Then she’s awake.

A low moan exits her throat. As she opens her eyes, the sound rises in pitch. There’s a look on her face that’s abashed, edging the wild. It’s bald fear, raw as a carpet burn. And she’s seized by it. There’s little human about her state, or perhaps, she’s ultimately human. Sometimes I can’t decide. She runs to the end of the bed and back, pushing me away. The fat tendril of that low moan has tightened into a scream and she’s simply not the same little girl that went to bed. Not any longer. Everything that I know about her is gone and replaced with some undiscerning creature.

She’s been stomach-sick before, once, but that was when she was still an infant and she doesn’t remember that incident. Without that memory, this experience for her is terrible in its newness. That it happens at night, waking in the clutch of the wet retch, makes the strangeness of the moment worse for her. Of course it’s hard to deal with. I often consider that most of our lives would be spent shivering in abject fear were it not for the balm of memory. What else allows us to encounter the world with the necessary distance from events that we might process, understand, categorize and survive them?

I think of her running at me with her sharp elbows and shiny knees, laughing as she’s captured into my tickle trap. I think of her face slack in sleep, that little girl snore, how she holds her friend’s hands as they play. What am I doing? I’m looking for memories to ward off the intolerable present. It’s the only way we can possibly live.

It’s why writers write, no? Writing a story is a process of rendering various ennui and horror into something manageable, focusing it into known narrative structures so that our mimicked surprise at a plot twist is a doppleganger for the sheer terror of the unknowable and constantly new world. Writing is a striving to breach an impenetrable distance. Because the truth is we’re never connected at all. Never. We’re inviolate, always adrift, alone. Occasionally, we act in concert, but in doing so we’re casting our perceptions abaft constantly. We exist in the often-tread, the used, the worn. It sometimes feels like any momentum forward must also be a movement inward. Where else is there to go?

We gather towels and hump them in the bathroom around her. Finding the toilet bowl was hard. There’s a foul mess. It’s on my hands, my shirt. She just wants to curl inward, to get away, and she won’t kneel before the calm oval of water in the bowl. I can understand that, but there’s a limit to how much vomit one can abide on the floor or collect in a dish towel. My wife pulls my daughter’s crusty hair back since she won’t let us wash it. The hairbow is bright pink and her scalp shines through. The shape of her head is strange sometimes, like a vague pear, the sort of pear one might see through the bottom of a wet glass. Her cheeks pale, flush, then pale again. Even her color retreats. Soon it’s just the wormy green of stomach fluid splashing (finally) in the toilet, the worst kind of retch. I rub her back. She screams. She doesn’t understand. It’s an incomprehensible event. The world is cruel, always cruel in its newness, as it has forever been.

My work continues to be rejected, sometimes nicely, sometimes with a flippant disregard. That’s ok, though. Some people say yes. That does happen on occasion and I’ll tell you about a yes shortly, but first more offal and melancholy. What’s interesting is how little rejections appear to matter when I’m working on a long project. There is no more apt buffer for the battered self-confidence of a writer than to be engaged in the production of new words. Notice how easily I refer to myself as a writer now? That’s a change, no? An improvement of the temper for sure, and a narrowing of the focus.

Let me wax a tad vernacular here, or wane as your wont goes: this second novel was a bitch to get going. Fumble and lurch crowded the page and sometimes–sometimes there was nothing on the page at all other than a white expanse of not-knowing. Nearly a full year’s days accrued between finishing The Ransomed and starting on this book, although in retrospect, I think I was working on the second book all along, just doing it in fit and spurts the way a tubercular patient gasps before finally drawing in a fresh breath.

But you know, talking about the work, I think, tends to diminish the desire to work, so I’m done with–

Zoe Keating? You’ve heard of her? No? Forshame. Her cello is entrancing and captivating, full of woe and the right amount of wiggle to veer past expectation. She has an album here and here. Listen and look at her playing Escape Artist:

Shorn of words, the music is allowed to unfold from the force of its own energy, as perhaps music was always meant to be heard. After all, words acquire character and resonance more on the page than in the air.

But that yes, I promised. Here: A year after submitting a query and responding to a full request, an agent called me and offered representation. I’ve accepted. Now, I’m not such a dullard as to think that the struggle is finally over. No, the struggle will never end, I think, as I remain dissatisfied with almost all my writing. But I’ve taken another step, or at least it seems like I have. The feedback I’ve received so far on The Ransomed from her has been absolutely stellar and right on target. A few edits need to be done, and damn it, the synopsis re-written, but once that’s complete and we agree that the manuscript is in shape, my agent (and it feels damn nice to say that) will start shopping it around.

So there’s that.

Each day the baby ages, I fear I grow two older, though. There’s an exponential accretion of time in the aging process and it’s really only now that I’m feeling the press of the days. I know that some future moment holds the time when the weight of the next day or breath will no longer be there. Perhaps I’ll be unconscious in a bed, lost in the black well of thought. Or I might step out from the Post Office and get shot. Or more likely, I will simply whither away until one day the heart does not engage its endless clutching, and the final, sparking connections between synapses that raised this collection of systems into something resembling a directed being simply fizz and fade away. I do think that moment will come before I expect it, before I’m truly ready, which makes the writing now even more important, as far as important things go. I feel pressured, excited, intense. If for no other reason, I need to keep breathing, so I can continue working. The baby, after all, needs health insurance for 17 more years.

I just shivered a little. There’s an actual chill in the Texas air now. My morning breath plumes like a ghost as I make my way to the car for the drive to work each morning. Everything is grey, as William Gass said. The trees, the day, our moods as we move through the hours. Our breath is grey in the bodiless light of the moon. Frost hoars the cold glass on my blue car and I keep rubbing my hands, rubbing my hands in search of warmth.

BEAT to a PULP: Hardboiled is a compilation of uncompromising, gritty tales following in the footsteps of the tough and violent fiction popularized by the legendary Black Mask magazine in its early days. This collection includes thirteen lean and mean stories from the fingertips of Garnett Elliott, Glenn Gray, John Hornor Jacobs, Patricia Abbott, Thomas Pluck, Brad Green, Ron Earl Phillips, Kent Gowran, Amy Grech, Benoit Lelievre, Kieran Shea, David Cranmer, and Wayne D. Dundee and a boiled down look at hardboiled fiction in an introduction by Ron Scheer. Edited by David Cranmer and Scott D. Parker.

My story, The Blooming of Lester, is included. It’s another Button story and it starts like this:

Three things Lester Leroy Haight knew without a doubt: peanut butter tasted like dandelions, a woman’s voice curved, and he was going to kill Hilton Fishtrap. Ever since Hilton had clubbed him with a tire iron and wooed away his sweet Evaleen, the world had been awry. Snow filled his eyes when the sun shined. The soft blush of water drops splintered ice into his thumb. Everything was backwards and wrong, but most of all, Lester Leroy Haight had lost his love. For that, Hilton Fishtrap had to die.

So, check it out, will ya? Buy it here. Less than a buck on the Amazon store.

Here’s the first paragraph of my story, Until Shiloh Come:

Few things were known save they arrived enraged. The first of Dinah’s children—if one dared name them as such—started with the red antler of a cramp, some sense within that change was unfolding and wouldn’t be stopped. That the child dropped from her dead and yet moved but would not die again could not be disputed. And though the tribe shunned her, the Benjamite did not. He continued trying to make something pure with her, failing each time. The pain of the latching in every conception charged her with hope, though. Perhaps this child would be the one to come and cleanse the world of the others she’d wrought. Hope is the great deceiver, Dinah learned, but still she’d lift her robe in front of the Benjamite’s beaten copper mirror, hoping that bump swelling under her palm was a ravenous seraph inbellied. Woe to the wicked, she’d whisper.

Also, I found out yesterday that my story The Devil’s Fingers will appear in the Spring 2012 issue of The Minnesota Review. I’m happy about placing my work there. Devil’s Fingers is another story dealing with the characters in this fictional county I’m creating called Button. It’s a fairly short tale about Hilton and Eliot Fishtrap and what their father Sherwood puts them through when the black-ass, as he calls it, takes him over.

I have Button stories coming out in a variety of places. The Rapture of Amee Grape, a story adapted from my novel The Ransomed, will appear in Mixer Publishing soon. Seven Feet of Fire, a very noirish tale will be in the pages of Needle: A Magazine of Noir. I really like Needle. It’s a well-designed book and the writing is always smart, brutal, and interesting. The Blooming of Lester, a continuation of the travails of Lester Leroy Haight I started here will be in the e-book anthology BTAP: Hardboiled coming out in November, put out by the talented folks at Beat to a Pulp. I imagine that anthology will be available at Amazon and the usual places. More information as I have it.

The way that I approach writing a story seems to be changing again. What I’ve done in the past is decide what I want to write a story about, be that grief, determinism, or the hollow, damaging nature of religion, and then I’d stick characters into that situation. For the past few months, my production has dropped off considerably. I’ve been thinking about quitting writing again, but I haven’t. Instead, I think I’ve been living with characters in my head, learning about them. I don’t like writerly musings like “my character demanded I write in a purple popsicle” or “my character Billy Bumpkin wouldn’t lick the toes of Penelope at a public park. Not Billy Bumpkin!” When writers discuss their characters like they’re people, it tends to sound self-inflating or grandiose. After all, everyone knows that a character is just a collection of words, an artificial creation that is imbued with energy by the act of reading and reader perception.

Then again, what is knowing another person? The person across the hall from me now, the woman whose face is slow on the left side, whose hips are wide and tight and always has one fingernail unpainted, what is she? Is she real? Really? I know her by her movements, how she taps that unpainted nail on her desk when her husband calls, how she prays with her door closed during lunch, how she reaches out with the tip of her tongue to taste the icing on a cupcake. She’s nothing more than an accumulation of details and dialog. In many ways, a character can be more real than a person because with a character one has avenues into thought processes, unless it’s a McCarthy character. Nevertheless, I balk at talking about my characters doing anything voluntarily. I don’t really believe anymore that the woman across the hall behaves voluntarily either. Complexity is not free will, but it’s probably enough.

We don’t need truth. We only need to be entertained.

At any rate, these stories and characters about the fictional county Button won’t seem to vanish, no matter how I’ve tried to quash them with Rum or television or a dumb staring into a dark room. So I’ll try to do what I’m still learning how to do: write.

Thanks for hanging around during this blog’s long drought. Blow the dust off and take a poke around. Buy Surreal South ’11!

—

The first half hour of waiting was never as maddening as the last. They sat in the shadow of the water tower and blew cigarette smoke out the crack left in the truck’s windows. She curled her bare feet on the dash and he stared at them. They both enjoyed the waiting, the cruelty of time in that hour, how it seized their wants and made them wider. He didn’t much care for the taste that the cigarettes left in her mouth, but the rest was clear water and strawberry twizzlers.

“Let the wickedness wash over you,” she whispered and straddled him then. They went at it the way motors cranked over, the cross dangling from her neck making cold shapes against his cheek that he couldn’t turn away from in the small space of the cab. Let’s take it easy, they said to each other, wait till we get inside. He whispered the word in her ear as they moved: inside, inside, inside. Then she bucked and her head clanged the cab’s metal roof.

In those moments where separation swelled between them, she thought of dinner, the silver laughter of forks, round plates with potatoes and quivering, bloody meat. Her father would intone a prayer, his eyes small in his wide face. Deliver us from our sin, he’d say, deliver us from our wicked ways. Her face would warp in the bowl of a spoon during the prayer. The meat was red and sweated on the plate.

He liked the way she behaved in the house after his grandmother left, the noises that she made. They would leave the blinds open so the sun could slant in across their naked bodies. He enjoyed the slow revealing of that other girl inside her, the one only he knew, how her under parts arrived white and goose-pimpled. He didn’t know why, but her hands were wrinkled and creased as if they’d been burned or were yet unformed in their becoming.

Their favorite thing was to stand bare in the kitchen. He’d nestle behind her, his hardness clasped in her rear’s cheeks, his hands holding up the weight of each breast, raising first one, then the other like puppets. A bay window at the front of the kitchen opened to the wide day. Light flooded in and warmed the spots of their bodies not touching. There was always a moment before things turned frantic and huffing, a still moment that sifted onto them. It was a moment the boy was certain his parents never had experienced. How could they? They touched like the wrong end of magnets. But things were different with her. There was a certainty in the way her body fell into his, a natural melding, a fate. They would age in this closeness by the minute. They aged into their bodies the way a peach ripens within its skin. A pink blush splattered her belly whenever she came and from between her legs a great gush squirted till the sheets dampened, his hands full of the unholdable liquid, his face salty with the slick. At first, she was ashamed and would cover herself with her hands and squeeze her knees together to slow the jerking flow, but soon she came to enjoy his attention and now spread her thighs wide for the release, gripping his hair to hold his head so that he would drink, revealing all that she was and would be till they molted apart and he fell back with a wet and amazed face, watching her belly and its pink heaving.

She leaned forward and rasped a cigarette from the pack on the dash. Tobacco sizzled in the orange eruption of the Zippo. She leaned back, her head on the passenger door armrest, legs slightly apart. White panties with a wet spot. He stared and felt himself swell with eager blood.

She curled her toes against the rubber floor mats and squeezed her legs together. It’s not as if they were on fire as it’s often explained, more like they were the sort of forces that are compelled toward each other. They had discussed this before. Protons and electrons. But she didn’t care about that. Explanations and prayers did not matter. Reasons were for the old and the dead. What mattered was the here and now. She enjoyed how his scrotum moved even without being touched, as if it contained a life separate from his. She often thought it responded to her thoughts. It wasn’t so much that she wanted him inside her as that when he was she didn’t concern herself with escaping and thought little of those dinners, the silver laughter, and the lessons of red meat. A cock is a wonderful distraction, she told her friends, with a small flip of her wrist. It’s the best we have to hope for. She grabbed him in the truck and moved her fingers on him. Then she gave it a little kiss and said to him, “All mine. This will be mine forever. Especially if we have a baby.”

The things people say to each other. He rolled the window down a bit more and a scarf of smoke moused out the breeze. The water tower’s shadow bunched in the cab. He softened in her mouth. She moved up and sought his lips, but the cigarettes bothered him. Her wrinkled fingers cupped his chin. “What’s the matter?”

“A cramp in my thigh.” The window squeaked as he rolled it down all the way. “You have any gum?”

They both heard the other’s breath and felt blood grow old in their hearts. Grass stalks fluttered against the muffler. Though each felt different, the world persisted as if that difference didn’t matter. It was like the weight of all water was there and pressing on them, holding them back from becoming what they wanted to be. What people really are is revealed in sunlight and nakedness and they each looked for that in the other, but the shadow from the tower had filled the truck like a black balloon and they were becoming nothing but hands and tongues and everyday toes.

Seven minutes past ten and the boy’s grandmother still had not left. An hour beyond that and still her car had not moved. This had never happened. Never had they waited like this. He leaned his head back so that his hair darkly ovaled against the rear window and then he released his breath. He began to wonder what the rest of his life would be like from this moment forward. His concern was only for what might arrive, not that which had passed. His mother worked three jobs, wearing an orange dress, serving hamburgers. He thought of how her eyes had turned wet the last time her husband had touched her.

He looked at the girl who had fallen asleep and thought she could be replaced, that she was no different than any other. Then he closed his eyes and forgot about the virus of the past. All the past did was repeat. Noon approached. The cross around the girl’s neck glinted in the hollow of her throat and the sun crested the tower. Light broke around the truck. Light flowed and washed away his thoughts of what was to come and what had passed. His grandmother’s car was finally gone. The house was empty and full of breeze, willing as the moon to harbor that which they had to give. Their hurts would soon be healed, the breach closed. He woke her up and told her it was finally time. The news made her face a bright apple. He knew that what lay ahead was a privileged thing. This gave him a quiet pleasure and strength. He started the truck and they felt the combustion rattle their bones. As he drove out from behind the water tower, sunlight illuminated every inch of her body. She came out of the shadows into wonderful glory.

—

I have a Biblical zombie story forthcoming in Press 53′s Surreal South ’11 Anthology.  I’m really happy to appear there with some names I recognize and others that are new to me. Also, if you missed Fixing Miss Fritz, that story is still up at The Texas Observer. And more exciting news: I had a story accepted by Needle: A Magazine of Noir, a top-shelf crime fiction journal. A future issue of the Used Furniture Review will include four of my poems. That’s right!  Poems! Other than those, I seem to be moving away from the strictly literary writing. Much of what I’m doing now is more crime-oriented and I’m enjoying the work again.

That’s the thing about fear. Fear needs no real symptom. All fear needs to bloom is one little thing out of place.

So it is with writing too. Or trying to publish writing. One labors over words, types them out, feels a measure of satisfaction. Then the hurt starts. That person on the other side of the desk is actively looking for a reason to put your words down and deny you. One little thing out of place, out of round. Teal when they were anticipating crimson. A tooth-nick instead of a flickering tongue. One little fucking thing turns the whole enterprise sour.

Of course things go wrong. They always do. Life is about navigating failures. It’s a collection of disappointments, a parade of suffering. There’s more, I suppose, but it doesn’t really matter. Outcomes are so often fixed it’s laughable that we consider ourselves free-thinking, free-acting, inviable. Systems grind us into material. Beauty is always a bright flare against a canvas largely absent of color. We call things beautiful because beauty is rare, even though we convince ourselves that it abounds. The yellow of that four-nerve daisy that urges a grin when you walk past? Its leafless stalks sprout from death. That woman’s warm mouth? Later, she’ll hiss that she hates you.

Life is a process of falling out of love with yourself and everything around you. When you fall out of love, all you’re really doing is understanding the truth.

A single nail saved my family’s bloodline. One nail refusing to unbite its wood kept the windows boarded in a prairie house under assault by two Cherokees. A mother and her child huddled in the hot, dark room, clutching the greased barrel of a rifle, waiting for the sun to crack through the creaking boards. She wrote in a letter that she saw brown fingers reach around the board and tug. One of the Indians suffered a splinter and kicked the wall. Here is a case where light would have brought doom. Light almost always brings doom. We’re safer in the dark, where we can’t see and what’s around can’t see us. But the boards held, or the Indians were lazy, and eventually they mounted their Paints and clopped away, leaving the woman and the child breathing hard and unharmed in the dark. The woman’s husband had already been scalped and left bloating in a creek. She found him later, dragged the body back to the house by tying rope around his ankles and letting the horse do the work. Fluid trailed across the ground. We give up everything we hold inside when we die. There are no secrets. The woman jabbed the spade into the hard earth until blisters turned her hands into claws. She rolled her dead husband into the hole and moved on. If those two Cherokee warriors had gained entrance to the home, the bloodline that gave birth to the Greens would have stopped and I would not be here.

Later, the woman married an Indian from a strange tribe. Many of them had blue eyes and black hair. Perhaps my daughter’s eyes are Indian eyes. Our past rises in strange places sometimes and we become afraid when we should be informed.

One little nail holding its position gave me a chance to sit here behind this screen and type these words, gave me a chance to send out my stories with their flaws and posturing and hope, gave me a chance to worry over my little girl. One little thing holding a position offers hope.

It’s been a while since I’ve updated anything here, so here’s a short story originally published at Night Train.

~

The cops took Cora’s daddy away the day he kept putting out cigarettes with his fingers. With a forefinger and thumb calloused as cowboy leather, he squished the orange embers and she marveled at the sizzle.

“Don’t start that again now, Jerry.” Cora’s mother held open the screen door, her arm sharp with bones.

“Doesn’t hurt,” he said and lit another. “Here, hon.” He waved Cora over and she hesitated before climbing onto his knee. “God comes to me out of the air and enters my body when I don’t take no breath. The world always wants to kick me in the head and God in my body is the only way to survive. The Holy Spirit is like a radio wave and I can tune my body to receive the signal as long as I can be still enough to listen.”

“Jerry, I’m going to call the loony house again if you don’t take your meds.” Cora’s mother stood in the doorway wearing her orange Whataburger uniform, elbows red and jutting, her body lean and solitary as an exclamation point.

“Right.” Jerry rolled his eyes and Cora smiled. “Better than fucking LSD, God is,” he said. He drew an amazing amount of smoke into his lungs and let it out in a glorious blue plume.

Cora sat on her daddy’s knee till the cops arrived, watching the glowing tip of the cigarette shake as her mother continued to berate him until Jerry reached forward and mashed the hot tip between his fingers. “Only way out of this, pumpkin.” He flicked the cigarette away and lit another. “Hate to stick you with that woman, but a man can only take so much. You remember that. Everything is against a man, I tell you. It wears a feller down.” He blew smoke at the back of her head and it swirled out in front of her.

~

Cora’s temple squeaked on the truck’s side glass as rocks pinged off the undercarriage. Her mother had protested the visit the entire length of the old gravel road that wound out to the highway. She had no use for that old thing was what she said, her cheeks hollowing around a Marlboro. She’d have to take off work. That’d be hours lost. It’d mean beans and cornbread for dinner all next week. No hot dogs. Certainly no Banana Twins. But that didn’t matter. Cora made enough noise for a long enough time that her mother finally relented.

“I ain’t seeing that old fart though.” She shook the hot point of her cigarette at Cora’s face. “You can damn well bet cash on that. I ain’t got no use for such a man. Things are hard on a woman. You’ll find out. Ain’t no Holy Spirit comes to lay a salve on my hurts.”

When the truck stopped, Cora startled. The motor chugged trying to shut off, as if it were afraid to give up the work of its combustion.

“Get on now.” Cora’s mother cracked her knuckles. “I’ll not linger all day. Best skedaddle.”

Cora stepped out of the truck onto the hospital grounds. It wasn’t a house, really, like everyone said. Squatting red brick buildings. Long, rectangular windows covered with a black iron mesh. A woman wearing faded sweatpants stood on the other side of the gate, laughing like a sun-struck tin can. Cora took cautious steps forward.

A man with small thumbs and hairy forearms took her name. Cora snapped a yellow rectangle badge with VISITOR in all capitals to her shirt. Slithery pale squares of fluorescent light swept under her feet as she followed the man down a long hollow hall. Thirty three steps later the man shouldered open a rusty door onto a small yard and motioned with his chin towards a plastic table.

Part of the table’s left leg was melted as if someone had held the furious tongue of a Zippo there. The chair complained under her weight. Jerry looked up at her and his beard parted over crooked teeth. “Hey, pumpkin.”

There wasn’t much to say. Cora just kept staring. He’d thinned, the flesh under his chin dangling like a chicken’s. The twitch in his fingers that she’d expected to see was gone. When he did move, it was as if he were underwater and she wondered if that was what it was like being with God, being with anyone. Cora handed him a cigarette stolen from her mother’s pack and the lighter rasped under her thumb. Flame trembled into the tip as he breathed in the heat.

“Why are you here, Daddy?”

“For three squares and no laboring,” Jerry said, smoke leaking from his nose. “The woman over yonder blows me whenever I want. I read or watch TV or sleep. I don’t have to do a damn thing is all, just talk now and then.” A slow smile spread out from around the Marlboro. “This is a perfect place. It’s a wonder not hearing your momma’s yelp. Such quiet is freedom.”

Cora told him how much she missed him. She worried it made her sound little.

Jerry took a long draw on the cigarette and his breath hissed through the flaring ember. Cora stared at the tip and it didn’t shake. Her father held the smoke in his chest as he talked so that it brilloed his voice on the way out. “I really don’t care none, now do I, pumpkin?”

~

Cora’s mom saw it on her face as soon as she opened the truck door. It was a moment before she started the engine. Her hand was on the key and then it came off to hang in the air. For a moment Cora thought her mother’s hand might come on over, rest on her knee, touch her hair, squeeze her shoulder. She didn’t breathe, waiting for that, waiting for something to come through the air to her. She tried to be still and silent in order to receive the signal but her mother’s fingers hardened and twisted the key in the ignition. The old motor coughed and rattled the cab. Cora leaned her head on the glass and watched the world rush up toward her and slide past.

Whew. But the two essays I contributed to Numero Cinq have been named to the first Volume of their Best Of collection. I’m honored. The first essay is here and the second there. Don’t forget to check out the other fine work in that collection.

I’ve got nothing else out now to point you towards.  Everyone keeps saying no.

I saw a girl today that made me wish I were someone else, someone that wore cufflinks or knew how to make people laugh. She had such cool and long fingers, she was scornful and loved cheesecake. It was impossible for her to spare me a glance. I know you’ve seen people like that, people that burn the air with their youth and strike you dumb. I always wonder what that feeling is called. It’s want, sure, but also more. Want is such a typical term, a word barely burning. This is more, of course. It’s the peach’s bright juice bursting in your mouth. It’s the match flaring behind a caught breath.

I like the feel of worn and sun-warmed wood under my hand. I adore a quiet room and a tall, fuzzy glass of Rum. At night, after the Rum has unfurled its clement tendrils, I’ll find myself sockless in the dark, at odds with the inertia of my life. I think that my choices were wrong, but of course they were all that they could be at the time.  When I think I’m most interesting, I’m often wrong. This is a bad condition to have, especially for a writer. I’m like that guy laughing at his own jokes, you know, that guy with the paunch, the one with the haunted look and the wife that rolls her eyes?

I wonder what it would be like to seduce a woman that has a swimming pool and is fearful of mice.

If you find someone that wants to see you laugh, worship them. People leave you or become disinterested in you in slight, but monumental ways. Someone will kiss you with lips numbed and cold from ice. Or they’ll wait for you to pass through a tight spot instead of risking that brush. They’ll come to the couch with one soda instead of two or pat you on the knee when you make a joke. Sometimes they’ll meet your eyes, but only in the mirror.

Then you find yourself overcompensating, combing your hair in mysterious ways. You can bury your knuckles in your pockets and stand by the window all day and the sun will never find your face. The sun remains ungovernable. There are days like that. There are days where you are small inside and mean-hearted, dismissive of the elderly and unaware of the young. You simply can’t be bothered. You are all knees and elbows when others are smooth thighs and open palms.

The best way to be wanted is to dismiss others. People need to know where you stand, what you think. This is how lines are drawn and there’s no way to understand the shape of things without lines. Each flaring moment of want is a way to delineate. But what if you’re a mimic? What if the shape you have is only realized through the boundary of the other? What do you do then?