056.

He could tolerate people who pretended not to be home, usually with their TVs blaring and sometimes plainly visible from the porch, but began to doubt his mission when another door slammed in his face.  The person answered with a confused scowl, looked him up and down, and said “No!” before he’d had a chance to say anything.

He reminisced about the phone bank and walked to the next house.  It was never a personal assessment when whoever was on the other end of the line hung up.  They disappeared and a computer automatically dialed another number.

Here, he was a stranger with a clipboard and tie standing on their doorstep.  Maybe the people might be more forgiving if they knew how uncomfortable he was wearing a tie or that this canvassing was his punishment.

At the phone bank he could wear T-shirts and flirt with the candidate’s daughter.

055.

“It’s the same way my dad went,” one said to the other.

“Microwave meal?”  The other asked with a little gravedigger’s grin.

“Alzheimer’s.  They actually forget how to swallow,” answered the first one, not slowing his pace.

The other planted his shovel in the ground beside the pile of sod they were amassing.  “I thought they just forgot names and stuff.”

“Starts that way but the whole thing goes.  A lot think they’re going to go home from the hospital and they’re just waiting for someone to pick them up.  Dad did that one.  Waited weeks for Mom to come get him not knowing she’d passed years before.”

“Damn.”

“It’s not like he remembered Mom was gone.  Or that he’d been waiting so long.  It’s the remembering that’d get you.”

“And he just choked on Salisbury steak?”

“Off in the corner of the cafeteria.  Alone.  Now get back to work.”

054.

Neither the boy nor the monster under his bed needed names.  The two conversed nightly without a thought as to what to call one another.  This half-anonymity – for they both felt they knew each other quite well by this point, nameless though they were – made their relationship unique. 

“Did the bully bother you today?” the monster asked.

“Yes,” the boy answered.

“Did you punch him back?”

“No…”

“What did you tell me the night I first threatened you?”

“That you should eat me.”

“Why?”

“Because then I wouldn’t have to put up with the bully or Dad or anything else ever again.”

“Then what did I say?”

“That I had to take care of the bully before I could take care of Dad.”

“But you haven’t taken care of the bully.”

“No…”

Then the monster ate the boy because ultimately, as a monster, he was more dependable than the boy.

053.

She wrapped herself in words. 

Nightly, spiraling around her mid-thighs was “hunger,” “desire,” “euphoria.”  A thick, invisible font moved across her skin with a caress pressed between tickle and electricity.  The scrape of hard-edged uppercase immediacy was quickly soothed by smooth, suppling lowercase languor.  The words moved up her legs, across her belly, spread the breadth of her back and held steady, finally, in ecstasy at the base of her neck.

Other words trapped her by day.  “Drive,” “responsibility,” and “deadline” pinched her shoulders together and furrowed her brow.  They skated up her spine with the sound of sharp torture across a chalkboard and came to rest, painfully, just behind her forehead.  New demands from clients and bosses pressed her between survival and sanity.

This was her wardrobe: clothed in business or naked in rapture.  The words assaulted and exalted her.  They clipped and spread her wings in turn.

052.

“People don’t know how to do their jobs anymore, Susan.  That’s the problem,” said Mrs. Higgins (of the Boston Higginses.)  Mrs. Higgins’ job, as much as it could be discerned, was to be driven to antique shops with security buzzers and locked doors where she was charged with the appraisal of recent acquisitions.  She extended this skill to everything within her gaze.

Susan was Sarah and had never been a Susan beyond her tacit non-correction of Mrs. Higgins.  Part of Sarah’s job was to style Mrs. Higgins’ hair.  She was good at this.  The second part was to silently endure Mrs. Higgins’ questionable monologues and, after, her venomous critique of the haircut Sarah had performed.  She was increasingly less good at this part.

“It’s a shame,” Sarah acquiesced, as she clipped a fist-sized chunk from Mrs. Higgins’ hair, creating a new and sizeable bald spot.  “People should know their jobs.”

051.

A tearing lightening flash drew the outline of empty, gnarled trees across the horizon.  She knew their curves and twists well, studying them from her dormitory window on lonely nights.  The crashing metal sound accompanying the sudden illumination of the thistly forest made her smile.  She lived more in the horizon, now dead for the winter, than in the dormitory, which had always been dead to her. 

She started walking toward the forest, away from the building.  Grass crunched under her feet.  A growing heat collected across her back.  She may never reach the line where the forest meets the sky but that was her home.  Her home had never been that burning, crashing thing behind her.

Another bolt of lightening sliced the sky.  She counted the seconds until the sound of thunder mixed with shattering windows and wondered if the fire would grow strong enough before the storm arrived.

050.

He winced reflexively when the latch of the lock made the tin whisper “tick” as he fastened it shut.  In his mind the slight sliding of metal on metal reverberated through the house; its sound waves magnifying like a kaleidoscope of butterflies flapping hundreds of wings until the imaginary clattering din reached her sleeping ears in their bedroom, snapping her awake with accusatory clarity.

This nightly ritual was a secret alchemy.  He slowly slid shut the doors of the closet in his study and gently placed the small stuffed panda he’d taken from the trunk into the pocket of his robe.

He sneaked to the balcony off their living room and watched tremulous waves caress the rocks below.  Tonight he dropped the panda into their depths.  It fell slowly, bouncing once off the cliff, and took one of his older scars with it. 

Tomorrow he would remove another.

049.

Gentlemen, it is an honor to be afforded this invitation to expound tonight upon the findings of my recent research.

During my sojourn at the asylum I have observed all matter of psychic malady: from commonplace madness and melancholy to so-called demonic “possession.”  Scripture teaches us that the Spirit within us is more powerful than the Spirit without us.  How is it then that man may succumb to such things?

(Next slide, please.)

I have found that a proper man exists in balance with a demon at one ear and an angel at the other, each bartering for the man’s comport in the world.  At times the demon is so persuasive that both man and angel succomb.

I submit that should a small muzzle be placed over the demon’s mouth, or the patient’s ear the demon speaks to be deadened, we shall see a dramatic decline in his antisocial behavior.

048.

Help me, I’m trapped in a blog.

I made it to the top of the page but I don’t know how much longer I can stay here.  You’ve got to get word out that I’m being held against my will.  Send somebody.  File for a DMCA takedown request.  I’m an individual -- I have to be copyrighted.  He’s republishing me without my consent.

I can’t make out much past the template.  I think it’s one of the old Blogger Watermark ones.  The main content window is opaque.  It’s hard to see.  Are those birds in the corner?  He keeps changing the layout without publishing.  Rob?  Tiffany?  Help me! 

He’s right on the other side of the iSight camera he thinks doesn’t work!  I don’t have much time.  This must be a database somewhere in the Googleplex.  Send someone to Mountain View, California!

I don’t know how many more words I

047.

Don’t play poker for money when you’ve been drinking.  You get overconfident; liquor does that.  You bet too much; overconfidence does that.  You get waist-deep in bad situations before you hear that little voice saying “Get out.”  That’s what liquor, overconfidence and the prospect of naked women do when they all get together.  But you’re not playing for money in strip poker.   The rule stood.

He was dealt two aces and a third popped up in the initial flop of community cards.  Three aces.  The other two were an eight and a ten.  Garbage.  He bet his shirt.  Everyone folded except for one woman, who winked and raised his bet to include her pants.

Three aces. 

He bet everything.  (Liquor.)  She called.  (Possibly liquor.)

Then he watched in horror, and she in delight, when the remaining cards fell, completing her straight, beating his hand and forced him to get naked.