The Everyday Sublime

            It has been just over six weeks since I gave birth to my daughter, and, whenever she is peacefully napping, I find myself thinking, how have I not written about childbirth and being a parent yet? Then, at the same time, I think, how could I possibly write about those things? I don’t mean how could I find the time, although, I will admit there is very little of it between all of the feeding, cuddling, crying, diaper changing, and general attempts to maintain a semblance of normalcy in my home and life. As tiny as my daughter is, she has changed everything in my life, but I have never been happier. What I mean is that having a baby is the most amazing experience I have ever had in my life. It has swallowed me whole, and I am immersed in the experience while staring at it overwhelmed and awe-inspired from inside my own head. I am in it and consumed by it, like the quotidian sublime of the ocean or never ending fields in the Midwest. It is something that happens everyday, and, yet, it is one of the greatest things a human being can experience. While I can write about the details, tell you everything that has happened and even fit it into a swell narrative arc, I can’t quite find the words to describe the experience as a whole, an experience that is greater than me. It is like trying to describe the ocean to someone who has never seen it before. It is blue, it smells salty, and any list of descriptive details could be used, but the details don’t quite cut it. You can’t quite understand until you see it for yourself because it isn’t just each sensory detail that adds up to make the thing, it is the experience.

You realize this when you become a parent. You think back to all of those times you rolled your eyes at your parents for worrying about you when you didn’t call or came home late. You finally feel what they felt, this all embracing feeling of love, a love that must worry and protect. You finally feel what it is like to want the very best for someone and to know in your heart that you will do anything to give your child that. Everything that your parents have done and continue to do for you becomes illuminated, and you begin to understand that you were probably right to adore them as a child and look at them as superheroes. They are superheroes. Every parent should be their child’s superhero. And, if you have friends who had children before you, you know you have heard them say all of this, there is nothing else like it, it is the most amazing experience in the world, I wouldn’t change it for anything. And you nodded, and you believed them, but you didn’t really understand, you can’t really understand, until it happens to you.

But, while it may seem impossible to write about this experience, it isn’t. It just takes finding the right moments and describing the perfect mix of details about those moments. There is no recipe, but it can be done. That is the challenge of a writer. You have to write about those tiny, poignant moments when you felt most deeply. Of course, you can’t live every moment like that or you would probably melt into a puddle on the floor, unable to function as an adult. Believe me, this has happened to me. So, instead of feeling everything all the time, we let those moments flutter into our lives and we never forget them. We return to them when the pain or mundanity of life has made us feel numb. Those are the poignant moments we write about. I can think of no better place to start then when the nurses placed my daughter on my chest for the first time, she began to nurse, and I stared at her tiny hands and full head of brown hair. A smile burst on my face and I couldn’t stop looking at her. Despite all the commotion around me and the doctor sewing me up, there was nothing else in the room for me at that moment except for my daughter and me, dissolved into happiness.

Remembering Nanny

My grandmother passed this morning, and I have so many happy memories with her. I wanted to share this essay, one of my very early pieces of writing (from high school!), about some of the most memorable parts of visiting my grandparents at their home in Florida.

The sun beamed in through the windows of the car creating a warm sensation on my shoulders and cheeks. I felt the car stop moving, and the monotonous hum of the vehicle came to a halt. I opened my eyes and looked between the two front seats occupied by my parents. I observed a black stone eagle mounted on a garage. If that image alone had not been enough to verify where we were, my sister’s next comment would have surely cleared things up. “We’re here! We’re finally here! Let’s go find Nanny and Pappy!” Without a second thought, before my mom or dad could tell us to carry our bags in, my sister and I had escaped into our grandparents’ arms.

            “I have something for you girls once we get inside,” Nanny said with her pleasant, grandmotherly charm. The smiles already glowing on our faces seemed to defy all laws of nature as they grew in size.

            “I think they have something for us too, Loretta,” my Pappy said to her. My sister and I looked at each other in confusion. “What’s that you’ve got there?” he said with a chuckle, as he reached behind my sister’s ear and pulled out a quarter. “Look what I found behind your ear! Don’t you ever clean those things?” he exclaimed. My sister and I fell to the ground in a fit of high-pitched giggles.

            “You’re silly, Pappy,” my sister and I said still trying to stifle our laughter. Soon enough, my parents made their way over. With the adult greetings initiated, we charged for the front door prepared to explore the fun and excitement that waited inside. Through the screen door, through the heavy brown door, we had finally made it into our childhood haven, the architectural sanctuary for our youthful memories and dreams.

            Visiting my grandparents’ Florida home was an annual event for my entire family. It was like a birthday, something I looked forward to every year. Each room was like a beautifully wrapped gift begging to be opened. Every door was my gateway into discovery, the taunting bow and paper that must be torn to reveal the contents of such an anticipated parcel. Entering every room was like diving in the box, something fun in every corner, something new for my grandma or grandpa to show me. Each year brought new surprises, but traditions remained as well. Everything I knew and loved lingered about the house year after year. My Nanny’s California Raisins and the grapefruit tree in the backyard were always just as I had left them.

            Before my journey through the house could begin, however, I was struck by an all too common ailment of those engaged in long travels. My feet moved quickly on the russet carpet; passing two bedrooms on my way, I reached my destination, the bathroom at the end of the hall. I turned the doorknob and entered a warm, bright room. My nose was suddenly filled with a sweet aroma. My eyes caught a glimpse of the source. A basket filled with a variety of shower accoutrements was placed daintily upon the commode; bath salts, bath beads, bubble bath, and even a set of a miniature shampoo and conditioner stood positioned in the vat of goodies. I reached in and pulled out a tiny round bath bead. It felt smooth in my fingers, and I suddenly had a desire to pop the ball and release its gooey contents. I squeezed it slightly but resisted my longing for destruction of the bead. Fearing the repercussions of such an action, I placed the bead safely back in its nest. Above the basket hung a tiny sign that my grandmother had cross-stitched, a hobby she later taught me one lackadaisical afternoon. I recited the words in my head as I looked at the elegant thread lettering, “If you sprinkle when you tinkle, be a sweetie and wipe the seatie.” I chuckled at the language that dangled on the wall before me, and it suddenly reminded me of my favorite entertainment in that land of luxury. I moved closer to the sink, and, sure enough, five tiny soaps in the shape of seashells were huddled on a beautiful dish. Before I had time to explore the fascinating sculptures further, however, I heard a knock at the door. It was my sister. “Hey, Dude is on Nickelodeon!” she said with excitement. The news grasped me out of fantasy land, and I hustled to finish my business at the end of the hall.

            My grandparents’ living room was a lavish suite for my sister and I. There was nothing particularly intriguing about the room. It was relatively small; a couch that folded out into a bed and two Lay-Z-Boy chairs took up the majority of the area’s space. Photographs coated every timbered wall almost as if there were no fortifications and only pictures from floor to ceiling. With seven children and an innumerable amount of grandchildren, there is almost no questioning as to why everywhere you looked in my grandparents’ living room, a smiling relative was looking back at you. There was one gripping feature of this room, however; it was of particular interest to my sister and me. Back at our own home in Frederick we did not yet have cable television. When we went to Florida, though, cable programming was at our fingertips for a whole week! It was the opportunity to view our favorite Nickelodeon shows like Hey Dude and David the Gnome whenever we wanted. It was perfectly dreamy sitting in front of the tube and turning the knob until the television rested on that sacred channel. The living room held grandeur like no other room in the house. The television, perfectly placed in the corner upon the earth-toned carpet, was of epic proportions. Cable programming could be viewed from any seat in the room, especially the up close and personal seats marked by four tiny dents from four tiny cheeks in the carpet.

            After an hour or so of being loyal strictly to that box that stood before us, the warm breeze of Florida in February began calling our name. The sun leaked into the living room, engulfing us with its warm glow. Surrounded by the flowing rays of light and the temperate zephyrs from outside, my sister and I saw no other solution but to relax in the screened-in-porch with our grandpa. The room was bright with vivacious green plants all around. A set of brilliant white patio furniture filled the room with the finest plastic in town. I could smell the citrus fruits of the grapefruit tree only a foot away. I heard a strange sound, a buzz, or maybe it was more of a hum. I looked at my grandpa slouched in a chair in the corner. His head was tilted back, and a strange noise came from his nose as his breath tickled his long nose hairs. He was asleep, and that strange noise was Pappy’s deep, billowing snore. My sister and I looked around and decided that that was the perfect setting for our salon. Armed with makeup and various pieces of hair décor, my sister and I beautified our deep sleeping Pappy. My mother came in and laughed so hard when she caught a glimpse of her father in blue eye shadow and pink lipstick. She called Nanny in, and the laughter that ensued was enough to wake the sleeping bear. Everyone was rolling with laughter, and after my Pappy was informed of the situation, he had a chuckle too. “You girls are sneaky,” he said as he gave us a great hug that lifted us from the ground.

            My sister and I were never finished exploring, and the end of our week in Florida always snuck up on us like a nasty cold. As our car pulled out of the driveway we smashed our hands and faces on the windows. Our eyes remained glued to the house, craving one last glimpse even as it grew smaller and smaller in the distance. Once the house was out of sight, and the black stone eagle could no longer be spotted, my sister and I eagerly began the countdown for next year’s thrilling trip.

Some Poetry.

Love.

Love weighs a lot.
No one tells you that.
As you grow up,
if you have good parents,
it might take you quite awhile to realize its weight.
Love, at that point,
is an invisible security blanket,
always around you,
always comforting you.

When that is the case,
It isn't until you feel your first heartbreak,
that you understand how much love really weighs,
that you understand how and when and if it is taken from you,
that you might suffocate from trying to breathe the air alone,
like you were stranded on a high mountaintop for the first time
without any oxygen.

You feel betrayed by what you had perceived to be the world,
like a goldfish who took the leap from his bowl,
but ended up flat and dried out,
air all around him,
but with no knowledge or abilities to take it all in.

But unlike the goldfish,
you survive.
Because you have to.
Abandonment and betrayal can destroy any blanket,
leaving you feeling naked and cold.
So, you must find your way back
to that original familial fabric,
the invisible one that was there from the very beginning.

The batting may have diminished over the years,
thinning in spots and clumping in others,
leaving the general texture of the thing a bit lumpy.
But when you hold it to your hot, tear-stained face,
you find that it still retains the power to comfort you,
to restore you to the perfect temperature.
When your face is red, warm, and swollen from the tears,
it wraps your face and cools you.
And it enables you to see
that while one blanket has been shed,
there are indestructible fabrics that still surround you.

As the familial fabric enraptures your face,
you feel a new blanket covering your shoulders.
The blanket is more of a quilt,
filled with shared squares of memories and love
of friends old and new, near and far.
It is there to swaddle you too,
as it had always been,
even when you thought you were all alone.

Those blankets hold you while you are weak.
They pad the fall, cool your fire, and warm your tiny, bleeding heart.
And, eventually, they give you the strength,
the strength you need to build a new blanket of you own,
to wrap around a new lover,
who, one can only hope,
has one to cover you that is as tightly knit as your own.

Introducing Character

I am working on a story, a story that I have been working on for nearly a year now. It started out, essentially as a character sketch; a few months later it developed into a story with a clear plot, but no definite ending; and, now, finally, I see where the story will go. But, this requires the addition of a new character, and a strapping young male character at that. It is incredibly difficult to write about tall dark and handsome or blonde-coiffed blue-eyed dreamy without using those cliches and sounding incredibly sentimental or romance-novelly. I start to imagine my beloved story turning into a scene out of a Nicholas Sparks novel where a muscle bound dude with a perfectly chiseled jaw arrives to to save the day by carrying the female protagonist's bike or two bales of high on her farm. Just like in real life, that man can't save anyone by lifting heavy objects, and he certainly won't save my story by swooping in to ease the female protagonist's plight. Ultimately, what saves a story is writing characters that seem real and that seem to have real connections with your other characters, and, to paraphrase the great Eudora Welty, this often means writing characters that are "more real" than reality because we get to know them more than we ever get to know another real life human being. The trick, of course, is not making it seem obviously over the top or exaggerated. The trick is creating a great character subtly.

So, to figure out how to do this, I decided to go to a writer who could write sex, love, and romance without sounding sentimental: D.H. Lawrence. I believe he does this by focusing on symbols, gestures, etc. that represent the psychological aspects of love, hate, and other impassioned human emotions (see: the rocking horse winner). Particularly, I recall Lawrence's book, The Fox. In this novella, two unmarried women, March and Banford, live on a farm together in England during World War I. They are without laborers and male counterparts, and, during the war, they struggle to maintain life on the farm. A fox is a particular difficulty for them because March, the more stereotypically "male" of the two women who performs acts that require strength such as hunting, attempts to shoot the fox who has ravaged their farm, but he always eludes her. Below is Lawrence's description of March, with gun in hand,  coming face to face with the fox:

"She lowered her eyes and suddenly saw the fox. He was looking up at her. His chin was pressed down, and his eyes were looking up at her. They met her eyes. And he knew her. She was spellbound-she knew he knew her. So he looked into her eyes, and her soul failed her. He knew her, he was not daunted."

This description ends, of course, with March being shaken from her spellbound state and realizing that the fox had eluded her once again as she sees him leap off, leaving her with only the image of his "white buttocks" retreating in the distance. Shortly after this occurrence, a man, Henry, arrives on the farm. And it is clear, through the reaction of March to both of these characters, that Henry and the fox are connected in some way. It would be easy for Lawrence to have simply made the man appear, but he is creating back story and symbolism with the fox, allowing us to see the psychology of March through a seemingly straightforward description of a fox and a man. Below is Lawrence's description of March and Banford's first meeting with Henry, which certainly has clear comparison to that description of her meeting with the fox:

"He had a ruddy, roundish face, with fairish hair, rather long, flattened to his forehead with sweat. His eyes were blue, and very bright and sharp. On his cheeks, on the fresh ruddy skin, were fine hairs like a down but sharper. It gave him a slightly glistening look...He stooped, thrusting his head forward...He stared brightly, very keenly from girl to girl, particularly at March, who stood pale, with great dilated eyes. She still had the gun in her hand. Behind her, Banford, clinging to the sofa arm, was shrinking away with half-averted head."

There is so much depth in this introduction of Henry. Clearly, Lawrence's language is layered with sexual innuendo, both in his description of the fox, "And he knew her," and of Henry, "He stooped, thrusting his head forward;" but, superficially, Henry is depicted rather innocently. The description starts with alliteration, words to describe Henry's physical description with repeated "f" or "r" sounds: "ruddy and roundish," "face with fairish hair," "flattened to his forehead," etc. The use of these "softer consonants," a voiceless fricative (f) and an alveolar approximant (r), as a opposed to voiced or plosive consonants (for example, a "v" or a "p") has an interesting effect on accelerating the reader's perception of Henry's appearance. The "f" and "v" sounds create a soft and liquidy atmosphere in which we meet Henry. This seems to fit well, generally, with how Lawrence wants the reader to perceive this newcomer - soft, liquidy, and mysterious, like an angel or a ghost (we're not sure). Lawrence also uses words that act like approximants (not a stop or a fricative, but somewhere in the middle), words that establish that Henry is almost certain things but not quite those things: "roundish face," "fairish hair," "rather long," etc. His entrance is cloudy, veiled in mystery. Why, indeed, is he there?

Henry claims that his arrival at the farm is based on the fact that his grandfather once lived there. The truth of this is unclear. But beyond the mystery, we see a bright blue-eyed man with fair hair and red cheeks, and all signs of character types point to innocence, much like the external appearance of a fluffy brown fox. Of course, Lawrence does not stop with the external appearance of Henry. We see how other characters react to his arrival, which gives us information about Henry as well as the other characters in one fell swoop.

March reacts to Henry much the way as she reacts to the fox. She stands, frozen, but with a gun in her hand, conflicted between being mesmerized and penetrated by the stare of the other (a metaphor for her feelings about sex, fertility, the male gaze in general?). With Henry and with the fox, she didn't move to shoot, but she also didn't drop the gun. She stood in a liminal space between fear and fascination. And, through March's lens, the reader becomes fascinated by March, the fox, and Henry as well; all while the frail Banford is cowering in the corner.

In these two descriptions we learn about March psychologically through the physical description of staring from the eyes of a fox and a man. The conflict that boils throughout the story is also given its first flame here in these brief moments of introductory character description. It takes a powerful hand to create so much meaning in a few sentences, but that is what writing is all about. Each word, every sound has power to portray something (plot, character, etc.) to the reader, and, if you are writing smartly, each sentence will do a multiplicity of those things. So, hopefully, I can listen to my own advice and finish this damn story that his been boiling in my brain and on my computer for nearly a year now. I guess I've always been a slow simmerer. ;)

La-Z-Boy

The La-Z-Boy rocked back and forth, back and forth, from his quick exit. He walked with vacant, bulbous eyes focused on only one thing, that bottle of amber liquid he always had waiting in the kitchen. He poured a shot into his Old Fashioned Glass, but left out the ice. Instead, he tipped the bottle again and made it a double. Shaking, he carried the glass in his venous, wrinkled hands back to his weathered recliner still rocking back and forth, back and forth.

Sitting, shaking, staring, his black, beady eyes gazed into the swirling oblivion of his glass, the amber liquid that would obliterate everything he didn’t want to think about: his dad, his parents’ divorce, his latest break up, his many many failures. The La-Z-Boy had become accustomed to his touch, just like the women in his life. The cushions were indented, sunken in to accommodate his head, butt, and legs. The recliner was always waiting for him to fill in the gaps he had created.

The women were the same, until they realized he could not fill in all the gaps that he left behind. They would become sad or angry, and he would send them away, not knowing how to make them happy, not knowing that it was his own unwillingness to accommodate his soul to another that would make him unhappy and his partner unhappy time and time again.

The La-Z-Boy expected his touch nightly and expected nothing else. The chair could not tell time or become paranoid when he didn’t enter to fill in the gaps. If only he had realized that people aren’t recliners; they’re trees that must grow and bend but still stand proud and tall alone. But he was a toxic weed that consumed other life from the roots.

The tan, red, and brown lines of the recliner had faded after many years with him. His pressure on the fabric, causing the cushion to compress even in his absence, was the only relic to prove that the man was living at all. That, and the ever-dwindling bottle of amber liquid. A chair, a bottle, and a man alone.

***

When he was sixteen, his daddy bought him a fancy new BMW. Shortly after, he had his first girlfriend (no more masturbating with bags of mushed up bananas). But, it wasn’t about money or cars or even sex really with this girl; it was about finding someone who would hang on his every word, like it was the most unique and insightful statement ever uttered. He had never felt important before, only when he was making jokes like a hired monkey brought in to entertain his parents’ friends, but that first girl was different from everyone else in his life. That first girl listened to his feelings.

After they broke up, he convinced himself that he was an asshole. He let the guilt eat his convictions. He convinced himself that self-destruction was the only way to live his life. In his late twenties, he went out to the bar night after night with people who knew him only superficially. This was comfortable for him. He avoided questions by making jokes or witty remarks. He never really wanted to let anyone in again.

When people saw him more and more at bars, restaurants, his usual haunts, they began to see a deep pain in him that he carried around everywhere. He tried to explain it away – his dad, his job, his current girlfriend, anything except turning the lens around. But the poison started to leak from his heart and into his veins. It was becoming harder and harder to hide. Dark circles formed under his ever-blackening eyes. His fingers and toes blued with each passing day. His ears and nose, too, blued and blackened, giving him the look of a half cleaned chimneysweeper. He looked for cures and answers in the bottoms of bottles, in between the legs of women, through a glassy eyed stare from the La-Z-Boy and into the TV.  

Nightly, he would go to the bar ready to perform with his blue nose and his façade of jokes. The people would laugh. He told them lines, like the one about how he had gone down on Smurfette one too many times. “And your ears and fingers?” the people would ask.

“She was a wild one, that Smurfette,” he said with a smirk. Eventually, the jokes would grow stale, the laughter would die, and the people would trickle out, leave with their respective partners, family, or friends. Then, he would be alone on the barstool. As he grayed and wrinkled, and the blackening and bluing bled inward as he sat on that burgundy barstool, the employees started to take him in as an elderly family member who needed assistance. They would make sure that he stumbled home okay and that he found his way to his unmade bed, where the sheets were never changed, except for when Karen, the bartender, who was only working at the bar in Queens for the summer, noticed urine stains and stayed to wash the tan sheets that had become brown.

***

            Karen found the place unnerving. The exterior of the building was brick and somehow this old man lived on the third floor. He was leaning on her shoulder, his eyes closed, drool seeping out of his mouth, as she stood with him outside of the black metal steps leading to the green door. Karen looked up at the door and then back again at the old man. Holding him steady with her right arm, she shook his right shoulder with her left hand. “Wake up,” she said. “We’re here.” He pushed her hands off of him, grumbled, and stumbled back to stare at her with shiny beads of eyes. He hobbled up the three black steps, gripping the railing with each struggled climb as if holding tighter would salvage some shred of the dignity he had lost long ago. Karen watched him as he made it to the pinnacle, let go of the railing, and turned the knob to push open the green door. A piece of her felt that maybe she wouldn’t have to go in this time, or ever, but when the old man fell flat on his face as he opened the door and seemed to move in with it and then down away from it, she knew there was no chance of escaping the reality.

            Karen took in one deep breath through her nose and exhaled a puff out of her mouth. She jogged up the stairs to lift the old man from where he had fallen. He was frail and thin. She thought picking him up would be easy, but he was heavy with the irresolute weight of alcohol. She heaved him up, using the strength of her powerful legs to hold his venous rangy body. His head lolled into the space created between her neck and shoulder as his body leaned into hers. “Wake up,” she said to him again, and his head and eyelids lifted for a moment to show her thoughtless shiny beads. His head rolled back into her shoulder gap, and she grabbed for the railing, using its sturdiness to pull them up step by step.

            She reached the top of the first flight. She stopped to breathe four heavy pants. The old man said nothing, a lifeless sack. She looked above at the pink-carpeted staircase, the two more flights to go, the white and black and brown flecks of dirt and lint peppering the staircase. She looked to the old man on her shoulder and began to trudge forward once again, gripping the railing tighter and tighter as the load of the old man began to challenge her endurance.

            By the time they reached the top of the second flight, a time that felt infinite until it had indeed ended, the weight of his body merged with her own. They were a pair of Siamese twins united by the shared strife of life, but she was carrying all of the vital organs, all except one. She looked up at the final flight of stairs to the white-painted wooden door with the golden doorknob. Keys, she thought to herself. She leaned on the bottom of the railing and reached her other hand around the old man and into his pocket. He groaned. The pocket was warm but empty. He groaned again, and she removed her hand. As she placed her hand on the man’s shoulder, she noticed her fingertips were blue. She tried to wipe it off on his shoulder, but it wouldn’t budge. A dye residue from his navy pants, she assumed. Shifting her weight into the man and holding him by his shoulder, Karen let go of the railing and quickly reached into the man’s other pocket. She felt metal, looped the ring around her finger, and quickly pulled her hand out of the pocket to place it back on the railing. The key dangled from a loop around her bluing ring finger, and on she heaved.

"Blue" - A new story I am working on with altering points of view...

I look back on my life, sitting in this tunnel, knowing I have done little of interest, except for the one thing. But no one knows about that, except for the unborn child in my wife's belly. He is Blue, pregnant with my ideas as his mother is pregnant with him. I am still not sure if it will be born with him or if he will have to seek it out, like he will search for identity or meaning in life.

I know not if his mother is aware of what she carries; she knows I wished to call him Blue. I told her that before I left, before I went into hiding. But she knows little else. I couldn't tell a living soul about what I was doing. It would be too tempting to expose. So, I thought about it endlessly when we were making efforts to conceive Blue, and, then, when I knew he was in there, I whispered it into my wife's belly everyday until I left.

I am sure many of you (whoever you are reading this) wonder how I am so certain the message went through. I wish there was an easy answer, but the answer lies in the idea itself. The idea and all of it's complexities, which are no longer mine, which sit in the subconscious of my unborn son.

***

"Elijah!" the woman with blue hair screamed to the boy with crystalline eyes. "Elijah!" the woman screamed again, this time up the stairs, assuming the boy was hiding in his bedroom. She assumed correctly.

Elijah sat on his bed staring at the Picasso print, an old man playing a guitar, a print of form not so abstract as his most famous work. He sat, staring, as he always did when his mother called him by his middle name. He liked the name he had been given, but, she, for some reason, had grown to hate it with time. With each passing day, more and more Elijah's replaced less and less Blue's. But who was he, a boy of twelve, to tell his mother of the great struggle she was causing him? Shouldn't his mother know more than any other the name he was to be called? Elijah just didn't feel right, and each time she said it, it was like she was jamming a pipe deeper and deeper into a tiny hole. No, Elijah didn't feel right. It didn't feel enveloping and nourishing like a cocoon did, like Blue did. Elijah was suffocating him. He would have to tell her.

Plan Benny (Story in progress...)

The first time Ellen Sawyer saw him, she was ten months out of a five-year relationship. He barreled into the party, a tiny ball of nervous energy seeking a power outlet, like Napoleon preparing for battle. Ellen’s first thought when she saw him was, who the fuck does this guy think he is. Her second thought, bedroom eyes. Her third thought was interrupted by his squeaky speech, but first by the speech of his friend in the room.

“Benny! What have you been up to, buddy?” Ellen could sense the way the other men in the room fed on his nervous energy, his insecurity. He was fodder for ball busting, for making everyone laugh, for making the other men feel stronger than they actually were because, at least, they were stronger than him. Ellen felt sorry for Shakespeare’s fool, but she had to remember that this wasn’t Twelfth Night, that people are people and not character types, that just because someone acts like a fool on the outside does not mean they must carry some heavy wisdom on the interior. In the real world, the fool is often just a fool, but Ellen was still a bit enamoured with Madame Bovary ways of thinking about the world. For the moment, though, Benny quickly shook her from her literary frame of pondering the world.

“Tryna get laid, dude!’ Benny said it and then sniggered into a fit of staccato, high-pitched laughter. Ellen shifted her context of understanding this man from literary to historical. He wasn’t Shakespeare’s fool. He was Napoleon Bonaparte. And, then, the context quickly shifted to the psychological - Napoleon Complex. If there was a term to describe Benny, that was it, and it seemed his friends knew this and pressed on with inquiry of his apparent bachelor lifestyle of attempting to hook up with random chicks at ski resorts. Sex has always been an easy way to obtain power.

“Having any luck?” his friend said with a smirk.

“Not really.” Benny sniggered into laughter again. Ellen’s Madame Bovary lens flicked back on again. In her typical way, she felt sorry for him in the moment. She wanted to help him, to let him see that everyone had something to offer, that any man can reach for the apples at the top of the tree and keep one, if he really worked hard for it. And Ellen wanted to help herself out too. It was clear Benny had one thing on the mind for attaining status - women. Having sex with him would be easy. She didn’t think at the time that easy sex would not necessarily be good sex. Her only thought was that it had been too long. That ten months, twelve if you don’t count the last two of her relationship where sex amounted to hand jobs, was not a healthy amount of time to go without the touch of another human being. So, she decided to play the game, a game she had been good at because of her solid knowledge of how it worked, but bad at because of her inability to foresee how the game would toy with her sensitive emotions.