By The Bi [#2]
I Feel Pretty Writer’s Collective
Published by Gibson Culbreth and Wyl Villacres
Copyright 2012 I Feel Pretty Writer’s Collective
(All Rights Reserved, Individual Authors Retain Ownership)
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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FICTION
1. Ocean Graveyard- Virginia Baker
2. Magic Eight Ball- Liz Baudler
3. Carnival- Sayla Blackwood
4. Atrophy- Shelbie Janocha
5. Lucy and Eleanor- Ben Kramer
6. Doggy Style- Amber Ponomar
NON-FICTION
7. How to Write a Research Paper in Less Than 24 Hours- Brittany Selters
8. Getting Arrested- Lisa Mrock
9. Casino- Wyl Villacres
NOVEL EXCERPT:
10. Breathe- Gibson Culbreth
11. Kaplan Waking Up- Jazy Jes
Charlie’s boat was a worn down dinghy that he bought from an old fisherman his father knew. It used to be Charlie’s pride and joy. He would spend hours onboard, sanding the floor, painting the sides, refitting the old ropes that were holding up the sails. But the boat was beginning to lose the magic it once held. What was once Charlie’s escape from reality was now his cage.
The sun was shining as he adjusted the sails and checked the motor before beginning his day. Even at midmorning, the unavoidable promise of a hot afternoon was clear. Only a few other men were out on the dock, some returning from their early morning fishing trips, unloading their catches, showing off to the other men, some getting ready to leave.
He heard the sound of the rattling of wheels as they rolled over the wooden boards of the dock and he looked over his shoulder to spy the two delivery men, Frank and Buster, both of them big, stocky men who were overdressed on this warm day, making their way to where his boat sat at the end of the dock. They were pushing a big, refrigerator sized cooler with Arnold’s Bait Shop printed on the side in orange letters. Charlie picked his bucket hat up from the floor of the boat and pulled it over his long, oily hair that he hadn’t washed in weeks. He gave his scruffy beard a scratch before climbing out of the boat to meet the men.
“Hey there, Charlie,” Buster greeted him as they stopped in front of the boat. He wiped the sweat that was beginning to bead on his forehead. “How ya doing on this beautiful morning?”
“Can’t complain. How are you boys doing?” Charlie stood in the boat, looking up at the men on the dock, studying the cooler, trying to determine what kind of day lay within it today.
“Not too shabby.” Buster bobbed his head up and down. Frank was looking out beyond the both of them, out into the sea that glimmered in the morning sunlight. “We got a pretty big shipment for you today.”
“Well, I better get a big pay for it.” Charlie tried to sound hard, but he just sounded tired instead.
“Don’t you worry, old man. We’ll have your money ready for you when you drop the cooler off at the truck tonight.” Charlie didn’t like the way they called him “old man.” It wasn’t even apparent to him whether he was that much older than these two boys.
They began the process of loading the cooler onto the boat. Fastening ropes around the cooler, they began to lift it, using the pulley system installed on the boat. The vessel leaned dangerously to one side as the cooler was suspended into the air and transferred into the boat. It took a few minutes for the boat to stop rocking and settle into the water.
“Alright, Charlie. We’ll see you at the usual spot.” And with that, the two men left Charlie standing on his boat, the cooler sitting before him, an ugly sore he could never rid himself of.
Things weren’t always this way. A few years ago, he was a real fisherman. He had a crew of two young men and he would float atop the water all day, bringing home loads of fish as the sun set. But now he spent long days by himself and he only caught fish when a desire would overcome him. He didn’t need the money anymore and he didn’t want to spend more time out on that ocean than he needed to.
He was in his mid-forties and had a wife, Josephine, the girl he had for most of his life. Together they had a daughter, Angeline, who was seven now, just beginning to accustom herself to the weight of the world. Her sweet smile and the way she would jump into his arms at the end of the day, screaming “Daddy!” as he walked in the door was the only thing that Charlie looked forward to these days.
His heart had grown heavy. The soft fluttering he once felt in his chest had become lead that pulled at his insides. The world was playing a terrible trick on him, turning him into something he once hated. He stopped caring about Charlie. He let his hair grow long, trickling past his chin. Sometimes he pulled it back, but more often than not it was wild, blowing around violently in the ocean wind. His scraggly beard that grew on his jaw line covered most of his mouth. Josephine hated the salty smell that clung to his facial hair and she would offer to wash him. “I’ll be gentle,” she would offer, but Charlie shrugged her off. He figured he should be as filthy as he felt inside.
He never wanted to get into this kind of business. Charlie was a completely harmless guy and no one would have figured he’d be mixed up in anything unholy. Which is why he was sought out to partake in this ugly deed. No one would expect it. And he couldn’t turn down the price tag that came along with the job. “Besides, they’re not really people. Not anymore,” he tried to convince himself, day after day, as he opened up the color, tied the weights to the once-living flesh and dropped the empty bodies into the sea, into the ocean graveyard, void of tombstones and epigraphs.
The sea was choppier than usual, the sour waves squealing as they splashed up against the rickety boat. It took longer than normal to reach his spot, right above the Pacific trench that cut through the ocean floor. Charlie could sense when his boat was above the gash in the earth. A musky shiver ran through his bones once he reached the unmarked cemetery, where nameless bodies were forgotten. But he still leaned over the side of the boat to see the deep blue shadow of the abyss snaking beneath him.
He cut the engine and walked over to where the weights rested beside the cooler. The ropes were already tied to them. All he had to do was knot them around the legs and drop the bodies into the water so they could sink down to the bottom, down where all the other bodies sprouted from the ocean floor like balloons. How many bodies were resting there so far? How many half-decaying corpses were hidden beneath the waves, being eating by the fish that swam around them? Lifting the top off of the cooler he moved aside the layer of dead fish that acted as decoys. Wish those suckers would change these fish every once in a while. Like dead bodies don’t smell bad enough already.
As he reached into the cooler to pull out the first victim, his blood sputtered from his heart, igniting in his veins. It had been years, at least twenty, since he had last seen Samuel, but as Charlie studied the body before him, he was certain he was staring into the open eyes of his older brother, his dead older brother. “Oh Sammy, what did you get yourself into this time?”
By Liz Baudler
I’m a UPS delivery man and it’s true, you need four of us to deliver a package, even if it’s not a piano. Except today there’s just me. You might expect that I go to some pretty interesting places. What no one expects is that all the time I wonder, maybe I’ll find out where I’m supposed to go, not that I don’t have directions or know the street names. In a way I don’t, I’m only trying to get to the place everyone’s said I could go to all along. That’s one of the reasons I took this job: variety, variety, like that blind guy yells down at the fruit stand. Personally, I want to know how he knows it’s an assortment and not all bananas.
The next package and the next address are a real peach. It’s huge and it’s bound for Reta’s Psychic Ron-day-Voo. Whoo-hoo. On the third floor of a brownstone, I can tell from the numbers. Shoo-whee.
You probably would think this if you were a UPS man, what’s in all the goddamn packages? Not only what makes them so heavy, but what’s important to the person who sent it and why they sent in the first place. I read in the papers about some clairvoyant guy who solves crimes by holding on to someone’s old clothes or something. It’s a good thing he doesn’t work for a shipping company. The label rarely tells you anything on the package, so if you’re really interested you have to guess. It keeps you from getting bored and noticing how much the 50th box weighs compared to the first one. When I give it to the person and they sign off on it I always want to ask them to tell me what they got, if they know, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes I want to ask them if they know what they really got. Sometimes I’ve wanted to screw up the routes for a day just to see what someone would say if they ordered silver spoons and got maroon socks.
Damn people who live all alone at the top of city brownstones and still get heavy packages! I kick the bottom of the door. Sounds like knocking to me.
The door flies open with a jingle-jangle-jingle and I nearly fall in with the package in front of me like I’m bowing to her or something. It’s a lady who might be ugly, but it could just be the ugly jewelry and the ugly makeup and Christ—she’s still got curlers in her hair and it’s ten in the morning.
“I predicted that,” she tells me, but she sounds happy. “I predicted that you were going to come when I was doing my hair. Of course, I started doing it five minutes ago and the delivery was supposed to be for 10 o ‘clock, and it does seems like every time I start doing my hair someone comes to the door or calls me or drops in through the roof, so really, it wasn’t that difficult to predict and you shouldn’t be too impressed. But come in, come in, kind bearer of packages and have a fresh tea bag with me.”
I like burnt coffee better, but after carrying this box up three flights of narrow steps and kicking her door until I almost fell over, I’ll take raw sewage.
“You need sugar, right? It does taste like sewage, I agree, bad brand. They hawk it to penniless psychics like yours truly, but I really don’t know why they try. My custom mood ring turned a vile shade of pea-soup-green, and that needs no interpretation.”
I snort the tea out all over her purple, pink, and green tablecloth, and stand up in disgusted shock to whack a bunch of dead weeds tied to the ceiling with my head.
“Sit down, sit down, I had a napkin ready for your reaction to my little disclaimer. Speaking of disclaimer, it doesn’t take much power of prediction to know you’ll be late for your next delivery.”
“Oh yes, ma’am.” I say, throwing the napkin over the tea puddle, “that’s right, I gotta go, thanks so much for the tea, it wasn’t bad...now if you’ll just sign here.”
“Ah, but something tells me you’re going to be unavoidably detained.” she says with a leer.
“And how’s that?” I ask, picturing the truck outside idling in a no-parking zone and wondering if she’s attempting to seduce me. You’d be surprised at how lonely some ladies get and how good-looking we UPS men are.
“Don’t worry, you won’t get a ticket. The meter cop’s a friend of mine. I did his horoscope last week. I fudged it; he’s going to win at bowling tonight and his romantic dinner with his girlfriend tomorrow will go swimmingly. I can park my old bug in front of the garage door now.”
“What the hell?” I say and sit down. The stool with the spangled shawl dangled over it splits in half and I end up sitting on the floor.
“This is nice and cozy.” She coos, but then straightens up. “Tut tut, a few less donuts, no doubt would have preserved my furniture.”
“That’s the cops with their donuts.” I snarl, forgetting to apologize.
“You have a rare psychic aura that surrounds you.” She sticks a match in the mouth of a carved wooden frog.
“I’ll be happy to reimburse you any dama-A wha?” I say, totally freaked out by the last sentence and by looking around at all the weird stuff in her joint.
“It is not mere chance that you showed up at my door.” She says creepily, and then frowns. “At least, I don’t think it is.
“Hey, now.” I go, really confused. “Just because I’m some UPS delivery man who shows up at your door doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”
“Oh, no one who’s stupid would wonder what’s in the boxes he carries around all day.”
OK, maybe this crackpot was psychic after all.
“Magic 8 balls.” she says, giving the box a shake.
I started laughing. I couldn’t help myself. Whatta kook.
“So all these people...”
“The six.” she says.
“The who-what?”
“The six clients I’ve had in the past 6 six months. One a month. It works out nicely, don’t you think? So manageable.”
“You shake a magic 8 eight ball in front of them and that’s it?”
“Well, it’s a special system.” she says, drawing back a curtain. There were 51 mouse traps, about half of them set with a magic 8 ball in the spring, arranged in circles on the floor.
OK, I’ve been some crazy places, back alleys, bars with one bottle of booze, tin shacks and trading card shops, but this time I thought I would I would back out all the way down the stairs and back to the truck, ticket or no ticket, cop’s horoscope or no cop’s horoscope.
“I spring the mouse traps, which shakes the balls, and they roll out all over the place, pretty intense at times. Then I figure out the actual prediction based on the fractional coefficient of the probability factorial, a ratio of good predictions to bad.”
I blinked.
“It’s calculus.” she said with a smile.
“Calculus?”
“Hey, I’m a math teacher. This is just part-time, a little stress release, a little probability experiment to do in my spare time. Some women sew, I do this. My name’s not Reta, it’s Cindy. I have an M.A in Mathematical Education and theory. I bet math was your favorite subject in school, right?”
“Oh.” I said, because there was nothing else I could say and I had already blinked.
“The more equations, the merrier.”
“Ah.”
“Life’s one great gigantic equation, probability where everyone’s numbers are different, there’s so many ways to solve it, you might never solve, or worst comes to worst you get the wrong answer. But,” she ripped open the box and poured the whole thing out onto the red and blue flowered carpet.
“Good, seems to be 25. I had to get this order because I didn’t have enough. 51’s my old class rank. I love the mystery and total insignificance of that number. I used to think of it as football jerseys. And you know, it could have easily been 42. 42, the meaning of life?”
“Is it now,” I said uneasily.
The balls spread all over the trap-covered floor, looking like little black mice waiting to be caught.
They rolled only to the unset traps. I couldn’t believe it. It had to be a trick.
One ball didn’t roll with the other ones, but like it was on a mission of its own, it rolled toward us. She instinctively jumped out of the way like it was a set bomb.
“I have to let them find their own directions.” she told me.
I didn’t move. That one ball kept rolling, rolling towards me, its little black head pointed my way. It hit the steel-toed boots I wear to work every day with a little click. It stopped. I still didn’t move.
Neither did she for a little bit. She had her eyes closed. Then she opened them and said, “Wow.”
“Yeah, I know.” I said, still not moving. “ Do you want your ball back?”
“It has chosen you.” She said.
“Um...it has?”
“Pick it up.”
So I did. I realized its smoothness, and how little it was. I rolled it beneath my fingers. It came to rest on “You lucky dog.”
“I am?” I said.
“Use it well. She seemed to snap out of the fog she’d been in, and with the ugly harlequin specs I could tell she was a math teacher. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a pile of geometry tests to grade and you probably have missed 5 deliveries if you don’t have a ticket by now. And now I need to get another magic 8 ball before I can do this again.” she sighed.
“How do I use it?” I asked
“It all depends on whether you believe in destiny or free will.” She said, grabbing the tests and a red pen and throwing them on the rug.
I decided to push my luck. “Okay, do you want to meet for dinner tonight after I’m done with my shift?”
“Nice try, Free Willy. Not gonna happen.” She said, shoving me towards the door. “Now look at you, I have to make do with only 50, out!”
“Maybe you’ll get another shipment.” I said.
She wagged a finger at me. “I expect great things from you, you hear?” Definitely a math teacher.
“But—” I don’t know whether I was going to say she could have her damn stinkin’ ball back for all I cared since I didn’t know what do with it or that I knew Free Willy was a whale, but she slammed the door.
Now I’m sitting in my truck, and maybe I am lucky and I have that psychic hour thingy because I didn’t get a parking ticket. Maybe the guy did win at bowling, who knows how. I shake the eight ball again and it says, “you’re on a roll.” And it’s right. Somehow or other the emergency brake got released and off I go down the street. Good thing I can steer with one hand. I swear to God I can see a third floor curtain go up on a brownstone right before I hit the old Volkswagen that’s not supposed to be parked in front of the delivery garage door. Have you ever heard the expression, “You are driving the bus?” Maybe I ain’t. Maybe I ain’t driving this freakin’ bus no more.
I sure hope that cop had a sweet horoscope.
By Sayla Blackwood
At first, I couldn’t tell whether Sammy was a man or a woman. The first time I saw her I noticed that she had this cropped black hair that hung low over the center of her forehead and these wet, violet eyes that were at once both startling and soft. She was wearing this shapeless clothing that made her look like a big, wooly lump and had a foam hammer slung over her right shoulder, which she handed every so often to the people lined up in front of her carnival game stand. It was more than pretty.
The State Fair only came around once a year and though it was only a couple of blocks away from my house, this was my first time going. Before this, I’d always thought of state fairs as these dust specked places where brown and white spotted cows moaned and whined from their pens and balloon-like people paraded around, stuffing their faces with greasy elephant ears, sipping plastic cups full of watered down beer. But I was wrong.
My parents had coaxed me into going after my high school counselor insisted that I didn’t get out enough. My parents and I found herself in her office one afternoon, after receiving my latest report card, and when she mouthed the words “extracurricular activities,” her lips bunching up like a bundle of berries beneath her nose, they were sold. Soon enough, they were stuffing me, their seventeen year old daughter, into a horrible red, polka-dotted dress and dropping me at the gates of the state fair with false smiles and words that sounded less than encouraging.
As soon as I was there I felt uncomfortable. The twilight heat of August was making my thighs stick together so that the skin between them felt rubbery and thick and my hair was frizzing out like it always did, flouncing up around my face in one squirreling mass of auburn fuzz. The dress was stretched too tightly against my waist and I gasped for air as if there was nothing clean to breathe though the hot, heavy scent of buttered popcorn was already flooding through my nostrils, making my stomach lurch and growl with hunger.
I walked in and as soon as I saw the snow cone stand I knew I had to buy one. I could already feel those blue, shaved slivers of ice sliding down my throat as I looked longingly toward the small, white cart where a beefy man was shoveling out tufts of the stuff by the dozens. I marched to the cart, ignoring the throngs of people that bustled noisily around me, and motioned to the blue syrup.
“That’ll be five dollars,” the man grunted and stuck out an oven mitt palm.
“Five dollars? You’ve gotta be joking.”
“Does it look like I’m joking?” The man’s caterpillar mustache quivered a little over his upper lip and my arm hairs stood on end. I plopped the money into his extended hand and turned away, snow cone in hand, already hating the stupid state fair and everything it stood for. To this day I’m not even sure how they can charge you five dollars for a chunk of ice with some syrup spilled over it, but I figure it doesn’t matter anyway since everyone’s drunk and doesn’t really care where their money goes. The blue juice spilled over the sides of the paper cone and a few drops dribbled onto the front of my dress, turning the white polka dots blue in the process.
“Well, there goes the Barbie doll façade,” I murmured while spreading a pink, fleshy hand over the juice. I could feel the blue goo rub off into my palm and I opened and closed my fingers a few times, feeling the sticky juice against my skin.
I looked at my watch and began calculating the minutes until my parents would be back to pick me up. Two hours left. Not bad.
I started moving again, ignoring the blue stain on the front of my dress, and crunched the snow cone sap between my teeth while I looked around at the various fairgoers. They were mostly families, the kids all dressed up in t-shirts with animals on them and the parents cradling neon bright stuffed toys and paper plates full of pretzels and French fries in their arms. The rest of the people were middle and high schoolers – kids my age who didn’t even know me because I pretended not to notice them in the hallways at school, choosing instead to hunch my shoulders and dart around the building as if I were invisible. Their faces were smeared with lemon colored flakes of light from the fair rides and their cheekbones were brushed with the rosy air of summer. I was suddenly aware of how silly I must have looked compared to them – a frizzball teenager wearing an outfit plastered with dried snow cone juice standing in front of a group of girls who already had the perfect, willowy limbs of models and hair that shone like starlight and flashed and moved whenever they did. It felt like the world’s worst joke.
I was just about to turn away and wait for my parents back at the gate of the fair when I saw her. Sammy was standing next to one of those hit-this-platform-with-a-hammer-and-if-you-hit-the-bell-you’ll-win-a-prize type of games and she looked completely uninterested in her surroundings. Whenever she’d hand the hammer to a new person, her violet eyes would stare unblinkingly at them, transfixed on some point near their forehead or hairline. She moved around in all these fluid movements, almost like she was constantly dancing or swimming around inside her game stand. I was standing almost a hundred feet away, but even from that distance I could see there was something graceful and languid in the way her arms swung the hammer on and off her shoulder. Intrigued, I moved closer, ambling forward on clumsy feet until I could feel her hot, cotton candy breath on my cheeks.
“Can I play?” I murmured, instinctively rounding my shoulders to try and hide myself. I wasn’t even sure why I’d gone over there in the first place except for the fact that I was lonely and bored and there was nothing else to do. Yet here I was, standing next to a carnival worker, suddenly embarrassed about the state of my dress and the fact that I had come alone to the fair.
She didn’t say anything at first, just removed the hammer from her shoulder and held it out in front of me. When I grabbed it, the foam handle collapsed limply in my upturned palms.
“Go for it,” she fanned a hand towards the metal platform.
I paused and turned to her. Her hair looked like a sleek mass of black wax and it was cascading over her left eyebrow. Beautiful. “I’m Charlie, by the way.” Stupid. A boy name for a girl trying to finagle her way through the cruel world of high school. Sometimes I wondered if my parents really were idiots or if they were just that clueless.
She grinned and I noticed that two of her teeth had fallen out, leaving purple gaping holes in their place. “Name’s Sammy,” she answered.
I frantically tried to smooth my puffs of hair into place by sliding my hands through the thick, unmanageable curls.
“You gonna hit the damn thing or just sit there primping yourself?” she asked, still smiling. Her voice was smooth and elongated but with a rougher edge to it, a sort of gritty undertone that you noticed only if you paid close attention to the slurs between her vowels and consonants.
Embarrassed, I tucked my chin forward and raised the hammer upwards. My bony arms snapped and cracked as I reached the foamy hammer high over my auburn afro. My arm muscles tensed and readied themselves to bring the hammer singing onto the silver platform when Sammy’s voice came at me from the left.
“Can’t you do anything right?”
I stopped moving, my hands still raised overhead, refusing to look upwards or to the sides. I could feel a swift gust of wind lift the curls from the back of my neck and my dress swayed against my knobby knees. Then, she was behind me.
She pulled a pair of rough hands from the confines of her wooly overcoat and pushed my elbows together so that they were parallel with one another. “Like this,” she murmured.
Her callused hands steadied themselves against my bones and I felt the foam hammer wobbling warily over my head. “Is this good?” I asked and my voice shrunk to a whisper. The crowd around us seemed to have quieted down and I could hear only a baby squealing somewhere far away and the impatient grunt of an old man waiting in line to play the game. He was tapping his foot and the click, click, click of his shoes matched the pulse beating in my neck.
“Perfect,” she smiled and I swung the hammer forward until it smacked sharply against the platform. The bell at the top dinged loudly and the sound squished around us in a blow of tinny sounding air.
“You won,” Sammy observed, cocking her hip to one side and pushing her black hair back from her eyes with a sweep of her right hand.
“I won,” I repeated and I stepped nearer to her. I could smell her candy breath and musky, wool coat as I leaned forward, the two of us breathing heavily with our noses only inches apart.
By Shelbie Janocha
Every time I looked at her, my insides would coil in on themselves, wrenching and twisting into a pain that would make my brain swell and eyes water. My tongue would become thick and dry, bile threatening to push past my tight-lipped grimace. I would swallow repeatedly; my throat aching for any relief. My knuckles would whiten as they gripped my skin; forcing half-moon indents into the delicate flesh of my arm.
She was always oblivious to this. To the way my body reacted each and every time. She never looked at me, or even in my direction, her gaze never lifted from the floor. Every Thursday evening from six to seven, we would sit and stare, never making eye contact.
I can't tell you what color her eyes are, or what shape, not even what her voice sounded like, what her vocabulary was. I don't know her hopes and dreams, her fears and nightmares; I probably wouldn't even be able to tell you her name if it wasn't written in large block letters on this manila folder.
What I could tell you is that she's barely out of her teens, she's from a well-off middle class family. I could tell you that her mother is distant and her father more than likely absent. I could tell you that her blond hair was lank and lifeless, her pale skin-which had the potential to be rich and creamy-is tinged with yellow. I could tell you how the yellow skin clings to her emaciated figure, how the skeletal appendages poked at a bony thigh. I could tell you how she managed to pull a millimeter of flesh from the femur and her mouth-the only part of her face I could see-twisted in frustration.
I sat there, trying to calm the discomfort my body was constantly in around this young girl. I crossed and uncrossed my legs, the movement oddly comforting. I placed her folder, my notebook and pen on my lap and forced my legs to stop moving.
At least one attempt, I thought. At least one time, there needed to be an outreach from me to her.
I cleared my still dry throat, trying to get her attention. She continued to poke at what she saw as an obese skin fold.
"How are you feeling today?" Even, I could sense the lack of care in the words.
She gave no response.
"Ah. Well, that sounds lovely." I knew it was rude. I knew that it wasn't the way I should have started this session, but after weeks of silence, I was allowing my disgust to run my tongue.
Her hands had stopped prodding her thighs for the first time since she had sat down. She was hunched over; tiny hands tight on bony knees. Something dropped from the hood of hair and trickled down her minuscule calf. It was clear.
And, it hit me.
The tiny, clear wet trickle, was a tear.
A tear signified crying, which signified sadness, and sadness was emotion!
This was the first time she had ever showed anything besides impassiveness.
It filled me with joy, but then regret.
How dare I find happiness in her private suffering? I have no idea what this girl has been through. What the tear could possibly signify. I couldn't possibly put myself in her shoes. I don't know what struck me as more sad; that she had shed a tear, or that she had only shed one?
At that moment, I did something I had never done before. I allowed myself to become invested in this girl. In the girl who had taken two months to shed one tear.
That tear held so much.
I set my belongings on the floor, lowered myself and paused. What was I doing? I shook it off. This was beyond my choice. She needed this. On hands and knees, I crawled to her. Upon arrival, I kneeled, resting one of my healthy hands over her spare ones. She didn't react.
We sat there for what could have been thirty seconds or thirty minutes; time had no meaning at this point.
"Why do you do this?" My whisper was thunderous in the quiet air.
I don't know what I was expecting. An answer? A confession? A lie? I wasn't expecting what happened, but that's what made it all the more miraculous.
She exhaled; a heavy sound filled with more mourning then that of a mother who has lost a child.
My heart tore; no little girl should ever make a sound filled with that much pain.
I felt her fingers squirm under my own. My eyes roamed to her bent head and I squeezed, reassuring her through my touch. Another sigh flushed the hair hanging in the way.
In what seemed to be a Herculean effort, her face slowly rose until her eyes were boring into mine. I was too stunned to breathe.
Her cheeks were gaunt, the bones jutting out sharp and smooth, the skin stretching, dangerously close to breaking open. Broken blood vessels left the delicate under-eye skin dark and bruised, making her eyes sink deeper than they actually did.
They say that the eyes are the window to the soul, if that is true, then this is a soul desperate and hungry for forgiveness, for approval, for acceptance. Her eyelashes were thick with tears, threatening to spill over and drown both of us.
Her orbs wouldn't let mine go. I was mesmerized by the visible pain in her face and I now understood why she never looked at me before. She knew, and I knew, that the moment we made contact, I would see everything that she had been desperately hiding from everyone else.
As the second tear slipped from her eyelashes, I saw in her pain my own. I saw all the comments that I had ever endured, the looks and body language that made me doubt myself. In the third and fourth tear, I saw how weak I had been my entire life. In the unruly sobs that racked her cadaverous frame, I saw how jaded I had become to the pain of others. How I used to be so compassionate, the one that would heal anyone's sufferings with the kindness of a listening ear and tender words. How for the past few years, I had found it difficult to feign an interest in the stories of these broken people.
In her distress, I found who I once was and who I wanted to be again.
She sobbed like that for the rest of the hour and then some. I was fine with it. I sat there and held her hand, caressing it at times that seemed appropriate. When the sun had set and her tears had dried, she stood up and surveyed me.
In that moment, she was the most beautiful creature I had ever beheld. She didn't smile, or say thank you, but she didn't need too. I had been in this long enough to know that her weeping in front of me was the most intimate experience she could have shared with anyone and that was enough for me.
She turned and walked out of the office without a look over her shoulder or a falter in her step.
I found myself admiring her.
I could tell you that I sat on the floor until the sun rose the next day. I could tell you that I whispered thank you as she left because she had done more for me than I had for her.
I could tell you what color her eyes are, how the tears illuminated the green flecked hazel. I could tell you that the agonizing breakdown made the bumps of her spine protrude, a faint promise to cause harm. I could tell you how long we sat there, staring into each other's eyes with salt water streaming. I could tell you that she didn't come for the rest of her hospital mandated sessions.
I could tell you that I wonder everyday about her; wondering if she ever did start eating again. I could tell you that this was the only time I ever truly felt like I had helped someone.
I would like to tell you all these things, but if I did, that would break doctor-patient confidentiality.
By Ben Kramer
When Lucy graduated she didn’t immediately go to college. She opted to work for a year and get enough cash for community college. She was no longer on speaking terms with her Father who wanted nothing to do with her. The consequences of being procreated through the seed of another man damaged any sort of bond between the two and with her Mother being dead for so many years the bond had come down to a transparent thread.
She moved out the day after graduation. She decided not to walk and didn’t want to meet with her principal to get her diploma. It didn’t seem worth her while.
Her Father had left for vacation and had no idea that Lucy was leaving so soon but could only hope that she’d lock the door behind her when she left. She did and through the generosity of her friend Eleanor she now had a new place to stay.
Eleanor had been her friend since she was seventeen, the first girl she met who did not ridicule her for her weight but accept her as a friend. She was a Goth girl and being such she introduced Lucy to her new wardrobe of black and black and the fantaboulous whines of Robert Smith and Morrissey (Though in all fairness I couldn’t consider Morrissey Goth, just miserable).
She was taller than a corn stalk and tossed back more frequently than a shot glass. Her breasts non-existent along with her ass, which was nothing more than a slight lump of flesh that rippled in the wind when exposed. While not the prettiest girl around Eleanor was by far the most open, willing to give any man a chance in the bedroom to prove his worth. Rarely did she ever come out with a boyfriend in these encounters, or even numbers, and when she did most phone calls ended at her voicemail.
She knew a bunch of people, older people, mostly freaks and vagabonds in their late twenties, some of them as old as their forties, and she was always given a phone call every weekend to come and party with these eerie Peter Pan’s, who at some point unofficially declared, “I don wanna grow up.”
Lucy had started the summer of her eighteenth year unpacking shirts and panties out of her backpack at an apartment that bordered the north of the city. It was a cheap buy, which was really meant for only one person to live in. It was a studio, with Eleanor’s room and a small T.V room that had only a couch, T.V, and windows. The kitchen connected the two rooms and ran alongside the small hallway with a sink crowded with greasy, buttered up pots and pans with bread crumbs intermingled with old dust particles that were branded in the plastic counter tops long ago.
Lucy’s room, the guest room, was actually the furnace room, though this one was in a unique place. It was seven feet above the ground, from Eleanor’s bed, and the only way in was going by ladder. Once up the ladder you would tug open a little door only three feet in height and have to launch yourself up to get inside. It was cramped and by far the dustiest room in the whole place. It wasn’t meant to be a living space so Eleanor had to keep Lucy a secret from the landlord. The furnace and water heater made noise every night, something Lucy would have to get used to. The constant banging had Lucy believe a man was trapped inside there, knocking around, his way of calling for help. This man was in her dreams the first couple of nights with some dreams having him be peaceful and on his way out after he’d escape. Other dreams had him angry at Lucy, shouting, “Didn’t you hear my God damn banging you whore! I been in there for threeeee fucking years now and you ignore me? I’ll kill you, you fucking cunt,” and then he’d reach for Lucy’s throat and she’d awake trembling in sweat.
They lived in a crack part of the neighborhood, an almost ghost town with bordered up brick buildings, the graves of failed business’s that used to live before the recession. Blue police box cameras on top of every telephone pole, flashing a neon blue light to let you know that the police were watching. Every step being recorded and not just by law enforcement but also by the weirdo’s who wandered through the night without a place to go. Bus stops used as restrooms with city maps torn up with fecal matter and heroin induced vomit soaked in the pages. Glistening beneath street lights broken glass of Miller light bottles are beached up on the urine enriched sidewalks, the cracks and crevasses agricultural breeding canals of septic parasites and microscopic vermin.
Eleanor made it clear to Lucy that they should not walk alone at night, unless they wanted to be pestered by crack heads scratching their balls and begging her for a few bucks for “gas”. If she had her choice she’d live elsewhere, on her own, but this was the best Lucy could do at the moment. Her Father left her with no money, no trust fund, no nothing to build or spring off of. To support herself she got a job not far from the apartment, a 24/7 Burger King where tips were allowed, though not by corporate but by management that turned a blind eye.
For months she worked six days a week, taking in eight-hour shifts, and on some occasions working twelve hour shifts. She was making money, enough to pay Eleanor rent and to save up for college and some place of her own, but the work was tiring. Her depression remained constant, but her overeating was on a decline. After eating nothing but Burger King for a month she decided she could do better, but with money low for both Eleanor and Lucy they kept to making pasta and eggs.
Loneliness became a regular companion to Lucy. She had Eleanor, but she only saw her sometimes through out the week. Either she was off at work or Eleanor was at a party with her friends. Occasionally she’d come home with one of them and keep Lucy up at night with her moaning and groaning, and all out vocal unloading. Some nights had Lucy opening the door and coming down the ladder, in her Burger King uniform, while Eleanor was in the middle of being fucked by another man. The first few encounters were awful awkward, with Eleanor and her man stopping and waiting for Lucy to leave while she would turn red and cover her eyes with her hand and say, “Sorry,” as she’d speed walk to the door. After a while these nights became so frequent that when Lucy would come down Eleanor wouldn’t even pay notice to it and when her man would ask her, “Should we stop,” she’d say, “Oh don’t mind her, she’s only going to work.”
Lucy envied Eleanor in that she could constantly be with a man, though she didn’t care for the way Eleanor went about it. She wanted one man, a boyfriend, who would love her everyday and tell her he loved her everyday and that nothing shined brighter than her, not the sun, not a spotlight, not even the blinding light after the drop of an atomic bomb. But she knew that wasn’t for her, or that no one wanted her. Her weight had dropped down from 223 to 198 due to the poorer conditions she lived in now but she still held onto that fat girl mentality that mass is morose and that fat girls are only practice girls, if they’re even lucky enough to find someone who’d risk losing the respect of their friends by fucking a whale.
The summer ended and soon came the fall, Halloween passed and then her first Thanksgiving away from home. Thanksgivings were an ok time with her Father, as happy as they could get. His girlfriend would prepare a decent Thanksgiving meal, with a turkey that had been already chopped and prepared for earlier at the local grocery store. Stuffing that was only half done with some croutons still uncooked and crunchy, and mashed potatoes that were always cold because she’d make them first and wouldn’t bother to throw them in the microwave to heat them up. The best part of the meal was the pumpkin pie, mainly because it was from Baker Square.
Her Father would take a small amount of interest in her life, asking how school was and how her friends were. She’d normally answer in the yes or no format and then the family would commence eating, the slooping and slopping of potatoes being spun around on forks with turkey slices to make a pilgrim shish kebab. Water being slurped down, gulps seen with Mr. Marr’s Adams apple bouncing up like it was giving an uppercut to the water. And they would continue to eat, speechless, and when the meal was down Lucy would go to her room and listen to Siouxsie and the Banshees or the Cure or whatever band she was into at the time.
This Thanksgiving was to be different than the rest though. For once she had a day off from work, and not just a day but also two in a row, and finally had a chance to sleep. She finished her final day for the week and returned to the apartment where she planned on not even falling asleep in her bed but on the couch in the living room. When she opened the door she saw Eleanor on the phone, her hand on her hip, looking at some photo they clipped from the newspaper of Newt Gingrich making a funny face he did not mean to make. Lucy knew she was on the phone with one of her older friends, probably some guy, and probably going to meet up with them at a party and she prayed that if Eleanor got fucked tonight that it wouldn’t be here.
She ducked down past Eleanor who she gave a quick wave to without looking and then headed towards the couch. She flopped face first onto the it and closed her eyes, ready to be immobile for the next seventeen hours, motionless lovingly trapped in a state of REM where she’d dream and dream of being free from monotonous constraints and living somewhere further south where crack heads and toothless bums didn’t ask her for quarters in the name of Jesus, gumming curses when she’d pass them. She heard Eleanor wrapping up conversation on the phone, her saying, “Yeah I’ll definitely be there tonight. Yeah, for sure. Hey do you think I could bring a friend…great, cool, I’ll see you then.” She hung up and Lucy heard it all, including if she could bring a friend, which was sweet, but she really didn’t want to get up and waste her money on the Miller Highlife.
The floor cracked and the squeak of Eleanor’s socks squeegeed there way to Lucy’s ears. She knew Eleanor was coming to ask her if she wanted to go to the party or whatever and she already had her answer planned out for her.
No.
Eleanor creaked her way and stopped just a foot short from Lucy. Lucy imagined her with both hands on her hips, eying her up and down until she’d get caught at the sight of her fat that was loose and peeping out of her uniform. She didn’t care either because in sleep you don’t have to look respectable. A crack bended near her and a high tea kettle voice nearly had her flinch but in her exhaustion she remained still and listening.
“Hey, so I talked to Marc, he’s throwing a Thanksgiving party. You should come! Marc said I could bring a friend.”
Breathing in couch cushion Lucy was annoyed that she’d have to flip her face just to answer Eleanor. The cushion rubbed against her cheek, which gave her a light burn and reddened it too. Her eyes still closed she mumbled out an answer, but it didn’t get to Eleanor because her voice was too meek to be heard, so again she spoke, raising a grunt that said, “No.”
“Oh come on Lucy! You don’t do anything! Why don’t you do something fun for once?”
“immitredd.”
“What?”
Chewing on her words (she didn’t want to make the effort in creating coherent sentences) she managed to do the work of getting up by opening her eyes and swinging her legs around, nearly swiping Eleanor’s calves, so she could sit up and actually talk to her. It was the best form of action to get rid of Eleanor so she could doze off into oblivion and not have to hear customized orders of, “Can I get a Whopper with no lettuce, but triple the onions, patty done medium rare, and two dabbles of salt on the side of the bun.”
Eleanor was just as she pictured her, hands on her dainty, baby hips, with that open mouth expression on her face, the one where her eyes were half looking at you and half looking at the ceiling with her eyebrows arched like a shrieking black cat. Lucy frowned as Eleanor smiled, her eyes wrinkly and stretched, breaking the stamp of the crow’s foot beneath them, which Lucy thought was so strange for a young woman to have.
While talking nice before Eleanor dropped her charm as she said, “Come on don’t be such a bitch. It’ll be lots of fun.”
“Eleanor, I appreciate it but I’m tired. I really just want to get some sleep.”
She lifted her uniform shirt off, to get some of the heat, and smell off of her, and threw it at the feet of Eleanor, with it missing and scurrying across the floor to the kitchen.
In the few months they had been living together not once had Eleanor gone out with Lucy. They both worked so it couldn’t always be done, but Lucy worked far more hours a week then she did. And Eleanor thought it silly that she broke her back over burgers just to save up for community college. She was making money, had a nice place to live, and had even lost some weight. Why bother working all of the time just to invest in some college that won’t do her shit? But that wasn’t the matter at hand. She observed a freckle on Lucy’s left boob that was bigger than most she’d seen, this one the size of a pinhead, and continued on with her badgering and said, “You can sleep everyday Lucy! Just come to this party with me, please! There’ll be a ton of guys there and I’m sure you’ll meet someone nice.”
Fat chance. Lucy had never met a man in her life, at least one that wasn’t appalled and disgusted by her enormous figure. And besides…how was anyone to like her, let alone fuck her? Really, she thought of herself as a scaly, old elephant, and even that wasn’t low enough because at least elephants had ivory to show off. All she had was an appetite.
The only man she saw going after her would be some living dead loser with a syringe hanging out of his arm with a dried, crusty blood trail running down to his hand ridden with polyps. He’d probably ask her if he could, “Tinsel her tonsils,” to which she’d reply, “NO,” which would be followed by a smack against his scruffy, junkie cheek. The prospects of the party seemed bleak, miserable at best.
“I’m tired El, I really don’t feel like going.”
Eleanor felt a vibration in her pocket and assumed it was a text from her friend Rex who was fifteen years older than her, making him 33. She slid her boney fingertips down her pocket to retrieve her phone and as she did she kept up her persistence with Lucy.
“Come on. It’s only a half-mile away from here. If you don’t like it then you can take a quick bus ride home.”
How reassuring, a midnight bus ride filled with schizophrenic bums and creeps knee deep in their ear buds who’d nod their heads and give her the stink eye as she’d take a seat. The lights would flicker and a sinus symphony of hacking phlegm would move her stomach to tears. And best of all Eleanor would probably abandon her minutes in for be some pseudo-pedophile who secretly wished she’d be fifteen instead of eighteen but whatever, he’d take it cause pussy is pussy.
“So…are you coming?”
If she went she knew she’d only be there for an hour and then dash back home. If it was bad she could do the exact same thing, even leave sooner. As un-fun as things could potentially be, going there and back, she decided it couldn’t hurt. Plus she was pretty much up now.
“Fine, I’ll go with you.”
“Yay,” Eleanor said with half raised celebration in her voice. Her eyes were crossed on her phone, nearly finished with her text, and with only a few characters left she gave Lucy a suggestion.
“You should change and take a shower. That uniform makes you smell like re-heated french-fries.”
She finished her texting and slid her phone back into her pocket with those boney fingers. She looked down at Lucy and smiled a smile so big you could cover it front to end with a banana, which Lucy thought was funny cause Eleanor was no stranger to putting bananas to her lips, front to end. Little slut, but she loved her because she was her friend and got up from the couch to go and wash the whopper out of her hair.
By Amber Ponomar
I got nothing against dogs, just grody little half-terrier mutt things. When Chin-Chin (in his stolen revolutionary war coat) and me got to my house, it was all Sparky, my sister’s idiot dog, all over us. I swear that dog was always caked in some sort of condiment. Today it was mayonnaise.
Sparky made a beeline for Chin’s red-coat, up on his hind legs before even getting there, like a circus dog. Chin shrieked a little and I jumped in front of him, getting the brunt of the attack. True, Chin-Chin and I were sandwiched between the door and a mayonnaise-covered mutt, but at least Chin’s coat wasn’t ruined. It was the kind of coat that would only look good ruined if you were dead, or at least no longer a virgin.
“Jamie!” I screamed upstairs. “Call your fucking dog!”
But my sister was dumber than her dog and pretended she couldn’t hear me through her closed door. She probably had a boy over; Jen and Dad didn’t get home for another hour or so. Sparky started licking my mouth.
“Fu—no, Sparky!” I pushed him off my chest and he went for Chin’s coat again. I grabbed a rubber hot dog off the floor, squeezed it a few times, and instantly the dog was silent and looking at me.
“You want this, stupid?” He wagged his tail. Little flecks of mayonnaise dotted the front windows. “Get it!” And I chucked it at my sister’s door. The dog barreled up the stairs, dragging his butt against the wall, crashing into my sister’s door. The door burst open. Jamie screamed. A boy yelled, “What the fuck?” The dog leapt into the bed behind the two naked teenagers (who’d of course been doing it doggy style) and rolled around with his prize, mixing mayonnaise with other white stuff that I don’t want to talk about.
“Don’t look, Chin!” I yelled, turning around to shield his eyes. But of course it was too late. The little red-coated motherfucker was standing there, looking at my sister on her hands and knees, mouth wide open, obvious tent in his pants. “Seriously?” I smacked him. “That’s Jamie! Fucking, it’s Jamie!”
He kind of shook his head and came to, though his mouth was still a little bit open and his dick was still a lotta bit way too excited.
“What the fuck, Ryan!?” Jamie yelled into her pillow. Her boyfriend or whatever was stuffing himself into his jeans as fast as he could. The dog was still in the bed, standing on Jamie’s back, licking her.
I turned to Chin-Chin, looked down at his crotch, smacked him again, and then whispered: “Open the door.” And one by one, me, Chin, and my sister’s latest mistake escaped.
The dude ran to his car parked down the street and Chin and I were blasting off running in the other direction, back toward the el. Where else could we go but Johnny’s? My phone was dead so Chin gave me his and I called Johnny as we ran to the Brown line. He didn’t answer so I called him again. Johnny answered his phone all hazy.
“Dude, what? Kinda busy.” I could hear Lassie giggling in the background.
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