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.