each time i try to finish this out, to leave a footnote that'll be an introduction, because of the way these things are structured, i get stalled. i'm not proud of any of this, but i erased so many things that i cared about, i feel like i need it here. or it will be something that never happened at all.

it's this dumb romantic notion i've got. i wanted the end of the movie, where you see the setting in panorama and you start to think about what it will be in a decade or five or a century. where the events you just saw become a story. stories by their nature get forgotten. most don't even get a proper telling, and i wouldn't even attempt that - even with the benefit of hindsight now. they get lived, and generally you have to be happy with just that.

i wanted it to be a long story, i wanted it to mean something. i'm never going to know, now, if it meant anything to him. at this point, i think about the nothing that happened, the fraction of a possibility, and i think that's gonna be the best story in my biography. 

i doubt i got the best of him, but he got the best of me. when i go running now, i think about him. when i write something. there's this half-conscious hope that if i managed to be impressive enough in some regard, if i managed to be special, something would click into place with karma or the universe and he'd reappear in my life. maybe material, maybe somewhere i could actually see him. it's a foolish hope but it's what i get by on now.

fool though i made myself, that's the one thing i regret. i lost all fucking hope and just shattered. and in terror that he'd see how awful and ugly i'd become, i stopped talking to him, i intentionally vanished. now i can't undo that. no matter where i look, he's gone. maybe because he was hurt or pissed. probably because he was just tired of me.

you can build something up in your head and know completely that your fantasy is your own responsibility. doesn't mean you stop wishing for it to come true. 

in that widescreen movie ending i see when i think of him, it came true, of course. and instead of pathetically sputtering out, we burn together and our ashes hit the wind and eventually disappear. just another secret history where they'll someday build a mini mall. when you think about it that way, what really happened doesn't make much difference. there's something a little beautiful about a lost chance floating away.

eulogizing ruth popper

She watches her own grey toes. In the dimness of the room they resemble gravestones, which is fitting. She sees double, uses that as a sad amusement, blocking out objects with her big toe and still seeing them. As if she weren't even here.

The fight in her is diminished. Maybe gone for good. She can't remember being wild, she only remembers trying to escape dull days by lying as still as possible, faking sick and making forgettable excuses in order to do nothing but stare at the ceiling. There was nothing she ever wanted. Now she only wants to be left alone. If alone is all she'll be, then rip off the pretense and call it that. Call it an old woman in a dirty bedroom, no longer cared for, no longer wanted.

Her skin is cool. It isn't sweaty or dry, no, it's even, it might be pleasant, but she wants out of it. If there's no one to feel it, what's the point. Maybe if she were still pretty, she'd be wanted, but she isn't pretty enough and so she's just invisible.

Like an idiot, like a fool, she keeps hoping for the door to open.

Part of her wants sex so badly it hurts. Some days it possesses her and she can't think of anything else, it's all she can do to keep from rubbing herself on furniture like some animal in heat, offering it up to any warm body that happens to pass. She doesn't go after it, though, because she doesn't want a shameful angry fucking in some dark closet. She wants to be free, she wants back what she was before she fell in love and found herself imprisoned by the spectre she dreamt up.

It wasn't real and she knows that. She wanted it to be something it was clearly never going to, and she's culpable, not him. Could she ever be angry at him? No. Yes. Only in those insomniac 3am moments when she realizes she will never touch him. And she thinks he made her fall in love, like a curse, and how cruel to do that to her.

Then she spends the next day faking sick, playing hooky, staring at her toes and knowing she built her own damned prison. She saves up courage and starves herself so she'll be able to slip through the bars. She hopes she didn't invent her one good chance, but she knows nothing else will ever live up to it. Even if she makes it out alive, she'll be a fugitive, forever running from the sadness she brought upon herself.

what if i could just go back

If I could start over and do better I could do it now, now I know what to do. My floor would still be real wood and the would-haves would be dids. My limbs and heart would be hard and my mind would not be melted mush. My fingers would still be lightning quick and I would still weave that magic with them.

It feels like going home. But my walls aren't mine now and I'll be going near, but it won't be any less too late.

What if I could go back and find you? Drag you out of the memories or sink myself back into them, I don't care. You were never there to find, I know it, it was just in my head, you were all that was in my head. That hasn't changed, at least, but it used to be a flush at the fire and now it's just anguish.

All the old days are better than the days we have now, and when the good days are gone, we were too busy to take any pictures. They just blow away like the dust of the cherry trees.

Feels like I could turn a corner or get off a plane and be right back where I made that wrong turn. Maybe it's better I can't, so I don't have to live with making the same mistake twice.

I live in a fire. I live on a stopped train full of chickens and cigarettes. The rain I catch in my hand is sap the trees sweat out and I am bleeding too. My skin's hot and dry, freckling at each burning pinprick.

Standing in the bathroom, my hand, for the first time, did not shake. And no one noticed. I am past catching and past caring. I just want it over as fast as it can be.

I'll be wearing a blue satin dress, I'll be trashy with my burned skin and battered heels. I'll be smoking in the shadows and I'll be waiting.

When the night comes I'll stop smiling. I'll turn my face to the wall and watch those old flames flare up, swallowing secret gasps in the dark as the rest of the world burns down and leaves just the ticket in my hand to the place that's always there. The place I never reach.

i dreamt about you last night. i've been crying all day.

When I do cry I always go in the shower because I don't want to have to atone for my sadness. I don't want to be asked what's wrong and I don't really like other people to know I'm crying in the first place. Because it's weak. Because I want to be harder than that, colder than that. But sometimes shit just gets you.

Third night in a row, and god knows what brought you back from a sore spot to a full-on specter haunting my nights again. the first night I was standing on a freeway overpass and I knew you were below me, about to pass under me. I knew because I was reading it as it happened in a notebook I had. Then I realized I was writing the words and just then you passed under me and were gone and you'd seen me but you were lost in the sea of cars.

The next night was the same thing, I was reading your words, not speaking to you. You slipped up, you said you lived in South Dallas, which is probably not even a real place.

And then last night you were standing there, a full person with a face and features and everything. You were wearing boots and jeans and your hair was cut short. It was grey, which may or may not be the case but I'd spent the night drinking with a guy whose haircut has that same silhouette and it's grey, so. Your face was red, you were flustered, you were moving in to my building. But you sat down, you started playing a game with my husband and I, and you relaxed. You had a normal face, friendly, handsome. But you were whispering to me behind a scorecard and your voice was like Tom Waits or Nick Cave, full of a rumble of frightening secrets, and the whispers became kisses.

I woke up to the same old day with the same old neighbors and that regret was a sharp as it was months ago.

I know you weren't in the old place, but you could plausibly be here as well as anywhere. Sometimes I'm walking up 1st, and I wonder if you could be one of the commuters stuck at the light, if this could be your town, if I could pass you every day and not know it. I wonder if I'd want you to see me and I still don't know. Though the shame that made me want to hide from you is still with me, I fucking miss you, and I miss being able to pretend there was going to be something more.

get me out of this

I can hear him in the hallway, making excuses to no one. When's he's angry, or frustrated, his voice gets nasal, whiny. He's doing the last part of the chores. I'm out of the way. But he wants me to know how much he's suffering. He was a suburban kid. His mom cleaned the house, made his food, wiped his nose so that now he thinks he's allergic to everything.

There's a crash, followed by an expletive he habitually misuses. Who misuses expletives, as though there weren't enough to go around? He sounds like a midwestern churchgoer, dancing around the idea of actually swearing.

I swear to god I do not want to hate him. He's a good person. And I know, believe me, that the things that drive me crazy about him are really just me, feeling trapped.

At the moment there is literally nothing to do. We have no money, we have no furniture. We have a corrupt notion of a home that is really just four walls, and the being trapped is less figurative than it's been since I married him. I stare at the walls and imagine I'm alone, imagine I can go out and walk the streets and see things without having to drag him behind me, whining because he has to go to the bathroom or blow his nose or wants another latte or can't find a job. But I don't leave because walking with him exhausts me and I know he'd never let me go on my own.

I don't want to hate him. I want both of us to get out of this before that happens. Instead I turn it inside out, swallow it. I see what this lie of a life is doing to me and try to just hate that instead.

out with the rain

Time to clean up, time to close up. It's raining drops and the petals drops carry. Any second the ocean is going to sweep down my street like a sweet breeze. On the floating pieces of my dismantled household I'll be washed downhill and out to sea, drift south and hope the couch I'm riding grows wheels to carry me inland.

Inside it's dark like the power was already off. The low clouds block out the sun, a blanket over my head where I am hiding while I still can. And the streets whisper, shush, shush.

They say everything is bigger there, no thin and wan ghosts of the sort who wander the streets here survive. But I'm going to be smaller, once I dry out. What used to be a home I've shaved down to a storage unit. Halved my regal wardrobe, sold what was too big to get my arms around. By the time the waves carrying me out erode me down to what I'm left with I'll be person-sized again. I'm scared that I've surrendered too much. That the current may just pull me down.

why we like the cocky ones

"Come on," is all he says. There were words earlier, when we were sober, but those words were politely fake whereas these two, these two words are real.

He pushes me out with his hands resting on the backs of my hipbones, his thumbs sliding up and down the V that leads to my tailbone, under my shirt, down the waistband of my jeans. Every time we have to stop and wait for a path to clear through the bar he presses against me. But if I try to move my hips against his he pushes me forward, firm and impatient.

The night outside could be embarassing, but he doesn't give it the opportunity. As we fade into the darkness that circles the bar, he adjusts me so I am at his side, his left hand guilessly working its way up my stomach, down the back of my pants, but always guiding me rapidly forward. Suddenly we veer off and we're in an alley.

He presses me into a doorway, face up against one side looking toward the street, and lifts my arms above my head. He's not coy about it, he goes right to my fly and pushes my pants and my underwear down around my knees. He reaches one hand between my legs and the other disappears as I hear him unzip. It doesn't even occur to me to be terrified, or ashamed. He got me into this and, if need be, he'll get me out. I can't be expected to help what my body wants. He knows that. He may have me half naked, up against a wall, but isn't he kind of a gentleman for giving it to me without my needing to ask?

The tip of his erection taps my ass and thighs as he positions me, tilting my hips back so he can slide in. I have to bend over, but when it's in he pulls me back up, not even bothering to undo my bra, just pushing it up above my breasts. I'm nervously aware of a sliver of illumination to my left, just touching my thigh, my hip, my stomach, and now my exposed left breast. It's like he wants me spotlighted, enjoys the position he's put me in. He pulls me back against him, taking all our combined weight on his thighs so he can press fully against me.

He whispers jagged commands in my ear as he fucks me, and any other man I'd refuse, but I find myself stroking his balls, guiding his fingers, whatever he asks. It's surrender. He tells me to come and I do, just like that. It's not my system, but his system works. I have three little orgasms, two big ones. He has two and they drip down the insides of my thighs. I'm not even bothered by it.

Finally we rearrange our clothes well enough to get back to his car. He drives me to his place. We don't collapse into sleep, we do it again. And again the next morning, when he wakes me with his hardon already probing for any orifice at all. While he's in the shower I get my things and slip out.

I don't call him and I don't feel guilty about it. He took what he wanted, used me up, was cocky enough to be certain I wanted it, too. He was right, and it wouldn't be as good if I asked for it. We're done with each other unless fate sets us up like that again.

twelve things that never happened

She never got around to changing the locks on the big mahogany door. It remained a sturdy barrier to friends and the postman but did not protect her from her most dangerous potential visitor.

She never did take off the ring. Not that she didn't think of it, but whenever it occured to her she was someplace inconvenient. Though it meant nothing now she couldn't bear the thought of losing it, of it falling through one of the holes in her pockets and down some gutter full of pennies and dolls' eyes. She sleepily put it on every morning without thinking, because her finger felt wrong without its weight.

She never mended the holes in her pockets. She didn't feel like it mattered. She had nothing worth holding onto.

She would never, as it turned out, go dancing again. Instead she danced indoors, in the living room with the blinds drawn or in the darkness, a silhouette and her shadow on the yellow wall of the hallway. When she danced she had to force herself, because all the songs felt old and tired or gimmicky and incomprehensible. The only time she moved without being in control of it, it was out of nervousness, a dance of impatience instead of the dances of seduction and celebration she used to know.

She never laughed. Not real laughs. The noise that came out was askew, her mouth twisted in the grimace of someone having a heart attack. She barked and snorted instead.

She never burned the things he left behind, though she said she had. Without him they were just shells, staging areas, historical landmarks. They had nothing new to tell her and the memories they used to be full of were washed away with the months and years. Pathetically, she hung onto them anyway, waiting for that piano to animate itself again with the magic only he could give it.

She never minded when someone pointed out it was her fault. Of course it was her fault. She wasn't a talented woman, but she could ruin anything and I mean anything. She should have been a demolition.

She never smoked another cigarette after the pack she burned through waiting for him to come back home. She could have, her weakness would be an affront to no one now. But she didn't deserve that happiness, and when she thought of lighting up a cigarette she felt a nostalgic surge that reminded her of a braver self. She knew it was an illusion and that girl was gone.

She never shed a single real tear. Maybe because she never really believed it.

She never loved him so much as after he left. Her days were silent ceremonies interrupted by unbearable nuisances like hunger or the phone. She'd been lucky and she'd been a fool and hindsight made it sharply clear. Maybe he wasn't rich, but he'd given her the moon, even if it was just a clear night and a mirror of water in his hands. Maybe he didn't tell her everything, but no one ever told her anything as magical as the things he said. Even if she'd wanted more, she missed what she'd had, missed the words he would have spoken to her since. He was her first and last thought each day, and frequently occupied the bulk of the middle part. When she came back down to earth and was forced to remember his absense, the pain was real and physical.

Of course, he never came back.

evicted from the shipwreck

There's a building down the street they just painted, so that the new blossoms of the cherry tree in front stand out in sharp contrast. Everywhere the first pink blossoms have exploded out of dormancy. They're still clinging to the trees, though. The rain so far has been peaceful, constant late winter rain, the kind you wake up to find the streets have been washed by but never actually see. The tsunami rains of spring will be the next two months and only then will the cherry blossoms be loosed from the trees and make pink confetti drifts against the park walls and around the lips of puddles.

I won't be here to see it.

The ocean itself is only really good in spring and fall. In winter it's too cold to enjoy and in summer there are always people around. Once I caught the tail end of spring with a boy. We drove to the ocean and it was warm by the time we got there. We stripped down to our underwear, because the closest people couldn't have told the difference between our underwear and some theoretical swimsuits we might have packed if we'd thought we wouldn't freeze. We drank a bottle of wine, sitting mostly naked on a blanket in front of the closed eyes of the million dollar vacation homes.

Spring and fall are when the ocean is wild, and in spring and fall it's the only place I want to be. But here I go again, moving inland and away from it, springing forward all the way to a summer of sweaty parking lot nights.

I've planned one last caress, but I'll be the furthest thing from alone. My gods and I will say our goodbyes in some landlocked tattoo parlor a few months down the road, I guess. But I don't have enough skin to cover everything I'm going to miss.

i remember it sweetly because i walked out during the best part

When I think of him I think of rainwater. Because when I met him I lived in that town where, if you ever woke up in a man's bed, it was grey and rainy outside and you had to walk through the downtown streets in heels and wet stockings, toes and cigarette getting wet. He had a little studio and a white bed that managed to look comforting in the dreary light. I remember waking up there, him still asleep next to me, and thinking long and hard about whether to escape. I snuck out and when the door to his building closed and locked me out, I regretted it. Not that we were some perfect match, but it was better in his life than back in mine.

He'd been the most stylish man in my class, an arrogant smartass. I bought something from him over the summer and he answered the door shirtless. So then I wanted him. But a couple of one night stands never worked out and we were too jagged to fit. Nothing ever came of it.

Then I ended up alone in a bar in the city, after years. He sat down at the table next to me and neither of us noticed until he got up, or shifted, and found me there. We caught up. I was drunk already. I'd been drunk for months and I told him the whole sad story. But I was confident, taller, grown up, and he noticed. I wasn't hanging any measurements on the prospect of going home with him, I was too blindsided and raw to care. He looked more normal than I remembered, more wealthy, slightly vampiric, but in the tragic sense, not the evil one.

He did walk me home that night and I don't remember if it was raining. He walked me to my porch ten blocks away or so and after an awkward moment, we kissed. It was sweet, the kind of kiss that stirs those teenage butterflies. He left me with his phone number. I always wondered whether he expected me to really call.

what i'll put in my book

I can see it happening already and I know what I need to do. In the wake of duty, this boat is taking on inspiration. I've got siren songs ringing in my ears telling me to let it capsize and float adrift in some romantic ideal of artistic irresponsibility. I can't, though. I'd be too hand to mouth to get anything done, I'd do nothing.

So I'm buying a book for all my dreams. And all those thoughts and the flashes of staggering beauty and the color palettes and the construction plans and the moods will go there. I worry about the big ideas, though. I worry a little book won't hold them without crushing them. Maybe I'll look for them a year hence and find they're incomprehensible, that I no longer understand feelings that were the only things I felt.

The big one:

An ocean with a black sky and silver water, a beach of worn rock formations. A building right on the edge, built in the early 1900s with carefully laid marble and crumbling cornices and huge leaded windows. Isolation, the end of all things, the safety of irrelevance. An interior made of real wood under palls of dust, twelve foot ceilings, deco lamps, chrome light streaming in even in the midst of the eternal storm. A cast of characters who chain-smoke and sleep in their best clothes, opulent and disheveled. A beautiful mime with a broken heart, a prostitute dressed up like a princess, a serial killer and renowned academic. A runaway farmgirl who only wants to be a mermaid.

And there's the character who goes mostly unmentioned to keep the narrator's heart from breaking. A man with no name and a past that is merely the sum of all human experience, or at least the rawer ones. We readers know that he's blonde (or once was), tan, muscular, taciturn. He belongs to music, to the desert. He probably doesn't fit this scene, someone else's dream, and maybe that's why we never find him there. But the careful details of the interior, the glorious faltering lines of the building itself, the ocean and all its passion - they exist in tribute to him.

Even if I write it down, I'm terrified of the day I forget.

my captive machine

The wheels are tigers that run you down and we carry each other through a dusty darkness. It would be dangerous on the freeway, but we're alone, not even a Denny's bleeding neon across the blurry horizon. It's a shit road and the tires kick up gravel, the wheels slide around like nylon across hips. The only light is the dashboard, the speedometer and the ruler lines of the radio. The radio's off. It's just my breath and the breath of the engine. We're like ninjas in the dark, like wild animals stalking a new life we'll pounce upon and rip apart before it can drag us down into comfort.

The car I had before was a piece of shit, and that's why I loved it. One of the back doors didn't open, one day it just quit. It had one primered panel that was a trophy of my first accident. The radiator crapped out once a year and had to be prodded back to life with a few hundred dollars. It burned oil and there were constellations of cigarette burns across the backseat. But it has a supernatural turning radius and cost nothing to insure. It was all business. I never washed it, never cleaned it out, let dirt pile up on it like layers of scars, evidence of where we'd been together (everywhere).

Now I am slowly dismantling the suburban perfection of the new car. Internally and externally I am giving it scars to toughen it up, I am the bad influence, I am carrying it far from safety and past the point of no return. It's cruel. No one else would want it now.

So here we are in the desert, in a demented parody of a bonding exercise. I trust the car because it's the only machine I've got. It trusts me because it can't get away. I wonder what it feels when we park and I go off to eat or sleep, sitting alone at rest. I wonder if it's sad, wondering, why me? My old car didn't give a fuck. My old car was too tough for that emo bullshit. My old car sat gnawing on scraps of roadkill accidentally sucked up into its gears and waited to go again. I can't speak for the new car. Maybe the new car feels it could have been more than running.

We aim not to prolong the inevitable in this household. You can sit shining in your pretty drivway, hidden from death. Or you can chase it down and get it over with.

orgy girls

They have matte tans like Kraft caramel, more ribs than curves, smokey Fetal Alcohol Syndrome eyes and beige lips. They have quiet voices, not gravelly and sultry like you'd think but soft and hesitant. They walk with the posture of dolls, standing straight without standing tall, as though some supplemental piece of re-bar alongside their spine were keeping them from folding in half.

At five in the morning, as the sky dews up, you can see them standing on roofs mostly naked, feeling invisible. They aren't the types to smoke, or swear, or drink to excess. They don't care if you do - they think it's funny. But addiction and vice imply passion, and if they had passions they wouldn't be orgy girls.

Their price buys softness. Comfort disguised in the defensible packaging of scantily clad sluttiness. They never hit hard, they always say yes. They don't scratch or bite and if you go limp halfway through they'll hold your head and stroke your hair, lips silent and eyes somewhere else. A long time ago there was a hole cut out of them, a place for you to hide your weakness. What they get left with is the kind of strength that's good for nothing except making sure they draw the next breath, no matter what, and emptiness.

branches

I just had to look up to know I wasn't home. Home has branches like mathematics that barely branch at all, or branch with such even regularity they look like fractals, computer models. The pattern's repeated all the way down to their pine needle fingertips, a long division of straight lines.

Over my head, the branches bent so many directions you could hardly tell where they began. They twisted upon themselves like crimped hair or broken fingers. Bare of leaves, they looked like freakshow bodies dragged nude into science classrooms for voyeurs of tragedy to examine.

Because home is fertile, a perfect place for growing branches. It rains all the time, driving young limbs back in the direction of gravity, smoothing everything out. There, existing as a branch meant a lifetime of bending cruelly trying to outrun the unstoppable sunlight, jumping through the air like bacon in a pan but unable to dodge the heat. Trees are supposed to be more dignified, but these trees were scrappy and beaten up, foot after foot of broken knuckles.

I couldn't see myself in those streets, shopping in those strip malls or driving everywhere with my air conditioning full blast. I could see living under those sad branches, though, and that's a place to start.

Apieceofsky

Apieceofsky
Originally uploaded by myrtepeert

More form the same person.

Autumn

Autumn
Originally uploaded by myrtepeert

More from the same person.

Sisters

Sisters
Originally uploaded by myrtepeert

I like this photographer a lot.

ordained, huh

They look brave on the floor. Their shadows are cast larger than life by the moving lights, their hips move with the sharp motion of bodybuilders, their footing sure like sprinters. Yet they twirl and appear close to falling, and it's so clean it's obviously illusion. You seen the muscles bulge and shift under the weight and strain of catching hat motion and redirecting it. Really, though, they dance because they're scared.

What are you going to be if you stop moving? It's the obvious shit, for one you'll be a target for Lotharios, and you'll have to find a place to sit or a wall to lean against. But more than that, who will you be to the music? The religious define their lives by their piety. Your life is worth what you worship.

If we had gods, we don't know their names. It may be they have none. One is the warm tingle of your hips revolving. One is the brush of stray fingers across your back. Different faces of some god of lust and sensation. The church is an end unto itself.

You said you don't dance and it made me wonder about you. Who the hell you think you are to refuse. Too scared? Boy, you ought to be scared not to. If you were naked and primitive, you'd give in without a thought, jump under the stars like something in the throes of death. But here, against a floor of people covered in sweat, eyes blank with meditation, you just sit and drink your beer. That's no way to find heaven. It's not as scary as it looks.

young girls in men's underwear

Becca slowly rolls the cigarette between her fingers. The smoke catches under her fingernails and the veil disintegrates before it gets to the screen. She taps it into a dollar store ashtray which bears a sentimental similarity to the ones at Denny's. She lays the cigarette dow in one of the notches on the ashtray's lip.

Ashley lets it sit a second, then picks it up and takes a drag. This time the air from outside pushes the smoke back in. The door to Becca's room is closed and her mom won't be home for two more days, so the smell is not so much a concern. Nonetheless, Ashley feels a little ashamed, a little bit a bad houseguest, a little less glamorous than Becca, a little younger, a little more awkward.

They sit back down on the floor once the cigarette is finished. They have two more Salem Lights in a pack they charmed off the brother of a friend of a friend. Or Becca charmed him. Ashley just stood behind trying not to be obvious about the dilemma over where to put her hands. They're wearing matching outfits, big loose t-shirts and men's boxers. A few years ago, when grunge was still something, this and some combat boots would have passed for an outfit. Now clothes are different and it's not something they'd leave the house in. It's a teenage version of a little girl's summer outfit, halfway to sexy for being borrowed from the opposite sex, yet not revealing or tight enough to pass for sexy in any modern schoolyard or parking lot.

Like witches they sit Indian-style on either side of the ashtray. They have that, the near-empty cigarette pack, a cheap lighter with the child guard pried off, a candle, a razorblade, some pens and paper. It's just shit that's worked its way out of Becca's drawers over the past 36 hours or so. Things that might come in handy or are good to fidget with.

"We have to get some beer," Becca comments, tracing the razor blade over the pink blister bubble of her big right toe.

"I know," Ashley agrees, watching the blade press a furrow in the skin, but not cut. It's getting darker and the light is a doilie of golden spots. When the breeze shifts Becca's toe passes into the negative space of imminent night and Ashley can't see if she's making herself bleed or just flirting with the notion.

"Should we call Dave's brother?" Becca is suddenly all dark, except her eyes which look predatory and determined, glowing through the humidity. It feels to Ashley like that moment when you're high and you've been lost in some moronic thought, then you come back to reality and there's a new plan, everything's different. Becca likes Dave's brother and she probably doesn't care about the beer.

"I don't know. Is he gonna come over?"

Becca just shrugs, pushing herself up with one hand as she grabs the ashtray with the other. She pads down the dark hallway to the bathroom and Ashley hears the toilet flush, carrying out the stale smoke smell and the evidence. When she comes back, she has the cordless phone, and plops down next to Ashley. "You call him," she hands Ashley the receiver.

"Fuck no, it's your idea." Ashley drops the phone back in Becca's lap, crossing her arms, leaning back against the bed and looking up at the faint glints of sparkle nestled in the popcorn of the ceiling.

Becca calls him. They smoke the last two cigarettes on the porch, feeling safe under the cover of darkness. Dave's brother charges them way more than it should cost for a six-pack of Schmidt's and a pack of Camel Lights. Becca doesn't say anything, it doesn't even seem to register that he's leaving until he's gone and she's just a scratched-up fourteen year old standing in the dark in boxers she didn't take from a man but bought new at Target.

They drink their beers mostly without words, feeling frustrated and jangly, looking out at a weak spread of faint porchlights wondering if anything's happening anywhere. Until they're drunk and bouncing on the bed to the radio, just little girls in their innocent boxer shorts. They fall asleep like puppies and the next day goes the same.

the russian house

Technically, she sent him away. In truth, though, he'd been gone for a while. She just did the dirty work of goodbye.

The limp sentiment of her desire had followed him around for years, hiding in shadows, scared to show itself. It took one casual caress, just a simple thoughtless kindness, to set it off. It became a monster, a glutton, a cancer. When that happened Marchette's life changed. Her adoration of him was her life.

That pretense was where she built the Russian house. In the Russian house, she pretended he loved her back.

The fruit was made of glass, like jewels from The Arabian Nights. The coffee and tea were excellent, but the water came in straight from a river of ice and was too cold to drink. There were cigarettes in dusty boxes on tables choked with ashtrays and teacups.

The house itself was windowless, like Chinese restaurants from the fifties. Inside it was a different world than out, you were boxed up like some delicate doll. The walls were covered with brocades, velvet curtains, sumptuous to conceal the evidence that the house was a prison. The rooms crawled with haphazard antiques, looking like they'd frozen in the midst of an evacuation. The only natural light was from the skylights in the ceiling, the silver glow of wet clouds or the occasional screaming of moonlight.

So picture Marchette laying against the threadbare velvet of some 200 year old wingback chair, her cigarette yellowing her pale fingers. Picture her wandering around the house in a slip and long socks, asphyxiating in the heat of the battalion of old radiators that could only be on or off. Picture her loving him hopelessly, even as he was fading, falling back alone onto a dusty bed and dreaming he fell with her.

The entire world outside whizzed and sighed and she forced herself to ignore it. She stayed in her Russian house and refused to hear it. She conjured up his presence from scraps of notebooks and radio static in empty speakers. She made herself feel him. And she begged him to join her there.

He didn't, though, he wouldn't. Maybe the structure flattered him, but he wouldn't go inside. He admired it and encouraged her, but never passed its threshold.

Finally she told him to take his drinking glass from the wall and leave. She was ashamed. She felt grotesque, so in love she'd been willing to be rejected over and over, despite the hole defeat carved out of her soul. She never blamed him. She'd toyed with men who set themselves up to be playthings, and it would have been hypocritical to begrudge him the same conceited entertainment.

She doesn't know whether he looks for her on the plain, dull streets of real life. She'd pretty sure he's stopped looking for her at all. But she still looks for him. When the emptiness of real life leaves her thinking she should end it, sometimes she goes back to the Russian house. She lights a cigarette and waits for him, even though she knows he isn't coming.

things you catch in clubs

It's I don't know how late. We've just eaten and we're in the bathroom, me and two girls I don't know. It's barely lit by pink bulbs and I'm puking in the sink. They're in the two stalls.

I raise my head and drop my hair. It's messy on purpose anyway, it still works. I rinse my mouth and the extra drops spill down my chin. I grab my touch-up kit befor either of them can weasel a space in front of the mirror. I lay fresh foundation across my cheeks. It's a little dark, it hides the post-puke paleness. I have eye drops, too. Then we all light our cigarettes and we go, talking to each other about I don't know what, some bands, some boys. I don't know these bitches.


The club is new and filthy. It used to be something else that used to be something else and now it's this, unadvertised, exclusive as hell. I lose those girls and the guys we were with. Doesn't matter, I'm having a good time, dancing, doing lines in the bathroom with whoever.

I meet this guy and he's pretty nice. He's got a pinstripe jacket and a scarf and about a week of beard growth which scratches my face. I go home with him. Find out later the condom broke so I email myself from my phone a reminder to get a morning after pill.


About a month later that club is old news and they're taking street style photos of last year's socialites outside. We're going to some new place painted all white inside and barely lit so it's supposed to look like you're dancing in the belly of a ghost. I'm sharing a cab with some guy I don't know. He's got his hand up my skirt and I'm texting this girl who's going to meet us there. I keep swatting him away and he keeps pretending he forgot.

And then it's just like I heard something. Some animal over the tire noise and the driver speaking another language into his cell phone. And it says something true, it says, "You smell their blood." I do, I smell it. The pervert next to me and the oblivious cabbie. It's good.

He pulls his hand away and I look down to see hair growing fast, like time-lapse. Trippy. I bite right through his neck. Takes a minute for the cabbie to notice and I eat and eat. The cab stops with a screech and I jump out, into darkness, trailing neck blood.

I just charge from one meal to the next, through the alleys where the kids fuck up against slick walls and buy their drugs. Where people mind their own business. I move through so fast I'm gone before they find the bodies, they probably think I'm a slasher or someone's illegal pitbull. When I charge at them I can smell the fear and it smells good.

There's a fmiliar smell then, in some alley in I don't know where, I don't know how far I've run. My blood knows it, it's in my blood. It comes around a corner, just like me, covered in hair and other people's blood. I stand still and it raises its wet nose to my neck, makes my heart beat. I hear my own steamy panting roughen as it examines me, smelling me and the blood in my mouth. It grabs me and we run. We go until dawn.


Same guy from a month ago. I wake up in his bed, confused about why it's familiar. His sheets are smeared with dark stains, and the blood on our skin has dried to dark brown.

It occurs to me I should call the people I've slept with since. But the light hurts, so I just go back to sleep.

yes i still miss you

A depression is a dent. Just some place where the material supporting the surface has weakened or given way, or where external forces have crushed the surface in one place. Now what I have, what I have is a cavity. I have perfect hollowness, I have what you get when you scoop out a Halloween pumpkin to carve it up. I have ragged, vulnerable nerve endings trailing into a dark and empty space, repeatedly relaying the message that nothing's there.

I get aches, still, when I hear some songs, when it warms up and the sun shines silver. I get excited thinking about a new home in a different part of the world and then remember I have nothing to get excited about. I'll never know whether I've gotten closer to you or farther away. Even if I knew it was the former (and didn't just suspect), you're not there anymore. You're gone, it's my fault, and goddamn me I keep forgetting.

It's not different, though. Not really different. Still, you're the only thing I care about. Don't argue with me and don't tell me what I think. You're the only thing I care about. You always were. But you always left that cavity. It's just now I can't throw some leaves over it and call it a depression.

some things just don't work if you aren't smoking

You need those dirty stucco-upon-styrofoam walls that catch the black dust of the parking lot on the grooves of their teeth. You need big, flat, even sidewalk squares, all of them perfect and none halved or quartered to fit, like Legos or squares on a grid. You need unseen crickets and lamps in the parking lot that have just begun to flicker, marching away across a flat and empty expanse of welcoming and uncaring commerce.

In your room, you need cable TV. Five channels of ESPN and obligatory HBO but none of the good stuff. You need the Weather Channel scrolling FLASH FLOOD WARNING across the bottom of the screen and the repeating graphic of the tentacles of a low pressure system moving down into the area from (name of scapegoat state here). You need ashtrays hidden like Easter eggs one every cheap laminate surface, your nearly nude reflection watching itself ash rebelliously into the bathroom sink, sitting on a counter wide enough to unload your entire suitcase on.

You need that motel smell that clings to you after just a few hours, the cloud of cleansers that will follow you home in your bags and will survive the recycled air of the pressurized cabin. You need the feeling of thin carpets in ugly patterns under your bare feet as you wander the empty hallways after midnight, mid-week.

Finally, you need the storm. You need the crash that hits the giant window you can't open, the sudden hesitation of the air conditioner as it gets cooler outside. You need the plastic card that opens all the doors and the softpack of not-your-brand you bought in an unfamiliar chain convenience store five parking lots away, and your flip-flops. You run down the back stairs that don't cross the spotlight of the lobby and stand outside with your back to the dirty wall. It takes you ninety seconds but you get one lit only to watch it turn brown with dampness as you try to smoke it. You need to feel the warm rain flowing down your bare legs and soaking your hoodie. That cigarette in that storm is what you came for.

how i almost died on the couch

It's strange to realize how much people are willing to overlook. You can be as invisible as you like by making the people around you uncomfortable. You can scream in people's faces and they will smile blankly and praise your vocabulary, not focus on something else but change the subject subconciously, blocking the unpleasantness, easy as breath.

I confessed and no one said a word. And then I felt stupid for all the years I've spent concealing the things in my head. I was flattering myself to think people would care or try to hold me back. It's not that people are disinterested, it's that their minds filter those things automatically. It's kind of impressive.

It happened on the couch, it happened because I was drunk in the dark, tired, sore, defeated. I felt closer to the couch than to other people, the people outside, the people in the other apartments, they all felt like fiction. Me and the couch were real, the same. We were stationary and unchanging, our existances valueless to ourselves. All our days were the same. We endured without hope, silent and ambivalent. We were capable of observation, and that was it.

So I broke from the couch and went to where I'd hidden the sleeping pills behind my computer at another time when I felt too fat (different kind of couchlike) to leave the house. I wrapped my hands around them like they were some light-sensitive insect or a baby bird I was smothering the life out of. They were fully hidden and I lay down on the couch again to think about it. The couch didn't care at all. Not that it would have changed anything, not that the opinions of couches ever hope to.

The music was on shuffle and the succession of songs seemed designed to prompt me to action. I finished a glass of red wine, which was the end of a second bottle. It was Teenage Fanclub, If I Never See You Again. Something happens, a song changes, the wine's gone, I forget. I stand and quick with fear I'll change my mind I swallow all the pills straight from the bottle. They don't even make a sound, they just fall onto my tongue like Tic Tacs or rice, sitting obediently until I take a drink of water and wash them down. And I stand there at my computer where the bottle of water is, taking long swallows, staring at the wall, trying to think. My mind goes yes, no, yes, no.. I find myself wnating to laugh. Crazy doomed laughter. Disbelieving laughter.

It takes me a long time to pass out. Before I do I'm up, talking, walking around. Sleeping pills don't seem to work on me. Maybe that's why it didn't take. Maybe I didn't take enough. I'm no chemist.

And now it's been two weeks, maybe, and it's as good as forgotten. Nobody knows, because nobody wants to. And I wonder if before I leave I'll go to my friendly prescription-happy doctor and tell him I can't sleep. In case it doesn't work out, or in case it does and everything's perfect and I continue to hate myself. Everything in me says yes, do it, you know it's what's needed.

I'm not good at making up my mind. I need to try things before I'm sure of them. But now that I've tried it, I'm pretty certain I'll be ready to go next time. Fall down on some new couch and together refuse to be.

the robot queen

The robot queen is only half. Her biological components were replaced over the years in a series of back alley operations, leaving her filled with ticking organs as imperfect and personal as prison tattoos. As a queen, she is not so much ruler as representative. She yells for the voiceless.

There are other humans who've had as much work done, but it's careful, it's cosmetically sound. Not like the robot queen, with her waxy preserved flesh banded by chains of rivets and puckered by access hatches and indicator lights. Those others, unless you ripped them open, pass easily for men or women, while the robot queen, naked before you, looks more like a dirty city.

You could say she does odd jobs. Or you could call her a whore, because there are stronger robots, colder killers, better cooks, more attentive maids. It's this that makes her a robot, though, this working to live which humanity left behind a century ago. While there is a servant class she is of it and the servant class is growing all the time. And tonight you're just lucky, you just happened to end up waving a fuel credit at the girl who runs the show as far as your kind is concerned. To shield her from this dirty work wouldn't be the robot way. You wonder if she even feels it. If she still cares what intimacy meant to her old body. There's no question her reproductive organs were scooped out to make way for something more useful. What about the nerves that made it worthwhile?

You can't tell and she won't tell. She watches you with dead eyes, not appearing to breathe, waiting for an instruction. So you summon her and she kneels. It helps you put it out of your mind, that this thing used to be human and your curiousity over how it experiences its work.

You've leaned your head back, watching the cracks of darkness that worm their way through the ceiling's crumbling plaster. The kife is so quick that you feel only the choking sensation and a flash of terror as you try to draw air and cannot. Then it ends, and she takes your wallet and is silently gone. And if you were still awake inside that organic shell you might realize that her leadership is what's left of her humanity, and the humanity all robots can't help picking up from their creators. They hate you.

a disappearance in a casino

We're searching for each other in a casino with nice windows after he's finished with the Keno and I with the buffet. You don't often see windows in a casino, even these middle of nowhere tribal jobs. He said he was going to play the video poker, but all I see are slot machines. Everyone's smoking, but the air is the cleanest air ever, shining and super-oxygenated. Still, I can't find him.

A casino is much like a factory, like a toy factory making the biggest brightest animatronic wonder the world has witnessed. One after another, the slot games roll past like marvels paused on an assembly belt, jingling and twinkling. Like million dollar debutantes, they all start to look the same. They're not meant to be lined up together. Each is so ripe and fearsomely adorned that, taken as a group, they're just so many unwinnable fairy tales.

The only people who seem happy are the little old ladies. The women especially, the younger they are, the more they look like they're out of time. I don't talk to them - I keep to myself. I can only wonder who they are, how there are so many of them who've driven 50 miles from the nearest freeway, dolled up but dreary in J Crew and Chanel No. 5.

I sit in the lounge to wait.

The bartender is a mountain of a woman with some sort of glitter stuff in her frizzly blond hair-cloud. She refers to me as "Honey". Everyone in the casino calls me "Honey", although I'm pushing thirty and have two kids. All the world is a truck stop and I am just one more empty mug to be filled with greasy coffee and the cheap affectation of affection. Maybe it's just that I'm short.

Her name tag says Kimberly, but she doesn't look like one. Sometimes I wonder if people who have to wear name tags assume names, or share names, like phone sex girls. "Kimberly? This is Kimberly? Do you have a cold?" Or maybe phone sex girls don't do that. I would. After all, it's not you they're calling for, is it? It's the Kimberly you pretend to be, the one who blinks out of existance when you go home and make a meatloaf and put your feet up. Shouldn't the swing shift take over for Kimberly, so Kimberly is always there when the customer needs her and the customer doesn't have to reintroduce himself and explain his diaper fetish to Miranda or Pam or Brianna?

Kimberly and her thunderhead hairdo waddle off after my Whiskey Daisy. If we were in an ordinary bar, it would be empty now (2pm on Thursday), but there are no time zones here, no happy hours and no last calls. People aren't even necessarily drinking. A gang of boys is sprawled across the corner booth, drinking Mountain Dew and waiting on some hundred dollar poker tournament where they'll showboat for each other, pretending to be the guys in sunglasses on TV.

The bar feels like a wake, so quiet and clean. So serious.

In one booth, a woman is staring at her cell phone, which is sitting on the table in front of her. It lights up and does a whirring dance around the table, drawing tracks in the pooled condensation from her drink. She doesn't answer it, and she doesn't turn it off. Her drink is finished, but she sits there and stares.

I check my own cell, but he hasn't called. I hate him for taking so long, but I'm so happy. I don't want to get into the car and drive back to the base, outside where it's cold and grey and the roads are banked with the trash of a week-old Christmas. I don't want to sit next to him for that long. If I could forget how much he annoys me for five minutes, I could miss him.

From nowhere, there's a man over my shoulder. He's a sort of collapsed looking old Indian. If you stretched him until the wrinkles fell out of his face and the hunch from his back, he would look at home on the cover of a romance novel. But he's just an old guy in a golfing shirt and Wranglers, and I can hardly deny him a seat.

"Well, thank you very much, Honey." He says, motioning to Kimberly. "It hasn't really been my day. Wasn't relishing the thought of drinking alone."

I shrug, graciously, I hope. I don't want to be rude, but neither do I feel up for small talk.

"How about you, Honey? How's your luck been?"

"I don't gamble."

"No? Hmm. Well I guess that's pretty smart."

Again, I just shrug.

"So whatcha doing in the casino not gambling? You work here?"

I almost say something to the effect of white people aren't allowed to work in the casino, but I think of Kimberly and realize I don't know what I'm talking about. "No, I don't work here. I'm just waiting for my husband."

He gets an odd look. Resigned. "Been waiting long?"

"I don't know. About half an hour, I guess. That's when his Keno game ended. But if he won..."

"One of those."

"Yeah."

We sip our drinks, but not at the same time. We alternate. The monumental bigscreen is playing some football game and we both pretend to be absorbed as they stutter along, pausing every few seconds for some tumbling and flag-waving.

The old Indian guy removes a roll of mints from his pocket and holds them out to me.

I hate to be rude. I say thanks, take one off the roll, and pop it into my mouth. It's attached to a bit of pocket-lint, which I pick off of my tongue. It tastes medicinal. When I first quit smoking, I carried all sorts of candy to snack on when the urge for a cigarette hit me, but the doctor said that wasn't helping my weight any. I've gotten used to the taste of sugar free, but I haven't seen any difference in my weight.

He takes one, lint and all, and sucks on it. Maybe he's thinking what I'm thinking, that bourbon and sugar free mint complement each other in a way that's nice without being especially tasty.

I check the time display on my phone. He's 45 minutes overdue. I slurp the last of my drink and leave Kimberly a five tucked under the coaster.

"Gonna go find your old man?"

I nod.

What's in his eyes looks like pity. "Well, thanks for the company, Honey." He turns back to the game, which is either over or very badly stalled.

Stepping out of the relative quiet of the lounge, the casino is like some frozen Mardi Gras, paused mid explosion. The jubilant ringing of slot machines paying out hangs unappreciated in the air, confetti caught in time and fading. Most of the ringing is for payouts of 5 or 10 cents. The gamblers keep their heads down and keep playing, paper mache gargoyles all wearing the same black leather jacket.

I wander up and down the aisles of machines, wondering if they make a clever pattern when you see them from above. I still have yet to find the video poker, though I do find electronic Keno. I stop and watch one lonely card table with a low bid game going. All the players are retirees, or look it. The dealer is the only one who speaks.

He said I saw the best of him. It could have been, it was pretty good. He could turn the world on if he wanted to with just pocket change words. Could I have loved him? God knows. I never even met the son of a bitch. But did I? I do.