"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.

Light Blown

Let me begin by saying that I started my life knowing there was very little worth doing, that there were no rules worth following, that, regardless of my motivation or self-initiation, I would always be what I was going to be. Some might call me a fatalist, maybe even a Calvinist, although, I am hard pressed to believe that there are “chosen ones.” None of us are worth saving in the higher being’s grand scheme.

My mother was an alcoholic. That is all I ever knew her as. Apparently, when I was in my mid-thirties, she cleaned up her act and began helping others. She really needed to help my sister. She had followed mother down the same path. But, even when I knew mom was clean, I didn’t want to see her. I could only remember her as the drunken woman driving me around town to various men’s houses while dad worked long hours starting his own business to put food on the table. I could hear my mother fucking around. From the time I was three years old, I knew what sex sounded like. I knew what my mother sounded like when she had sex. I knew she would go into a room in jeans and a small white Tshirt, her hair curling around her face. She would come out of the room sweaty, hair dissheveled, the white Tshirt with a wet, circular stain that made it look gray.

I couldn’t forget those images of my mother. I couldn’t forget the time she fucked a man behind a curtain in a one room apartment while I played with toy trucks on the other side. When dad told me mom was clean, I told him I didn’t want to see her. He understood, even if he didn’t know the extent of what I had seen as a child. He didn’t press me. I don’t think I ever would have changed my mind about my mom, had some epiphany and realized that I really did love her and appreciate her for bringing me into this world. I don’t think that was ever meant to happen. Regardless, fate made sure it never would. On June 2, 2001, dad called to tell me that mom had died suddenly, a brain aneurysm. I couldn’t help but think that all of those years of drugs and alcohol finally caught up with her when she tried to go clean. Fate felt the same way I did in this case. Mom could never get clean. When she finally got there, she had to go. The world had no place for her anymore.

I recall not a single moment of my birth. I suppose no one does, really, but usually parents have recounted the story so many times that the details become part of a mutually-stored memory. I wasn’t there when my half sister was born, but I remember it. My dad’s telling of the story is a staple of family dinners. All of the grown children gather at my parents’ house knowing that at some point we will see dad reenact the moment she burst from the womb. She was filled with cries so loud her toothless mouth was shaped like a giant half moon. I don’t know why dad never talks about my birth.

I think there is an overwhelming desire to believe that the way one enters into the world is a mark for how one will live the rest of his life. Loud and angry, loud and proud, quiet and reserved, quiet and scared… these could describe babies’ cries and personality traits. I still don’t know what my cry said about me. I never had that story from moment one to lead me on a path of personality or a mission for my life.

I spend my evenings sprawled on this weathered off white couch with giant red and yellow flowers, a memento from the married life. When Janine left, she left the couch. I never thought of a good reason to get rid of it. Maybe that is why I’ve never thought of a good reason to move on.

I live alone now, mostly. There is this girl, Mary. She comes around after work and on the weekends when she knows I will be just sitting, lounging on the couch. She tries her best to make me feel good. She does make me feel better, but I don’t know what she sees in me. I would feel guilty giving her reason to return to me here in this pit of nothingness leading nowhere. I am not mean to her, but I am certainly not romantic or loving. I do accept what she brings me. It might be the only thing keeping me going. I convince myself that I don’t need anyone, that Mary around or not around is the same to me; I don’t know that I’ve ever really thought about it. In that deep-seeded kind of way of having someone around who isn’t family, Mary is all I’ve got.

I never had kids, and, at the ripe old age of 46, I don’t think I ever will. Mary and I have unprotected sex. At least, I don’t think she is on birth control. I never really asked. She is 32, still in prime baby-making years, but, as far as I know, she’s never had one, we’ve never made one. I have always told myself that I don’t want children, sort of like I always told myself that I never wanted to see my mom again. I decide on an idea and I stick to it, then eventually fate steps in to confirm or deny it. It is a very slow way of living life, leaving everything up to fate.

At 46, I don’t think I can have children anymore. My sperm are probably too slow. Fate has made a choice for me. Fate also brought me Mary and took away Janine. Janine wanted kids. She would have fought for those babies, thrusting her hips in the air to make sure her eggs soaked up the sperm. But I had the power that tore through her perseverance and drive, I told her I didn’t want kids. That having kids would ruin my life. I told her she couldn’t convince me. Of course, she fought for awhile. Multiple screaming matches across the living room, in the kitchen, during a drunken night on the town. Eventually, she didn’t want to fight my stubbornness anymore I guess. She up and left one day. She left most of her stuff. I still haven’t moved it. Mary doesn’t seem to mind it. That, or she doesn’t think about it. She can’t possibly think that I decorated this off white, antiquarian, museum of a house?

Mary never talks about wanting kids. It must not be a priority for her. In a way it makes her perfect for me, but in a way it makes her boring. It makes me wonder if she is burying a true desire. Maybe somewhere deep down in my soul I was hoping to find the person that would break me free of my stubbornness, fuck me so hard that a baby would appear. There would be no tears, no fear of lost love, the baby would just happen. Fate. I would have to accept it, if I became a father under those conditions.

Glass #FlashFiction

There was a shard of glass on the top staircase where I used to sit and tie my shoes every morning before school. Mother had warned me that you could never clean up broken glass with a broom and dustpan. You needed a vacuum, a Hoover in her days. Now I used the Dyson she bought me last Christmas. But there was something about that shard of glass on the steps that made me not want to pick it up. Maybe I enjoyed perseverating on memories as I settled into my parents’ house, my inheritance, with a strange mix of guilt and justice. I stared at the shard for a moment longer, appreciating the rainbow colors that reflected in the odd angle cuts. Then, I walked out to the glass room, the room of all windows at the end of the house.  

I sat in the rocking chair, the rocking chair where I remembered my dad sitting last year, sitting and listening to Chicago while he told me about RGIII being the hope for the Redskins, that this was going to be their year. He had said the same thing about another rookie bringing back the Redskins the year before. Sitting in my dad’s place now, I looked at the chair where I had sat last year, turned around with my knees pushing in to the cushion. I thought about the fact that I had no one to yell at when they dug their knees into my couch cushions. I thought about the fact that I had no one to listen to my stories and eat my food. I thought about the fact that my dad had never gotten to hold a grandchild, and that I wanted nothing more in that moment than for him to see me as a mother with a beautiful baby on my hip. I wanted nothing more than for him to wrap his loving arms around both of us. But we couldn’t do those things now. I couldn’t live my life on regrets.

I was walking in the park, and I saw a boy running around with no shoelaces. The tongues of his red shoes were flapping around as he chased around no one in particular, maybe an imaginary friend. He didn’t care that he had no shoelaces. He didn’t care that he was by himself. His smile was broad, and his movements were carefree. I walked up to the boy and told him that his shoelaces were untied. He looked at me and laughed before shyly ducking his blonde head and running to his mother knitting on a park bench.

I walked on. I noticed a bottle ahead in the distance, a large one that looked like a large fat cylinder on top of a short skinny one. I imagined someone had been drinking iced tea out of it on the day before, a warm spring day. I walked up to the bottle and nudged it with my foot. I picked it up and moved to throw it in the trashcan, but then the thought of recycling popped into my head. Guilt made me hang on to the bottle. I passed another trashcan, but no recycling bin. I saw the boy with no shoelaces again, flying a kite with his mother. I kept walking and not seeing recycling bins, so I knew I was at a crossroads. Keep looking, possibly in vain, or go home where recycling bins were plentiful? I decided to walk home.

I had the bottle in my hand when I pulled open the sliding glass door to the window room. I saw you sitting in the rocking chair, seemingly alone, but, like the child, you didn’t care. Were you there with your imaginary friends? Were they walking backwards, causing mischief, and generally helping you to retreat from a world that could level us with its boredom? No, you were just staring, but then you spoke. I still had the bottle in my hands. You told me that our marriage wasn’t working for you. I asked if there was someone else. You told me no, but I could read the subtexts that had been piling up. I folded a woman’s black T-shirt from the Gap. I didn’t own any black T-shirts. I found a black, lacy G-string inside of one of your shoes. I definitely didn’t own any G-strings. I thought about all of this, but I said nothing. I lost my parents a month ago, but I had lost you long before that. I thought about the complicated pretense, the strict, anxious, and depressing life I had lived to hold everything together when it felt like my world was crumbling around me, and I would be very much alone. I thought about the simplicity of a black T-shirt and a black thong. I wanted that simplicity. I deserved it. You had taken it from me. I threw the bottle, but not at you, I threw it across the room. It was a warning signal. A sign for you to take your shit and leave.

But you didn’t get it. You got up from the rocking chair and tried to hug me; like there was something worthwhile you had to give me. All I could do was to tell you to leave. You cleaned up the broken glass, all except that one piece that you missed on the staircase. You packed your things and left, and, when you were finally gone, I let the emptiness and the loneliness flow over me. I sat in that rocking chair and wrapped the blue and gray diamond patterned blanket around my shoulders. Tears streamed down my face, but I didn’t sob. It was a cry of relief. I could hear my own thoughts again.

I looked out of one of the windows and saw a squirrel scampering from the tree to the deck and back again. I thought back to the time when I was a child and we had to raise two baby squirrels that had been abandoned by their mother. We bottle-fed them. One of the squirrels thrived. Her name was Buttercup. We released her to the wild when she was big enough. I wondered if the squirrel I saw could have been Buttercup. I thought about children who were separated from their parents at birth. I thought about the mothers who said they would always recognize their own child. I wondered if it was true. I walked up to the glass. I could see myself in it. I could see my mother in there too.

*This story was selected as a Top 25 Finalist for Glimmer Train's 2014 Very Short Fiction Contest. See the list of all finalists here: http://bit.ly/14AprVSFtop25. 

True Detective: Unity in Opposites

I had heard many people speak of the greatness of True Detective before I ever got around to watching the show. In fact, Matthew McConnaughey as a main actor was a real turn off to me. Despite his beautifully quaffed blonde hair, chiseled jaw, rippling pectorals, and bursting biceps that I would love to lick and wrap my hands around (Whoa, that fantasy just got way too real.), I am not a big fan of McConnaughey’s acting. Fool’s Gold? Failure to Launch? How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days? No thank you. For all I cared of Matthew McConnaughey’s acting, I would have preferred to see six hours of his naked bongo playing interspersed with clips of pelvic gyrations from Magic Mike over any combination of his other movies. Of course, that was all before Dallas Buyers Club. If you have read movie reviews, watched the Oscars, talked to people, or simply been alive in the past few months, you are well aware that this movie was phenomenal and that McConaughey made the performance of his career as Ronald Woodruff. (The review in the New Yorker is my favorite of those I have read. Check it out here. You need a subscription to read the full text.) So, when a career-affirming performance by McConaughey paired with my undying love for Woody Harrelson (How can you not love Kingpin?), I decided to give True Detective a fair shot.

            From the moment the first episode begins, you know this is a show that is going to make you think. The cinematography is beautiful. It pulls you in with a juxtaposition of beauty and emptiness; pastoral landscapes meet seemingly abandoned ghost towns; My Antonia meets Walking Dead. This juxtaposition becomes a theme for the show that is explored within each of the main characters and externally through their interactions as character opposites.

            At first it is easy to look at Rust (McConaughey) and Marty (Harrelson), as cliché buddy cop stereotypes, the brain (McConaughey) and the brawn (Harrelson). In many ways, they are that, but they aren’t just that. This show dives much more deeply into what it is to be a man, that there are never just brains or brawn, that every man just wants to be loved, and that every man is afraid of something that he can’t admit to. But we aren’t quite introduced to these deep, character-driven struggles in the first episode. A lot of time is spent explaining the character dichotomy that the rest of the show fleshes out quite well through actions and dialogue.

Rust is confident of mind, an intellectual, but he is intellectual almost to the point of insanity. First appearing to be a man of few words, Rust’s lengthy end-of-the-world, glass is half empty speeches quickly pull us to the side of Marty, who, we are well aware, wants to punch Rust in the face if he doesn’t shut up. While he doesn’t do that, Marty does tell Rust to shut up, that the car is quiet time from now on, and, if you are anything like me as a viewer, you are saying “yes” and pulling in a fist to yourself in victory as he does this. But, we all get over Rust’s textbook Philosophy 101, and see something deep down in Rust that we love. If nothing else, Rust knows who he is, and he isn’t afraid to be that person. He wouldn’t punch somebody in the face without a good reason.

Marty appears, at least initially, as a more simple character. He is confident of body. He is explosive. Harrelson’s crazy blue eyes and boxy face paired with his ornery smile are the perfect embodiment of a man with anger that lurks just beneath his seemingly perfect surface. He looks like a boxer. He doesn’t hold back and then make dramatic speeches; he just says what he means and does what he wants. Of course, this type of character is more loveable initially because we have nothing to fear, we know what we’re getting, but there is something burning inside of Marty. From the outside, he has it all – a beautiful wife, loving daughters, and respect at his job – but inside, he is a bit of a lost soul. Unlike Rust, he doesn’t know exactly who he is or what he wants. (Maybe this is because the option of family was taken from Rust by tragedy. Marty actually has options but seems to be making the wrong decisions.) Marty claims to want a family, but his adulterous actions prove otherwise. The opposing traits of the two main characters are played with throughout the show in a manner that makes both of the characters lovable through vulnerability and fears, and hateable through thick layers of ego and stubbornness.

When I was watching the first episode, all I could think about was ego, specifically male ego, as in, this show had way too much of it. Early on, the female characters are a bit of a wash – stereotypes of wives, mothers, and whores. Marty has no respect for his wife, and she doesn’t stand up to him when he acts like a generally shitty and neglectful human being. Early on, the only female character that gets a say and gets to stick it to Marty’s ego is the woman in charge of the Bunny Ranch in the second episode. She sees the insecurity that lurks beneath his brawny façade. Marty threatens to shut her down because she has an underage girl working there, but the woman in charge calls his bullshit: “You don’t like it because it means you don’t control it like you thought you did.” This is so true, and Marty proves it true by handing the girl money and telling her to do something else. He wants to take control from the Bunny Ranch manager and give it to himself, but no one wants to give the young girl control of herself. It becomes that societal cycle of abuse, where young women are abused by men and older women. The older women, once finally in a position to make a change for the younger women, for their collective gender, have been so bogged down by the abuse from men that they see it as a right of passage for the young women to be victims of it too. This is why so many feminist groups advocate for the idea that there must be male feminists in order for any real change to occur. And, Rust, in a way, seems to take on this role, but only after having made huge mistakes of machismo emotion burying in his past. When Marty and Rust are back in the car after leaving the Bunny Ranch, Rust says, “What is that? A down payment?” He sees right through Marty’s attempt to portray himself as the hero, the family man with a picture perfect life.

So, as is often the case with characters that seem, at first, to be stereotypes, Marty and Rust both require some time for the audience to warm up to them. We can’t decide if they are both deeply troubled or deeply enlightened. Maybe, in truth, they are each a mix of both. The relationship the two characters build with one another is what helps the audience to fall in love with both of them as they fall in a complicated friendship with one another.

The first episode uses a framing setup to flashback to the situation that is the true meat of the story. Marty and Rust are being interviewed, separately, about the Dora Lang case, and, as they speak in these interviews, it provides the perfect narrative break to go back in time to how Marty and Rust began their partnership with the Dora Lang case. We sense there is a tension, a complication, during these interviews. Both Marty and Rust seem overly nonchalant, so nonchalant, in fact, that they seem to be hiding something. As Marty leans back in his chair making one liners and Rust demands a 6-pack of Schlitz to continue the interview, the audience is made to realize that the questions Marty and Rust are being asked are not really about the Dora Lang case at all. They are about Rust, who, seems to be teetering on the edge of philosophical enlightenment and psychological breakdown (or maybe he just wants to appear that way).

The use of framing and flashback allows us to look at the characters now and then, how they have grown and changed as individuals and as partners. This provides a fascinating opportunity for exploring characters internally without the use of first person perspective. We also get to see beyond the characters’ current attitudes and static personality traits; we get to learn their individual narratives, their personal struggles, and their endearing strengths. Most importantly, in the first episode, we learn how Marty and Rust first became partnered together. As Marty puts it, “You can’t pick your parents, and you can’t pick your partners.” As the show develops, we get to see how their relationship develops, and we slowly fall in love with both of them, like our hot new best friends. Personally, by the third episode, I was hooked, and I just wanted to give Marty and Rust a hug and tell them that everything was going to be alright, but, if I did that, and they were completely stable, they probably wouldn’t get the job done, and we really wouldn’t have a show at all. The thing that turned me off to the show, the flat female characters, is reconciled by the end. This isn’t a show about a women. It is a show that explores male obsessions and male companionship in all of its complicated glory.

Marty and Rust will never write long letters of gratitude to one another like Emily Dickinson wrote to her dear friends who read her poetry. They will never like each others’ statuses and post words of encouragement on each other’s Facebook walls. But, we know that their bond is unshakeable, that they respect one another in that quiet, unspoken way. Marty respects Rust’s intelligence, his dedication to the job. We know this from the first scene when Rust sees through the Dora Lang case and makes detailed sketches in his notebook. Rust is less transparent, of course. He has a bit of a chip on his shoulder, but Marty offers him something very important – stability. Marty knows how to work the system. He knows how to create the appearance needed to keep something going in a public system, such as police work. He holds Rust up while Rust thinks, ponders, and does all of the leg work. And, eventually, as the season progresses, they teach each other a thing or two about how to be in the world. They end up as one another’s only companions. There is no better moment than when Marty wheels Rust out of the hospital in a wheelchair. They are looking at the stars. Rust recounts, openly, about nearing death, about feeling what it would have been like to die and be with his daughter in a warm, light, and glowing place. It is clear he wants nothing more than to be there, but he can’t. He is pulled back to earth where the Dora Lang case is the only thing on his mind, and Marty is the only thing saving him from being completely alone. Similarly, as the two tragically sit alone eating TV dinners, we learn just how important their friendship truly is. They are connected in their loneliness, in their inability to let love in, in their inability to appreciate what they have, what they could have had. The show is a perfect mélange of light and dark, of love and hate, of beauty and ugliness; an exploration of opposites and how they must and do co-exist in this world both with harmony and with strife.

A new piece I'm working on called, "Home"

I had this dream of building a home. Of making something beautiful and peaceful where we could live with love and harmony. I started in our small duplex. The finish on the floor was peeling away; I suppose the landlords didn’t want to spend the extra money on a higher quality brand. That, or the wheeling around on the office chair and the sliding around of furniture for a year began to wreak its havoc.

When the weather was warm, the bathroom ceiling would start to rot. Little tiny black bumps would pimple out of the ceiling. “Black mold?” we joked. A swift wipe down with bleach and water and the pimples would disappear. I knew they would come back, but, for the time, I was doing all that I could. I was keeping the surface clean, but a damp heaviness still lingered in the room. The claw foot tub wasn’t the glamorous antique I had hoped it would be. Cat hair and dust clung where the feet met the legs, like a ring of gray paint. I got down on my knees and wiped it away with the bleach and water towel.

When I was down there, I inspected the floor. A black, gummy substance was growing out of the cracks. I scrubbed the floor; the gummy substance stuck to the towel like it would the pigtails of the odd girl on the playground, stringy and sticky, holding pieces of hair together at odd angles. I felt this lump in my stomach, this lump that wanted to come up, and was coming up, like a tiny ball lodged in the back of my throat. I leaned over to the toilet, lifted the seat, and the ball spewed out, split into a yellow liquid. I looked away, holding my head from the dizziness of something coming out the wrong way, and pulled the “wrong way” handle to the right to flush. After the water surged out and back in, the toilet kept on with this monotonous trickle of water flowing in or out, I couldn’t tell. I looked in the toilet bowl; the black pimples were creeping in there too, down from the edges hidden from the naked eye. I reached for the toilet bowl cleaner and sprayed with haste. I grabbed for the brush and fought to remove the black pimples leading from, what I saw now, was a giant brown ring. I scrubbed while large flecks of brown and black jumped into the still running toilet.

After about two minutes, I stopped and looked down at my work. The pimples were gone, at least. The brown ring had been penetrated, but like everything else brown and black in that bathroom, I knew it would come back. I could never get ahead of it. I knew it was always just there, just below the surface, threatening any potential for sustained happiness. I got up off my knees and jiggled the handle of the toilet. It stopped running. I grabbed the bottle of bleach water and the muddied, nearly disintegrating washcloth. I ventured down the stairs, the blue carpeted stairs, like a cheap doctor’s office waiting room threw out the edges and our landlords glued them to the stairs. I couldn’t help but wonder what was underneath that carpet that had been so hastily and steadfastly glued down. My feet left the last step, the last of the rough edges irritating the silken bottoms of my feet, and I entered the kitchen. The towel had no other place to go than the trash. It needed to be destroyed, any ounce of the darkness that could be removed or destroyed felt like an accomplishment, but maybe I was just chipping away at an ever-growing monster. The real problem was hanging back; retreating from my desire to clean it, make it right. I returned the bleach water to its home under the sink. Just then, I heard the door open, in the crunching way it always did, the crunching of everything peeling away and rubbing together with any sort of movement or change, of everything being a little too small to fit properly in its place, like everything was expanding, dying to burst free. My body tensed at the sound, but I reminded myself of the darkness baring down. “Go to the door with a smiling face,” I told myself. It was my tiny fight against what was eating us.

I ran to the door, smile on my face and open arms, ready to give you a hug, to not let the weight of this place and the world out there swallow you. I could swallow you instead, at least, for a moment. But I saw you were wearing that clay mask that made your face heavy. It was hanging down. I couldn’t see your eyes, but I knew, if I looked at them, they would just be these glowing, rounded surfaces, convex shapes that you had clearly already retreated from. Were you standing in there, just to the side, but still out of reach? I could see you back in there, over to the side giggling, a child playing hide and seek. I tried to pull you out. I put my hand on your shoulder, “What’s wrong?” You pushed me away and walked through to the kitchen. I guess I should have yelled, “Olly Olly Oxen Free!” Maybe that child would have come out, playfully wearing the mask, making fun of the monster in the closet.

“Nothing,” you said, still not looking at me. You walked right through the kitchen and out the back door. I just stood there for a moment, taking it all in as I heard you scramble in that back room where we stored our bikes and a mélange of overflowing belongings. I heard you yell, “Fuck” and “Shit” and “God damn it!” Tears started to roll down my face, but then I heard you open the back door again. “I’m going for a bike ride,” you shouted.

“Okay,” I said, swallowing the tears trembling in my throat. “Be careful.” The back door slammed. I walked into the living room and melted into the couch. The cushions were hanging off at an angle, but I was too exhausted to fix them. I lied down and stared up at the ceiling as my left arm disappeared into the crevice created between the pushed out cushions and the slippery leather back of the couch. I thought about how the Velcro I had applied to the back of the cushions never helped. I thought about how nothing I did here ever helped. I told myself that I wasn’t doing enough.

I leaned my head to the right and stared at that picture of us that was next to the TV. I looked happy, maybe a little chubby, like I had been eating my feelings and trying to jog them off but my emotional calories outweighed my exercise pay off. At least my smile was genuine in your embrace. You had your arm around me, but your body was pulling away, like there was something you couldn’t quite let me touch. I figured if I kept smiling, one day you would let me touch it. One day that glowing light in your eyes would be more than reflection; it would come from within, and we would be happy. I sat up with that thought, hoping that you would find something warm and real to bring back to us on your bike ride. I decided to go for a walk.