Stories

Here’s a collection of short stories I’ve written, just because I wanted to keep them somewhere other than in the dusty recesses of my Documents folder. Warning: bleak amateur-hour fiction ahead!

Dog Days | Fences | Revelations | Hourglass

dogdays_title

DOG DAYS

It’s surprisingly cool in your hands, even on this hot, end-of-summer day. Indian summer was what you called this weather as a kid. It’s probably not okay to say that now. Dog days, that’s better. It’s a dog day for sure.

Cool, yeah, not cold. Cool like the other side of your pillow. It feels pretty good, really. You shift in your seat, turn it over on its side, hear the small clicks of the objects in the chambers as they move, slightly.

Alloy frame. Stainless steel. Satin finish. Rosewood grips, shining just as pretty as a new-polished floor.

Whatever. The important thing is that it’s loaded.

Somewhere in the house a phone starts ringing. It’s a jangling, painful sound; one of those old phones that still has the holes you stick your fingers in to dial. You can picture it: dull scuffed plastic that was once clear, the edges rimmed with dirt from a thousand finger-insertions. Gross. That buzz when you let go each hole, short or long depending on whichever number. Zero, man, that one took forever.

The man you’ve tied up in the corner is yelling again. Well, trying to, anyway. It’s kind of hard to yell through a dishtowel, although he’s giving it the old college try. “What,” you say to him. “You expecting a call?” And you laugh a little. Jesus, it’s hot.

The phone stops, which is nice, because it was starting to get on your nerves.

He’s looking at you now, all pleading wet eyes, like some kind of cartoon character. Like fuckin Bambi, except not nearly as cute. He pissed himself about five minutes after you yanked the last zip tie tight, maybe around the time he first saw the gun, and the kitchen has filled up with that acrid piss-smell. Ammonia. Fear. It’s familiar to you as the cicadas humming outside, that smell.

“Hmmmmm,” he’s saying behind that towel. “Hrrrrmm! Hrrrrrrm!” He’s straining at those ties but they don’t have one bit of give. Keep the raccoons out of your trash, keep a grown man from moving his arms and legs.

“Go ahead,” you tell him. “Bark all you want.”

That bad old sun isn’t giving this day any kind of break. You turn your face into your upper arm, rub off a long runner of sweat, grinning as you do so because the fact that your gun hand is kind of waving around is freaking his shit.

Outside the insects drone, the afternoon throbs. Inside the kitchen the air doesn’t seem to move. Okay. Okay.

“Listen,” you say. “Listen up.”

You start talking. You had this planned, sort of, but once you get going it’s like some big heavy truck rolling down a steep hill: you can’t stop. Your voice gets louder and louder, until you can’t hear those bugs no more. He’s staring back and moaning and that piss smell is everywhere and your guts feel like they’re turning inside out.

And then there’s nothing left. No more words. Your face feels gross: tears, sweat, snot. You sit back in the ugly white chair with chipped paint that you could sketch with your eyes closed. Your breath comes in fast, hard little pants.

He’s on the floor, an old man with a piss-stain on his work pants. Pitiful, really. He don’t look like he could hurt anyone. One of your hands is on your lap. The other is raising, almost all by itself. Your thumb is moving, pulling back that hammer.

Now he’s crying, his eyes are pinched shut and he’s making little choking sounds.

“Open your eyes,” you tell him. You put your index finger on the trigger and feel the ridges in the metal.

It’s getting late. The buzzing is so loud, it’s everywhere. The sun is a giant ball of fire dipping slowly behind the horizon. Maybe what you hear isn’t cicadas after all, but the hot static sound of the sun burning everything alive.

“Open your eyes,” you say.

The Bible says to forgive but the Bible also says an eye for an eye and what do you do when someone takes something more important than an eye?

“Look at me,” you say gently.

It’s the tiniest of movements. Just a squeeze. That’s all you have to do.

fences_title

FENCES

The fly gets my attention soon after takeoff. It seems odd, a fly in an airplane. It makes me think of creaking openings in the body of the 747, entrances and exits that no one knows about. It’s stuck down between the rubbery seal of the window and the metal rim, its wings a tiny anxious blur.

I try to flip it out with the pen I’m using for the crossword puzzle but it’s hard to reach across the empty window seat; the fly gets wedged in there tighter. Or maybe I killed it somehow, because now the fly just lays there, silent and still.

Well.

“Do you want anything to drink?” A smiling face appears above me, her teeth practically glowing in the dimmed cabin. She’s offering me a foil packet, some kind of snack. Probably not peanuts, I figure: peanut dust. Anaphylactic reactions, people clawing at their throats.

“Water, please,” I say. I put the packet – I was right, it’s some kind of pretzel mix – in the seat pocket in front of me, and turn back to the crossword, pretending to be engrossed. (I don’t want eye contact: her smile is about to turn pitying, her eyebrows about to crumple in sympathy.)

Two hours until I arrive in San Francisco; it already feels like Denver is a million miles behind me. My house, my job, even my goddamned dog.

The in-flight movie seems garish without the headphones, without the sound to tell me what’s going on. People gesture at each other wildly, their faces contort into cartoonish expressions. A girl stares longingly at a boy; the camera inexplicably pulls back in a long dizzying swoop to show a lush green landscape.

I can’t keep watching, it makes me feel like I’ve been dropped into a dream where everything is just this side of normal and nothing makes any sense.

A man a few rows ahead breaks into a harsh series of barks, it takes me a moment to realize it’s laughter. I noticed the guy earlier: florid, his chest a husky barrel turning to fat. The ghosts of a thousand dead cigarettes coating his voice. His wife wheezing behind him like a Pekinese. Heart attacks waiting to happen.

I think of all the cigarettes I never smoked, all the drinks I’ve waved off. Got an early run planned before work, I’d say. The fucking picture of health. The guy you rolled your eyes at while you finished your pint, signaled the bartender for another. Okay, man.

The smiling face is back. She hands me a cup of water, asks, “Can I get you anything else?” while bending over slightly, her perfume surrounding me like a friendly little pink cloud. She’s pretty, in a bland California kind of way. Blonde, the right curves, all that.

Yeah, I think.

Get me a bottle of Jack, because tomorrow is going to be just like today. No early morning milk runs, no sunset Copper Mountain runs, no runs. No goddamn runs.

Get me off this plane, drop me at thirty thousand feet so I don’t have to go to Glen Park, so I don’t have to come home to my parents like this, broken and useless.

Get me a do-over. That’s all I want, really. Just one. Lousy. Do-over.

“No,” I say. “Thanks.”

She cocks her head, beams at me and nods. And I see exactly what I didn’t want to see: an expression that clearly reads, that poor son of a bitch.

She moves down the aisle and I watch her. My face feels hot, my teeth are clenched. I allow myself to imagine jumping up, pushing her into the lavatory, one hand on her hip, one in her hair, walking her backwards into the wall, hard. Don’t look at me like that, I’d say. Don’t. Her face all O’s of surprise and shock.

Right.

When the doctor at Centura first talked to me, used the words “catastrophic damage”, I didn’t even think about walking. I asked about skiing, not walking. I remember his set mouth, the slight shake of his head. Later, at the Craig, there were a hundred other sorry sacks of shit just like me, everyone with their own catastrophic damage. Everyone wondering just how long the list was, exactly, of things they would never do again.

Mine includes skiing, walking, riding a fucking unicycle, and chasing down stewardesses into airline lavatories.

I close my eyes and do the trick I learned in physical therapy: I picture a wall of black, which I turn blue, then red, then purple, until I stop thinking. When I open my eyes again my ears feel full, the plane is descending. Soon we’ll be landing, and I’ll wait until everyone else disembarks. Then another smiling face will push a narrow-backed aisle chair towards me, the one that’s got DEN stenciled across the front and collapsed like a broken umbrella to fit perfectly, cruelly, into the overhead compartment.

My parents will be waiting. They’ll look nervous, they’ll look old and tired and scared. My fault, my fault. I know how I’ll look to them: skinny, years of ski bum coloring bleached pale from fluorescent lighting, shadow-crescents beneath my eyes. They’ll take me home to their house in the southern edge of the city’s hills. Until you’re better, my mother said, back at Craig.

I had laughed: better?

I pull my seat upright and fold up the Post – the crossword grid almost entirely empty – and my pen falls to the floor, rolling into the aisle. I reach for it but I can’t quite get there, I need to rise up on my legs a little and of course I can’t. I feel like a dog who’s abruptly reached the end of his chain, surprised anew at my boundaries.

I wonder when these tiny frustrations will finally become familiar to me.

“Here you go, buddy,” says a gravelly voice over my left ear. I look up and it’s the heart attack guy, returning back to his seat. He stoops with a grunt, then straightens up and holds out my pen. For a minute I can only look back at him, how he’s just standing there like it’s no big deal.

Everything is just this side of normal. Nothing makes sense. I am going to have to learn everything all over again.

“Here you go,” he says again, impatient. I reach out my hand and take the pen. I tell him thank you. There is the tiniest of movements to my right that catches my gaze: it’s the fly, no longer trapped, no longer dead. I watch it walk along the edge of the window, and then it takes off. Inside the confining metal tube that makes up its world, it soars away, out of view.

revelations

REVELATIONS

It was grey and windy the day she found the foot. The sky was thick with layers of whipped-dark clouds blowing in from the east across the sea, and she took hurried steps along the path through the beachgrass and towards the shore. Ahead, the waves tossed bitterly, seething with white froth. She’d wanted to feel the storm on her own skin, but it was so cold. Turning, she could see the glow of the front window and almost headed back, but decided to press on, drawing her coat more tightly under her chin and ducking her head.

She thought later that she might have missed it entirely if she hadn’t been huddled in that way, peering downward through watering eyes and bending against the winds. She had just come through the cut in the dunes and was walking on the high part of the shore where the sand was deep and crumbly when it caught her eye. An oddly-shaped object poking up from a tangle of seaweed and yellow foam. Something pinkish. Maybe a shell.

She stepped closer to see, and had to pull her hair aside as it lashed against her face in a whistling gust. Carefully, she used the tip of her boot to nudge the seaweed aside. Foam scattered and blew, and she saw what it was. A toe. A single toe, dusted with clinging wet sand, pointing straight upward.

She stepped back in a rush and for a time stood perfectly still, her eyes on the thing in the sand. Her heart beat in her chest and her ears filled with the sound of rushing waters, inside and out.

The cry of a circling gull startled her, and she blinked. She looked up and down the shoreline and saw nothing but empty beach, twisted piles of driftwood, coiled layers of seaweed. A scalloped line drew the boundary between wet sand and dry.

The waves surged nearby, eager.

She walked back towards the grassy dunes until she found a suitable piece of wood, then returned to the toe. As she bent down, she noticed a tiny pebble clinging to the toenail, which she gently brushed away. She began to dig.

It didn’t take long to uncover the whole foot. A man’s foot, of course, she’d known that right away. It was buried with the ankle facing straight down into the sand, the foot bent upwards and the toes pointed. When she’d dug a big enough hole, she regarded what was exposed—the surprising pinkish tint of the skin, the neatly trimmed toenails—and took a deep breath before reaching in and pulling it free. It was cool to the touch but not cold, damp but not clammy. She had a moment of fear when the end of the ankle came into view, but this too was unexpected: a smooth expanse of skin, only that. No blood, no evidence of how the foot came to be detached from its owner.

She bundled the foot into the folds of her coat and took it home with her.

The next morning the skies were flat, the color of metal. The sea was calm, issuing forth its rhythmic breathings with none of the violence of the day before. She stood at the window for half the day, exhaling onto the glass and watching it fog, then clear, before finally pulling on her coat and stepping out into the salty air. She hesitated at the beachgrass path, but of course there was no real question where she was going, and she pressed on through the dunes. Her steps became faster until she was almost running to the spot in the deep sand, her boot-prints collapsing behind her.

Today, there was an index finger pointing up through the sand. Its nail was clean and trimmed. A tiny shred of seaweed curled around the knuckle.

For the rest of the week she ate very little and sat at the scuffed wooden table in the kitchen each night, drinking steaming cups of tea and looking out at the moonlight sliding over the waves. Each day, she waited until midmorning to get dressed and hurry to the shoreline. Each day, she dug in the sand and brought something home with her.

An upper arm. A leg. The crook of an elbow. A bent knee. A torso, so heavy she thought she wouldn’t be able to lift it.

The last day was stormy again, cold with winter fury. She stood shivering on the beach while the sea grumbled and moaned nearby and at first she saw nothing, then realized what she’d mistaken for seaweed was hair. Wet and dark and thick with salt and foam and sand.

That afternoon she ran a hot bath and washed the head as she’d done the others. The eyes were closed, but she was careful. She used a damp towel to clean sand from the corners of the eyes, dabbing as gently as she could.

It was close to midnight when she left her spot at the kitchen table and climbed into her bed. The room was warm from the fire and the surf was a comforting rumble outside. She felt enormously tired and content. She was happy to wait. She was sure it wouldn’t be long.

The lamp had gone out when she awoke, it was hard to know how much time had passed. Her blankets felt cold and wet, and she pushed them down with a small cry of disgust. Everything smelled of salt. From the doorway, a dark and silent shape was outlined.

Hello? she said, sitting upright. Her ears suddenly filled with the rush of ocean, and she shook her head. Hello? Come here where I can see you.

The shape came towards her, an inky black movement of shadows. Salt and sweetness, thick. Brine. Iodine.

She smiled, started to speak again, and in that moment the moonlight filtering through her window fell upon him and she saw. The roar of the sea filled the room and his eyes were open, dear god, his eyes were open and she saw, she saw and she opened her mouth to scream but he was upon her, an unspeakable frigid drown of water everywhere on her body at once and her last thought before the black became all-encompassing was that he was tearing her apart, he was tearing her to pieces.

In the morning, the house lay quiet and empty, the fire burned to cold ash. Outside, the sun shone in a patch of blue, white clouds billowing from the east. Far down the shore, the whistling tune of someone walking the beach, enjoying the sun. In a spot of crumbling wet sand, something poked through the seaweed, pointing up at the placid sky.

hourglass_title

HOURGLASS

He sits, slumped on the rain-slick curb. He’s got twelve minutes, according to the scuffed Rolex on his wrist. But he doesn’t move. He sits, head down, his coat dirtied by the street. Waits.

For Rent. The sign had caught his eye. He’d been walking towards the bus stop, his breath a smoky plume in the cold late afternoon air, when he saw the sign propped in a grimy basement window. Something about its rough-hewn look – its faded hand lettering, the crumbling edges of the cardboard – appealed to him. It looked anonymous. The sort of sign that went down when someone moved in, went back up when they moved out. Doesn’t matter who lived there, the sign didn’t give a shit.

They didn’t really give a shit at the Y, either. But it was time to move on. He’d been there too long.

A worn, colorless woman took his money. She didn’t ask questions. He moved in his meager belongings later that same day, learning the hard way that he had to duck his head when stepping into the apartment from the hall.

One room: a bed, a couch, a table that creaked in protest when you leaned on it. A small, but serviceable bathroom. No kitchen to speak of, but he didn’t much care about that.

On that first night, after he’d put away his clothes, his books, and carefully placed his gun within reach of the bed, he poured an inch of Jim Beam into the cracked plastic cup he found in the bathroom. Drank, added another inch, then sat on the couch.

“Home,” he said out loud, then immediately wished he hadn’t – he didn’t like the shrill note in his voice. He drank, added another inch. “For now.”
Days went by much as they had been, one blending into another. He read. He walked at night. He drank. He tried not to think about his emptying wallet.

Don’t think about the money you left.

Don’t think about Chicago.

He found himself jerking off in the shower one morning, chasing a joyless orgasm, and for the first time he cried. A nobody, a cipher, this solitary activity in lieu of anything real. His own hand, nothing more.

Don’t think about her.

Don’t think.

In the shower, looking down at his nakedness. His vulnerable self. And the ridged scar tissue running up the inside of his arm. The carved letters: GREED. So he never forgot. So he could never escape his most basic sin.

He’d been at the basement apartment for almost a month when the package arrived. When he looked back on things, he supposed that he had allowed himself to actually believe he’d gotten away with it. That he’d been smart enough. That he’d covered his tracks. When the package showed up – brought grudgingly downstairs by the uninterested landlady – with not only the apartment address, but his real name neatly printed in capital letters across the top…he’d felt something akin to a fierce physical blow. Something like shock. And something like shame.

Shame for allowing himself to feel hope. Shame for not knowing that they were just biding their time with him. He set it on the groaning table and stood for a moment, unsure. Small muscles at the base of his spine jumped, and he could hear the ragged sound of his breathing in the quiet room.

Every instinct in his body told him to run, to leave, to never come back, to keep moving.

Don’t think.

With numb fingers, he peeled back the plain brown wrapping. He opened what turned out to be a shoebox with something inside. Something wrapped in newspaper. He tried to pull apart the paper, but it was tightly wound around whatever its contents were.

Don’t think.

He lifted out the wrapped object and started ripping at the newspaper when something sharp sliced into his forefinger. Cursing, he gave the paper a yank, and it fell open.

Sand. Everywhere. Pouring onto the floor, running through his fingers and sticking to the blood.

He stood, holding the broken glass pieces, the torn newspaper, until the sand stopped. Until he could get his breathing under control. Until he could put the shattered hourglass on the table, walk to the bathroom, pour water on his hands. Until he could pick up the bottle of Beam and swallow.

The next day, greeted by sickly winter sunlight and a pounding head, he lay motionless on his bed. He thought about all the faceless others that had claimed this bed as their own. He thought about the sign being propped back in the window after he was gone. No one giving a shit.

The steel of his revolver felt cool, and he laid it against his cheek. Touched it to his forehead. Waited. Thought, I can’t.

Later, he sat at a busy coffee shop, his clothes packed into a duffle bag and sitting beside him. Everything had the overly bright frenetic feeling of a fever dream. Noises hurt his ears. He sat at a table tucked in the back, and he thought of nothing.

“Mister?” Startling him, coffee sloshing over the edge of his cup. A young girl, handing him a mobile phone. “This is for you.”

He stared at her outstretched hand. “Who is this from?” he said, in a curiously flat voice.

“I don’t know. Some man,” she said, gesturing behind her. The hustle of the café, people milling around, no one he recognized, no one looking in their direction.

“Here,” she said, impatiently.

He took it. The girl turned to skip away, stopping suddenly to flash him a sweet, gap-toothed smile. “Bye, mister!” she called, and was gone.

The phone rang.

Don’t think.

The phone rang.

Don’t think.

The phone rang. He inhaled. Exhaled. Answered it.

That was four hours and forty-eight minutes ago exactly. Somewhere, a clock is striking the hour. The peals of a bell echoing down the darkened city streets. And it’s like a movie – a bad one, where everything is too coincidental and rings false – when the long black car pulls up in front of him, almost silently.

It’s time for this to be over. It’s time to pay. It’s time to stop running. As the car window slowly rolls down, he whispers one word, and closes his eyes.

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