Sep

8

Storytime

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September 8, 2006

I am declaring today Fiction Friday here at sundrymourning.com, for no particular reason other than it’s been a long time since I tried to write a story. So, here we go, rusty fingers and all:

:::

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 fuckin 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. 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 as 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 hiccuping gasps.

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 in 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 happens 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.

Sep

7

Music to my ears

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September 7, 2006

The sound of a baby crying is, I suppose, biologically designed to bore holes into your brain tissue. That’s evolution, right? Developing the sort of noise that makes nearby adult humans (and certain dogs) drop everything they’re doing in order to make it stop, make it stop, feed it or pat it or do something, jesus, just make it stop.

When Riley starts crying I want to remedy the situation for some legitimate loving-parent reasons: he’s probably tired or hungry and I want to make him feel better. But secretly, the most important reason of all is because it’s an awful goddamn sound and it will give you a migraine in five seconds flat.

During the process of cobbling together little clips for his birthday video, I kept watching the footage of him as a much smaller baby, propped in his bouncy chair and bleating out a tiny cry. “Mmmmeeehhhhhh,” he says on the video, for all the world like a newborn goat. That was as loud as he got back then! Man, talk about the good old days.

Now, he can pretty much flatten redwoods and boil the oceans with his mighty screams. Sometimes he breaks out the big guns for no good reason, like when I’m wrestling him into an outfit, and I try saying “Riley” in a gentle, chiding tone. As in “Riley, for the love of christ shut your flipping yap before Mommy stuffs a throw pillow in there,” but, like, abbreviated. I’m comforting and all, but still sort of letting him know that it’s not necessary to unleash the Audio Hounds of Hell just because of some feetie pajamas, you know?

This works spectacularly, assuming my intent is to crank him up past eleven into Mad Hornet Mode. The gentle, chiding tone pisses him right the hell off. I find myself wondering how much of his future little-kid personality we are seeing right now, and how much is standard baby operating procedure. Because he just might turn into the sort of little boy who sets things on fire with his mind. I’m just saying.

People say that angry babies are funny, but I bet they haven’t had to share a 6-hour car ride with one. Yeah, it’s all fun and games until your eardrums rupture.

There is one thing he does when he’s upset that is pretty hilarious, though. Sometimes, usually when one of us walks away from him while he’s crawling around, he will collapse his front half onto the floor while his little rear stays poking up in the air. His head buried between his arms, he wails inconsolably. It is pitiful, and deeply entertaining. Of course, once I pick him up he immediately drops the boneless-chicken slump and starts kicking ferociously, aiming for my C-section scar, which is less amusing and more, hmmm, what’s the word for “needing to be dropped into a wood chipper”? I mean that in a loving maternal way of course.

This morning Riley had himself a little meltdown about being prepped with a fresh diaper, then he got mad about sitting in his highchair, then he was ticked off because JB left the living room. But then? He said “bah bye” when he was being walked out the door in JB’s arms, as I waved to him. That’s Darwinism too, you know — the colossal amounts of cuteness continue to keep him far away from that wood chipper.

FOR NOW.

:::

2 small things:

1) Remember how I was all “blah blah blah Cruel Girl jeans rock blah”? Well, you can get yourself a pair for a very affordable price on this website right now. I’m not positive that the jeans on there are the same exact style as the ones I own and love, but if you’re looking to check out the brand, there you go. I just bought myself a pair of the capri jeans off that site today, so I’ll let you know how they work out. (Thanks for the tip, Jenny!)

2) I sent JB an IM the other day to ask a basic math question (something embarrassingly retarded that I would know if I’d taken any classes past “Addition and Subtraction: Remedial Elements”). I apologized for the stupidness of my query, and this is what he wrote back:

soon to be famous writers are usually not good at math – that is why they marry math dorks like me who like spreadsheets and porn

I thought about it, and I believe the only thing that JB might find more appealing than some kind of porn/spreadsheet combination is if it somehow also included power tools.

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