” The retired torturer glared, “who is clearly an ally to the Lucens.”

“There are other accounts,” Lord Avin answered softly and the High Priestess entered the dining hall, her purple robe rustling as she bowed before the king.

“A young boy suspected of being involved in the magickal attacks was just captured in the Cold Reefs an hour ago and is currently under interrogation.”

“Will he lead us to Olslo?” Dominious asked.

“It is quite possible,” the High Priestess told him.

“And the Lady Rob?” he pressed, “has she revealed anything about her connection with the scribes?”

“No majesty, but we will continue questioning her.”

“What about our plan, have we been able to shut down the Lucen pools?” Dominious leaned eagerly forward in his chair.

Shaking her head, the High Priestess continued, “Olslo's actions have thrown all magickal operations into disarray. Our magicians are working to restore some of our own astral chambers. When we have recovered these we will resume our attacks on theirs.”

“And our people? Those taking refuge in Avin, are they taken care of?”

“Our Lord Avin has been most gracious in opening his lands to our displaced citizens. Most are already sheltered and their wounds are being tended to. I personally have been amongst them, administering to their spiritual needs and listening to their accounts. Most of them cannot understand what is happening, but they are angry nonetheless. They will be glad when Olslo is brought to justice.”

In the dungeon of the Towers of Ral, Lady Rob collapsed upon the stone floor of her cell where her keepers had left her. Beyond the bars of her cell, she watched them grab hold of the boy and carry him away. She wished to scream, more than anything, she wished to scream, but her tongue was swollen and saliva ran from her mouth onto the cold stone. Completely paralyzed, she lay on the ground floating in a state of near bliss now that an eternity of pain had come to an end. Vaguely, she could recall having done something to have earned her misery, but it was a blur. All that was real was the pain inflicted by The Torturer. That was all that had ever been, all that could ever be now. She wished dimly that the strange boy could be spared the experience. Then she lost consciousness.

The Past Comes Calling

Behind his cluttered towers of books and old fashioned type writer he could be as eccentric as he liked. This was his fortress. Within it he could let his hair rise in an electrified bride of Frankenstein way without feeling the need to tame it with a comb. In here, behind these impregnable walls of dusty books, he could wear his thermal underwear coupled with just a pair of jeans and fear no reprimand. He was the prince in this kingdom of fiction and nonfiction and coffee table conversational items and references. Letting his appearance blend with the general clutter, his mind could wander down forbidden corridors poking into thoughts left undisturbed by most. He could be David the Heretic, David the pervert, David the mad, or David the meek and no one would know.
Unless he wrote it, which he often did, and sometimes shared it at the weekly writer’s workshops or poetry jams hosted in the back of the shop. Even in this case he was still safe within his kingdom and those delirious poets and various unloved writers either appreciated his own breed of madness or else were too self absorbed to notice him at all.
He could remember too well the days when he had written in spiral bound notebooks in his bedroom and had feared discovery, the time when his sister accidentally carried one of his notebooks away mistaking it for her own, her horrified reaction, the subsequent beating from his father, his mother’s weeping and begging to know where they had gone wrong.
He could remember and the remembrance made this new phase of life all the more precious for its spacious anonymity and freedom of mind and word. They were, after all, only words and held no power of their own. Their power was lodged in the myriad of associations evoked in the reader or listener rather than in the words themselves. He was one of a rare breed that appreciated this truth and thus had no fear of them and twisted them every which way and used them to penetrate the carefully guarded darkness secreted away in the hearts of others, even and especially at the risk of calling forth their wrath and terrible sorrow.
Hunkered over a single serving of raspberry yogurt one afternoon he heard the bells hung over the front door jingle as someone entered. He finished spooning a portion into his mouth before looking up to greet the patron. Raising his eyes and wiping his mouth he beheld with astonishment the sparkling blue eyes of his sister. Her blond hair hung in a short bob around her face and her mouth was creased with lines that betrayed years spent frowning.
“Reina.” He uttered her name in shock, wondering what she was doing in this city, how had she found him, why she was here breaching his defenses.
She smiled a little.
“Hello David.”
Then he only stared at her. All that he wanted to know was what she wanted but it seemed callused to ask after 10 years of estrangement. He couldn’t think of what else he should say so he stared.
“Daddy’s sick David.” She said after a few moments, and big tears welled up in her eyes. “He’s dying.”
Again he could think of nothing to say so he merely watched the tears form in her big eyes and splash down upon her cheeks. She dried them with the back of a gloved hand and said,
“I’ve come to bring you home to see him.” She sniffed and looked at him waiting.
He thought for a moment that he might be dreaming so he leaned forward to the antique type writer and began to type an account of what was happening so that he would remember it better when he woke up.
His fingers clacked away at the keys and Reina said softly,
“David.” But he kept typing and then she cried hysterically: “David! Did you hear me? Daddy’s dying.”
He stopped typing and looked up at her .
“I heard you.” He said and leaned back in the chair rubbing his eyes with both palms.
“We should go as soon as possible. Before it’s too late.” She said “The flight will take about eight hours.”
As she spoke, she adjusted her hand bag.
“I’m not going.” David said simply.
“What?” her voice was high and demanding, “He’s dying. Don’t you understand?”
“I understand, and I’m not going.” He answered nonchalantly. Then he stood up. “Thank you Reina, for coming, for uh, finding me and giving me the choice. I… appreciate that. But I won’t go. I don’t want to see him. Even if he is dying. I don’t want to. You could have just called me, you didn’t have to come all the way here.”
“I know,” she said bleakly. “But I knew that if I called, you wouldn’t come. I thought that if I came to get you, you might.”
“I won’t” he told her with a small shake of his head.
She leaned forward and took a pen from his desk and wrote a phone number on the corner of a sheet of paper.
“My cell number.” She explained. “I’m leaving on the 4:30 flight out of SFO. I already bought your ticket, if you change your mind.”
“I won’t.” he repeated softly.
She sniffed again and this time he offered her a tissue from a dusty Kleenex box. She dabbed her eyes and blew her nose and pocketed the tissue. Then she waved the tips of her gloved fingers and walked back out of the door, the little bells overhead tolling her departure.
David sat back down and brushed the keys of the typewriter absently with his finger tips. His fortress had been compromised. The same piles of dog eared brittle paged books still towered all about him, but suddenly they were an ineffective sanctuary. He no longer felt strong or safe, but rather small and weak, as though he were a twelve year old boy hiding in his bedroom, waiting for his father to come and dole out the punishment he didn’t deserve.
He realized that his hands were trembling so he folded them in his lap and gazed at the door. Breathing slowly, he let the phantoms of his childhood evaporate under the radiance of the present. He was a man now, and the body of his father would soon be returned to the earth, and Reina would be gone before morning. When their mother died perhaps she would only call, and that would be even easier than this.
After a moment the trembling subsided and his battlements felt once again secure. He picked up his yogurt and finished it, licking the spoon clean when it was all gone.

Letting A Butterfly Go

It was a trailer that sat alone in a big dirt lot off of Grand Avenue, not too far from where it intersected with Riverside drive near the corner of the Lake where the old Machado house still stood hidden in a thicket of eucalyptus and pepper trees. From there to the ALANO building it was a short walk, and due to the lack of many other buildings, one could easily have supposed that the trailer was somehow officially connected with the ALANO club house, but this was not the case. The only other structure within close reach was a small shabby liqueur store to tempt the alcoholics on their way to and from meetings. A gravel road adorned with no trespassing signs ran from Grand Ave. along the side of the trailer and continued down as far as the lake where a loftier private residence was tucked behind a gate to protect it from the riff raff that congregated a half mile in front of its door step.

Jesse had once lived in a house further down Grand Ave. under the shade of the Ortega mountain range in Lake Land Village. There, for the majority of his life, he had dwelt with his mother and stepfather and two half sisters as a ghostly remnant of his mother’s past, haunting their wholesome attempt to build a family. He had been partially allowed to be a part of the new family life but at the same time he had been isolated from them by his origin and was permitted to drift in his own private life, mostly unsupervised, and occasionally reprimanded for his boyish exploits. His stepsisters brought their friends to the house in those days and he had been warned not to tease the little girls who were only two or four years younger than himself. At that age, however, two years younger may as well have been a decade, and four years a century, for while he was already stealing nudie magazines from the liquor stores and smoking cigarettes and throwing rocks at passing cars, they were running around barelegged in the front yard chasing bubbles and skipping rope.

Back in those days, the oldest of his two sisters, Morgan, had two companions that accompanied her most often, June, who was knitted to Morgan at the waist, and Lane who drifted about the other two like a lost butterfly. While Morgan was short and thick with mouse brown hair that made her seem as if she had been forged of clay, and June was about as short but less thick than Morgan, Lane was tall and skinny and fair haired. Jesse interacted with them minimally, either to quarrel with his sister or to trade them pogs for their lunch money. When Lane switched schools and vanished, he hardly noticed. That was in the time when they still lived in the house with its yard behind a brick fence. Then over the course of five years his mother’s drinking grew out of control and her husband threw her out and eventually Jesse and Morgan, now in high school, followed her to the trailer that sat under the blazing sun beside the ALANO club.

It was there in the trailer that Lane re-emerged one hot September evening alongside Morgan. It was a Friday night and both Morgan and Jesse had been permitted to invite a friend to spend the night. The girls would take the bedroom usually split between brother and sister, and the boys would stay in the living room. As in days of old, his mother had warned him to stay away from the younger girls, but it was no longer because she feared that he would tease them. She had a whole new set of concerns that, whether she knew it or not, were well founded. (Over the summer, Morgan and June had tagged along with Jesse to parties where they lost their virginity in a drunken revelry that left them stained with guilt. The two girls were avid Born Again Christians and Straight Edge punks by the time school started in the fall.)
Morgan led Lane to the room and played a Violent Femmes CD. Lane asked if they could listen to a Rage Against the Machine album that caught her eye. Morgan told her that it belonged to her brother and added,
“Besides, Rage Against The Machine sucks, Lane!”
Then she went to start her laundry in the old Kenmore on the back porch and left Lane alone in the room.

Jesse was waiting for his friend Brian to arrive so they could take a long walk down the dark wasteland of Grand Ave. and smoke marijuana and come back after his mother was asleep and try their hand with the girls. He came into the bedroom where Lane stood in her short cut off shorts, vintage polyester blouse and tattered flip flops. Her legs were long and pale, her hair long and blonde. While he dug around in the pocket of his leather jacket to retrieve his Zippo, she asked him about the Rage Against The Machine CD that lay by the stereo. She picked up the case and told Jesse that she loved Rage Against the Machine, even if every one else was into punk rock now. She asked if he still liked them. He said he did. There was something in the way that she spoke to him, without guile, without hope of looking cool. She still talked as though she were a little girl with no ulterior motives. She looked at him as if he were equally innocent. He was sure that she knew he was something else, but she looked at him and spoke to him with trust, like a little bird walking into the mouth of an alligator.

She started talking about good and evil, offering theories and observations, asking him his opinion. She used big words constructed in proper sentences void of slang. The way she spoke was more alien to him than the off color topic she wanted to explore. Drinking her in with his eyes he felt a stirring in his chest, a sort of painful ache.
“You’re pretty, but weird, you know that?” he said to her. Her look told him that by now she did know, and that knowing made her uncomfortable and proud. Then she asked him if they could play the CD so he put it on for her.

Later, after their walk Jesse and Brian lay sprawled on sleeping bags in the murk of the living room They snickered at the snores that drifted down the hall from his mother’s room. Brain, who had hooked up with Morgan once during the summer, said,
“Dude, I think your Mom’s asleep. Let’s go see what the girls are doing.”
Jesse imagined creeping into the bedroom and finding Lane in his bed. She would lie there and accept whatever he whispered to her and do whatever he wanted. He knew it with certainty and felt the aching in his chest again, remembering her wide blue eyes trained on him, the CD clutched in her hand, the instant warmth she had offered.
“No man, I promised my Mom.” He said.
“What?” Brian laughed, “So what?”
“So if she finds out, I’m out of here.” He answered truthfully, although he wasn’t worried about that at all. It hurt him a little to say it, because no one could tell him what he could do or couldn’t, and that was part of his cool.
“What?” Brian asked and his voice revealed his disappointment not only in the way the evening was panning out but also in his companion’s possible act of obedience.
“Just forget about it.” Jesse told him. “I’m tired anyway.”
And he rolled over and pretended to be falling asleep even though the room was full of an agonizing tension. He thought that Brian would say something else, but he didn’t, and, after a while, the tension began to fade and Brian’s breathing slowed down and he too rolled over and adjusted his pillow and soon he was making the deep snorting noises of a sleeper.

Jesse lay still and awake, awash in a bath of conflicted emotions. It would have been nice to touch her, and now he looked bad in Brian’s eyes. But for better or worse, she was unlike himself and his sister and the rest. He felt that she should be allowed to remain that way. He knew that a butterfly’s wings should never be touched. If they were, it would be unable to fly ever again and it would be a butterfly no more. It was a little sacrifice that he made, lying there in the dark of the trailer that stood by the ALANO club, a sacrifice that would keep her from joining them all down in the heavy muck that was confusion and regret and sorrow. Lying on the sleeping bag thrown over the worn carpet, by the couch with broken springs, in the trailer on Grand Avenue, not far from the old Machado house, he let a butterfly go.

Foreclosure

The window was still spotted with circles of white from the rain of two nights past. It had come down like an avalanche of tears, a state of being she had come to know so very well. There had been thunder and lighting to match the violence of her mood. As the orchestra of electrical sounds played, shooting as they went through the air like gagged lives running from a demon, she took her brother’s old wooden baseball bat and destroyed the contents of her old family house.
The bank had sent her the final notice three days before, the words in stark black and white. Those sentences showed no mercy, no softness of compassion. The words blurred her vision and took away the speed from her heart, she fell to the ground. At first, unable to breathe, unable to cry, unable to think. The world closed in on her, swallowed her up and took her into the small little cave that she would soon learn was home. Her new home. She sat crumpled like a piece of dirty laundry on the rug in her hallway, she sat there as the afternoon turned to night and until her little white dog came up to her and took a lick of her ankle, on the skin just above her sock line. The feel of life, of wetness and heat brought her back just a little, then the thoughts rushed in to fill the newly opened space.
What would happen next?
Where would they all go?
What would happen to all their things?
The stuffed animals and the furniture that her grandfather had carved and the album collection she had spent so much time building. How would she get it all out within a couple days? They had shown no mercy, those men in tailored suits and black hair, she thought of them with hate. She had no job and no waiting apartment, no trucks or movers. It was her alone, and she had nothing to fall upon, no mattress to catch her fall, no soft arms that would open and receive her, taking her pain.
Her chest moved up and down slowly. Life indeed was ending, this life that she had known. She watched the dark rain clouds moving in fast, pulled in from the coast by the heat further in the valley, just beyond the mountain ranges that filled her window with their power.
And as the rain came that night, she smashed holes through the walls, she tore at the sheet rock with her bare hands, cursing with each action. She crushed the tiles along the bathroom sinks and in the kitchen and pissed on the carpet and smashed the glass doors that led to the patio. She cried as she did so, screaming and cursing with rage.
She was hurting her own child, the place she had loved and tended to. But if they thought they would just take it from her, if they thought she would just walk away and give it to them without pulling it down with her, no…they were wrong. They would come to know her rage, or someone would. She would leave her ghosts in these walls, she would forever linger here, her screams would come with the rain.

Mermaid

The sun shone brightly that day in mid fall. On a day like this, the town could forget that winter was looming and the leaves of the maples were still in the process of falling. It was a day to imagine, to pretend that the dawn of summer had arrived. Despite the sun that tried to kiss her with its light, she was filled with an anxious energy that vibrated on the tips of her fingers and the edges of her toes, and although fear ran up and down the length of her short body, the center, the star around which everything swirled, was her chest, the anxious heart that twitched with nervous palpitations since dawn.
She drove anxiously to a tattoo shop on the outskirts of Pacific Ave, the last storefront before the street began to curve and give way to small parking lots and mid-sized hotels and half a mile later, the Pacific ocean. She parked a couple blocks away, in the residential neighborhood in which she had once lived for a summer, to avoid the parking meters. She walked with her boyfriend, a 6’1 man with broad shoulders and a soft stomach. She had woken with worry, the culmination of an endless anxiety about her boyfriend’s drug abuse and his impending trial to determine just how long he would have to live in jail for being under the influence and distributing heroin.
She itched with an internal battle that had become nearly unbearable. It was not sharp, not like lightning blasts or shocks of thunder, it was more like a constant drone, the sound of a mosquito that had played around her ears for days, getting loud, getting soft, but never leaving. And she awoke, unable to contain the underlying pressure any longer.
“I need to hit something. A punching bag. I need a tattoo.”
So they drove downtown, to the shop painted in black on the inside and out with a checkerboard floor. Driving there, every car seemed like an obstacle placed in her way. Every pedestrian was an unmovable barrier to her release. She looked at them all with a small measure of hate. They moved too slow, too unsure of themselves and their direction, idiots in their lack of purpose. She was moving, going fast, determined to reach her destination. She arrived exasperated. She arrived hoping for renewal, for cleansing. She imagined herself after the new tattoo, she would be reborn, calm, the day would then truly begin.
But this was not to be. The receptionist told her there were no available tattoo artists, everyone was booked for the day…perhaps if she came back tomorrow…No. this was not a desire that could be held, tomorrow would not be the same, later in the afternoon would not do. It was now. Now she had to feel the needle in her flesh. Now she had to feel the sting of the vibrating gun. They walked out of the store into the bright light of the sun reflecting off the cement sidewalk. She drove back to her house in the Santa Cruz mountains faster than usual, bursts of anxiety crossing her lips, gusts of heat seeping from her skin.
Inside her apartment, just off the busy mountainous road of Hwy 9, she searched in the phonebook for “tattoo.” She saw an ad for Papa Joe’s Tattoo, which was in Ben Lomond, a small mountain town just a couple minutes north from her. The ad said, “real artists, no attitude.” She picked up the phone and talked to Papa Joe himself. He said that he was not available at the moment, but if she wanted, his apprentice was available. He assured her the apprentice was good, but perhaps he knew that anyone with a tattoo gun would be good for her at that point. He heard her voice of desperation, the unspoken words of longing, the pent-up of frustration and rage that needed an orgasm. Perhaps he recognized the inclination. There could be no waiting. He probably had seen it all before.
With her boyfriend in the passenger seat, they wound up the mountain, passing the indoor swimming pool that was covered in a circular plastic dome, like a clear astronaut’s helmet…passing the art studio of a man who never tired of carving bears from thick wooden stumps. At the first stop light, at the only stop light in Ben Lomond, she made a right and on the corner, saw the pale pink two-story Victorian that housed the shop of Papa Joe. A wooden sign hung above the door, swinging slightly in the warm breeze. She walked inside, a small bell on the door announced her arrival.
Papa Joe was leaning over a man who was laying topless on his stomach, a bright bulb was pointed directly at the man’s back. Papa Joe looked up and the noise of the needle was silenced. “Hi, I called a couple minutes ago,” she said. “Hi, sure, this is Dave, he’ll be working with you.” A young man approached, a twenty-five year old with dark baggy blue jeans and a loose white shirt. His dark hair was nearly hidden beneath a white baseball cap. He greeted her somewhat coldly, barely making eye contact. She handed him the small design she had torn from an old sociology notebook. It was the doodle of a mermaid she had drawn in the first college class that would drastically change the course of her life, but the doodle was manifest evidence she had had many lapses of attention during the lectures. The drawing was three inches long, an abstract black shape she interpreted as a mermaid with the head of a crescent moon. The young man looked at her a skeptically, he brought it over to his teacher… “do you want it just like this, or do you want us to add some details...”
“No, just like it is please.” The two men looked at each other. “You’re sure?” “Yeah, it’s just what I want.” The young man brought the little mermaid to his drawing table and began tracing the design onto carbon paper.
A couple minutes later, she was on the vinyl padded table. She lay on her right side and lifted her shirt and pointed to the place she wanted it, just above the soft mound of her love handle. Dave applied the design, put on his latex gloves and poured a small plastic capful of black ink. He adjusted his work lamp. She heard the buzzing of the needle begin. He leaned closer, she felt the needle approach with the slight wind the vibrations caused…then she felt the pain as the needle dug in. She lay motionless, as still as she could while breathing. Dave outlined the mermaid in a couple minutes, then came back to fill it with a solid coating of black. She felt proud she could lay this still, proud she did not cry out, proud she was strong and did not cry at all. The pain was real. The pain stung. Dave went to wipe the collection of blood that had seeped from her skin with a paper towel, each wipe felt like sandpaper. But she lay still.
Twenty minutes later, the tattoo was complete. She walked out of the shop, relaxed for the first time that day, for the first time in many, many days. And there was now a permanent message on her flesh, a message that spoke of secret yearnings and secret fears, dreams and nightmares which she could never say out loud, not to herself, not to anyone. For her words were of dry land and her secrets were of the waves, and a mermaid formed the bridge between two worlds.

Circle

The man slowly stood up from the wrinkled bed. It was already past noon and he had just opened his eyes fully for the first time. He had halfway opened them a few times as the morning progressed, but each time the light would hit his pupils like acid sliding across sandy paper, and he decided it was still too early. That kept on happening until the morning was gone. Now he was finally getting up and the light still hurt his eyes as it fell through the window in a mass of yellow transparent harshness and the wooden floor felt cold on his naked feet but he was hot and sweaty all over because it was noon and it should have been morning and then it would have been cool, but the morning was gone by now, and nothing he could do would bring it back. He walked into the bathroom and the white tiles of the floor were even colder than the wooden floor in his room. He shook all over for a moment and then he let out a loud burp and smiled at himself in the mirror. He reached down and felt his hard penis, which was so hard it that it rubbed up against his lower belly and that gave him a slight taste of pleasure. It made him think of the Vietnamese girl he had seen a few days before in the park, the one with the long black hair and brown, tanned skin, the one who danced for a moment on the bright green grass while he played the drums. He knew that she wasn’t just dancing for him right then, or for anybody for that matter, but it felt as if she was. Just the thought of her slender body moving to the deep sound of the drums made him even harder. He walked over to the toilet and realized that he couldn’t pee as long as he was this hard. So he masturbated quickly, quick rapid wrist movements and closed eyes, and, as he climaxed, he exhaled loudly, he opened his eyes wide, and he looked up at the dirty yellow ceiling of the bathroom. He just barely heard the small splash of sperm as it fell inside the water of the toilet bowl. He breathed slowly for a moment and then he peed, looking down to see his penis shriveling back down to its normal size. He exhaled once again, finished peeing, flushed the toilet and walked over to the sink. Again he smiled at his own image as he washed his face quickly and then he walked back out into his room. That was as good as having a morning. Now he was ready for the day.
He surveyed the expanse of his kingdom and he found it to be very small, specially now with all that light streaming through the window. He thought that soon he should get a curtain. If it was dark enough maybe he could sleep even longer. Now it just looked like a little room, about four hundred square feet, with a single door, a little closet, a bathroom and a window, a window that he wished wasn’t so bright. He sat on the bed and looked up at the little frame that held his three medals. In a flash, he was back where there was rain and tall green trees and pain and arms that would come off of their sockets and wide open eyes and friends that asked for help when you didn’t have any help to give them and it was all too much to think about right now, and that had been true all along but it became true once again with every day, specially in the daylight.
Now the morning was gone and he leaned over towards the bedside table and took out a few marijuana joints that he had thoughtfully rolled up a few days before. He lit one up and sucked in the smelly smoke, and then, once again, the dark trees and the screams of pain and the friend asking for help, it all faded away as it usually did. He walked over to the window and the light wasn’t so bright anymore, in fact it was becoming very beautiful. He looked outside and he could see the green lawns of the park from his window and he remembered that that was why he picked this little room over all the others. He got dressed quickly, still taking quick tokes from the joint, and he began to smile. It was always good when he began to smile, that meant the day had truly begun and the light that was so harsh just a moment ago was about to hit him like a shower of little kisses as he walked out the door.
He arrived at the heart of the long lawn, not even a half hour after taking the first hit. The glimmering colors were already multiplying. What had been golden and warm and simply delicious, now became a rainbow of ecstasy, in the shape of a girl in tight blue pants and a light top, swirling and dancing in front of him, and smiling, smiling so beautifully that right then he could see the whole love of the world in her eyes. He looked around himself and there was an old man looking up at the sky, with his eyes wide open in a gesture of pure wonder and amazement, and there was the love of the world once again. He walked towards the circle, where the loud sound of the drumming was coming from. He stepped right into the center and everyone knew him and everyone smiled and tacitly welcomed him even as the drumming continued and he placed his own conga drum in between two others who shifted aside to make room for him. He began to beat the drum with abandon right away, falling smoothly into the driving pulse that the others had established. There was an old Latino man swinging the maracas and there was an old black man banging on a djembe and there was an old hippie banging on the bongos and here he was drumming with them, whoever they were. For as much as they were strangers, they were the circle, and the circle changed every day, but the circle always stayed the same. He was now at the center and he was no longer in pain. The help that he couldn’t give so long ago would now be openly forthcoming, and the drums were loud all around him, and some girls were dancing, and some men were juggling, and a few couples were kissing and rolling around up on the hill behind him and the pain had disappeared as easily as a puff of smoke disappears on a breezy sunlit day.