Wednesday, January 21, 2009
His Brother
The legend spoke that he was just five men, equally less than one whole. That his style equated five different styles but that never the two were seen. The Italians had begun to disappear first, and there were suspicions that racism was afoot. The children ran through the fields at night and enjoyed games of lecherous woes and gratuitous follies. We watched with abandon from the veranda we had so come to love. While you and your followers prepared a feast inside our beloved hovel, he came to view me from below the panels of the floor. I would request a photograph, a memory, some proof, that he existed as but one man and not a manner of five. He requested in return, a hug, and I could see a sadness in the beast that the children never thought to perform. A sadness that only you would perceive as well. It was a secret I must keep from all but yourself. He was your brother. And you had only one brother. I clicked the shutter and I hugged the saddened man. I declared myself your closest brethren, as if he were one man of a religious order, I too could be so. He ran into the darkness after the incessantly frightened children.
It was winter and we drank in celebration of the reveal of the man who we feared and revered. I rolled cigarettes for our visitors and told them of our miraculous discovery. You were yet to know, for it was a secret. Your mobile device would make light of this fact some time the next day, as we saw him pace in the front grounds with a satchel too heavy for his shoulders. You asked if perhaps this was some form of medical sadness that inflicted him with a wanting so strong that he would hug someone to death. I warned you that perhaps it was a form of psychosis, and a doctor should be called.
She would be the doctor that would go with you that night, to drink in solace and find what was wrong. She told me that you would request some form of sexual payment from a woman so strong, and that she would refuse, but you would herd her to a point of no objection, and she would succumb. I would be to tell you of this, and I would want to impress your one brother, the man of many men. You would refuse this possibility, as she was but a simpleton in times such as these. Your brother would giggle and request that we play scrabble.
He would leave you this night, as you slept on the veranda we had so come to love. He would leave you in sadness and once again become five men in a winter so harsh that he would need to embrace, in order to survive, his need for human contact.
A Typical Complaint of the Proletariate
There’s something that smells really off about this time of year. Like the whole world has finally stopped crying and now we’re just staring at our blood shot eyes in the mirror, trying to quantify our pain by the only visible remainder of what was. There are no bruises from tears, just the off smell of pent up mucus and dried tears. It fucking sucks. I don’t understand why we can’t all cry at different times. Nobody wants to be consoled by a sad person, but when the whole world is sad, the whole world is lonely at the same time.People talk about the beauty in simplicity, but I never understood that. As they scream what the fuck about the human circulatory system, and yes, it is true. I’d rather an expanse of four leaf clovers than a piece of rotting tarp. I’d rather a pathetic news article about death than a poorly written book of motivational sayings that only get stocked in the gift section of whatever terrible book shop you go to because there’s nowhere else to go. I’d rather you fuck me up than never exist. Shit.
It’s not hot anymore. The only thing we know about this place is that it’s hot and that when we leave we will appreciate below 20 degree temperatures, but shit, it isn’t even hot today. It is like having a tooth pulled on the one day of the year it stops hurting. I am extracting a fucking tooth while the whole world is crying and there’s nobody around to hand us a fucking tissue. And that is a figure of speech because the tissue has only ever been a symbol of sympathy when one knows not what else to do. Everyone knows we’d rather deal with the sticky shit of eye expulsion. It is the only thing that makes it real.
And everyone is excited that it’s a new year and that means that everything is going to change, but as you said, it’s just another fucking day. Nothing changes but nothing stays the same. Nothing drastic happens and life goes on with nothing to write home about. Maybe there’s a new lot of ants building a home in your kitchen or one of your friends got a new job. But who cares? It doesn’t effect you. It doesn’t affect you. Effect. Affect. Effect. Affectation. I’ll fucking exaggerate your pretense.
Why, when we talk about the world, do we always mean the people in it.
I wish I was back.
A Reprehensible Christmas Decoration
Should I have wanted my character to appear outside of herself, I would have invented a better term for this condition. I wanted her to be analytical of the situation around her but not as though she were stringing together a list of memoirs into a conceivable and somewhat emotionally reprehensible Christmas decoration. No. I wanted her to be aware of the feelings that hung listlessly in the air but not speak of them in the way a nihilist teenager understands their place in the universe; alone and original. She was not. She woke this day surrounded by people she had known her entire life, as her life had not truthfully started until the day they were all born. She was always told that her place in the world was accentuated by the family she belonged to, if only until the day she decided to leave. She had, the day before, been writing about the utter destruction of the earth due to an overbearing sun, and found no interest in including a mooing whale in the story she already saw to be going nowhere. He, in turn, found no interest in her story at all. And so their conversation ended.
She woke this day surrounded by people she had known her entire life, and felt little if not no affinity with. No, she felt no attraction between her antigens and their antibodies. It was simply the one day of the year in which she had to allow her favourite antibody to spend time with his opposing antigens, on the other side of the country. It was, after all, the celebration of the birth of Jesus, a man she too felt no affinity with.
She woke this day to some level of panic. It was a hot day, like every other day in the northern Summer, only it was a very early hour and not at all a time for daylight. But there was daylight. There was an immense daylight. It burnt through everything around them. The rain covers on their tents began to change from silver to a burnt form of plastic that stank through the already heavy air. She ripped at her clothes, not caring that nobody had seen her body for the last three years. She ripped at her clothes, imagining that it would not matter as she must be dreaming. What else could explain such an odd change in weather? Certainly not science.
The person you are calling cannot be reached. Please check the number and try again.
She repeated these words in her head, knowing they were only a memory of years before. She knew that phone companies no longer recited these words as it was not in good public relations to claim that the customer had made a mistake. She just had not bothered to listen to the new messages as there was no point, so she always hung up. Either way, his phone was off. Or out of service. Or broken. Or lost. Or something.
They drove through the heat, assuming that some sort of freak wave had affected the place they had been sleeping, and that the rest of the world remained in beautiful tropical wonder, as there was no life outside of
When she was afraid she would write letters to him. She would intend to tell him all the things she never would say, but the letters would turn into lies, and then into stories, and she would let him read them anyway because they’d never say the things she didn’t want to say. They would say the things that someone else would say. He would laugh and say she was full of shit, and she would assert that everything she said was the absolute truth. If he never knew when she was lying, he would never know when she was telling the truth, and they could live in gregarious silence. A family that never spoke. Lovers that never made love.
Six months later they finally ran out of food. The televisions had long ended and the radios only worked at one time of the day, letting the masses know that there was little more hope than there was the day before. He was gone, and her books were filling up with letters never that would never be sent, like the lyrics of some long forgotten aspirant punk band. Six months later and the water had stopped a long time before, and the release of a heat stroke related death was becoming more and more viable.
Their car was covered in video cameras and the windows were blacked out, to hide them from the giant explosion too many light years away to witness. They drove and drove to find some solace. Something to fill their empty stomachs, and at the risk of sounding cliché, hearts. The clouds had cleared up months before, but the rain had never stopped falling.
She ran to finish her story. To become a character. To become a number who felt her skin burning as she graced his eyes with one last moment of her presence. His phone may have ceased to call, but he never stopped playing number games, waiting for her to return. She was dead, and he was alive. And he never once wrote or read a letter. He never once heard the rejection tone of trying to call her back.
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