Welcome to my site archives. 10 posts are listed per page.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
wanted
its a thursday, because you only go one place on thursdays, and thats work. itd be easy to track you down here, your in laws- if they existed- would know which cubicle you were in, your spouse would be able to reach you at your desk phone if she needed you, because you're that predictable. its been two years working nightshift after night shift in cheap button downs and permanent press cycle khakis, serving up your fatass boss' requirements like you should be grateful for the opportunity to waste your life at a dead end job.
he's five inches taller. like the movies when the men get out of expensive cars and tell you to take the red pill or the blue pill, you know this sequence.youve only seen it in hollywood, the way he carries himself, the things he hands you. its the rising action, before anything goes wrong. you have a choice. be the lion, or be the lamb.
so many years being the lamb. the slaughtered, the menial. him, with tattoos, with brass knuckles, with scars on their faces, with the gunsmith's manicured silver bullets, painting in jewel tones on massive canvases, artists. a convent of sinners making decorations for their followers. if they could read it, they'd know, he says, the messages are in the paint.
today we're going to play a game. i'm going to beat you this time, he says, but after a while, i won't. the first time you take a punch to the face youre out cold, and hes smirking at you like youre the fucking son of god laying on his bedroom floor.
its suprisingly easy, all of it. natural. like you were manufactured for it, like it was all a part of your insides. you shouldn't know the answers to these questions, but you do, and soon he's on the receiving end and youve got a knife to the back of his throat, tracing all his tattoos, his rib cage, and hes just breathing steady. i told you so, he says.
nights and nights of no sleep, the poetry of a million saved by the acts of one, so much red. seas of red, your own. and him, with his mouth against your ear, oure the savior, youre the minister. fighter and the fallen, all one, lying in bed together.
we alone are the chosen ones. we alone are in the place previously reserved for the gods of men. what will you do with that sort of power? it'll eat you alive.he says.itll destroy you.
when fate comes to your doorstep and heralds you to the same end a million other men have faced in the advent of their becoming, you betray it. maybe you want to be destroyed. its only natural. maybe you already have been.
i see my light come shining/from the west unto the east
any day now, any day now/i shall be released Comments (0) |
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Wednesday, July 27, 2011
texas forever
The thing is, Bailey asked for his car keys. I hadn’t seen my brother in 26 months and the bitch asked me for his car keys. I obliged him, but much like the families of addicts cave in their daughters’ sixth year of alcoholism; with the underlying taunts of just watch. Watch where I am the next time you need me.
Baby serpentine-esque spirals formed as it rained, clogging the wipers with runoff on their highest setting. At that point it was pouring so hard I almost thought the road was going to melt away under our tires, black expanses of water forming in the depressions in the Kansan Highway system. Bailey hadn’t spoken in 637 miles; I clocked them as they rolled past. He was a Marine even when he was home; he was still fighting those wars in his head. It’s not like he was scarred- it was just more of a conscious decision on his part to make me comfortable and socially competent than it was not to, and he was sick of being self-sacrificing.
There were ninety six miles to Avalon, the road sign said, ghosting the total number of miles I’d spent pressed inside my brother’s jeep, him never having changed since he’d gotten off his flight, me pretending to sleep. “Some friend,” I said in the cold-clotted air. We drove with the AC on its highest setting, settled in the leftovers of Bailey’s military reminiscent fleece blanket. Bailey glanced over and took the next exit, I breathed. “Worth such a long ass drive.”
“It’s not that long.” Bailey said. I watched him count the time in his head. By corps standards, I guessed, it wasn’t. By mine, it was still eight hundred miles or so of hell.
“How old’s he now?” I said, kicking my feet onto his dashboard. He shoved them off.
“Twenty-two or something? Shit, I don’t know.” He said. He breathed, agitated. The words wrinkled his face, like the creases in the sheets I’d barely changed since he’d gone on tour. Not used to civilian small talk, I thought, and civilian, that’s something he would never be comfortable being. I don’t remember what he was like before war, in the time before deployment paperwork and his seventeenth birthday. I don’t remember him before my parents’ death or much of anything after, just him as the outline. He spoke more in his class than with his own family, than with me. I took a hint, stopped trying, and stared out his window, at the constellations stark against the empty black sky you never saw back in Wichitaw.
He was meticulous back then, with everything, he still wore his tags. He’d been off duty for two days, the war over for three. I wondered if he looked the same in Iraq, stupid Afghanistan, in the ocean of gold and desert camo. I spent those last twenty six months without him to some degree of separation, and all he did after he got off that plane was take his keys and fix my collar.
I imagined his Corps tattoos like scratch off cards, basked in metallic foil, and the imperfections of a year in a war torn country. If I could just peel them back with my loose change, take back what I never said and give him the five years he never had, we’d still have a chance at winning something that’d make us whole again.
