I’m watching Al’s fingers lift his chess knights in the day room of a maximum-security ward at the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital for the criminally insane. Al’s an older patient just out of seclusion. Pasty white cheeks, grey stubble, slack mouth, intense brown eyes, with lids that drop unexpectedly, and flutter, and open once again. His fingers hold a castle’s head, then release it. He moves to a pawn, lifts its top.
“The Lord has remembered”
This was the meaning of my name. Zachary.
I don’t drive. Everywhere I need to go I can walk, bus or taxi. I take a bus to my job at Hadleys Department Store in the Consumer Help Department. You should know that I am a highly valued employee based on my ability to resolve customer problems while still maintaining company policy. Trying to find a parent for a screaming child or dealing with someone whose credit card bounced without ruffling feathers or giving away the store is like walking a tightrope. Someone who wasn’t both reasonable and sensitive couldn’t handle it, believe you me!
Removed at the request of the author
Blueberry
You wrestle with the blueberry pie as you floss through traffic on the freeway. The lop-sided bundle of pie looks like a monkey got ahold of an aluminum foil roll and tried to wrap a banana. You chuckle; you’ll tell Berry that one.
Anna was not one to look twice at anything or anyone. Everyone looked twice at her though. They couldn’t help it.
Most people don’t bother looking twice at insignificant details, so unsurprisingly she wasn’t particularly popular. People thought Anna was either arrogant, or stupid, or both. But I knew that when she did look twice at something, even more rarely someone, that look could take hours, it could take days. I’ve spent my whole life waiting for her to look at me like that.
Nineteen is the number of times I stabbed my father. One in each forearm, shoulder, thigh, calves. Neck back stomach balls. Between two ribs the knife plunged and pierced one lung, two, and caught on a shard of bone, a tendon shred. Wrench tug free. I’d pictured each puncture in detail one by one. Not over and over on loop like some freak but while waiting for the bus or falling asleep I thought about the order of it, in and out and back in, the quiet shrill of it. Muscle rip against blade, bone scrape against metal.
I first saw the sculpture about a month ago, walking to the Cumberland Farms with Matt to get beer and some papers. It was shimmering under the late day’s sun in the back of a fenced-in yard. Even from a distance, I could see the long spindly legs of the black metal spider clinging to the delicate netting of its web, waiting for prey. I was mesmerized.
It´s a balmy evening, there´s a couple leaning out of a dimly lit window at the side of a house overlooking an alley. They´re both naked and their heads are wreathed in smoke from their cigarettes, its effect heightened by the intermittent blinking of a faulty street light. You can´t even see the moon or stars.
Let´s call her Kate and him Daniel.
Continue reading “The Night of the Haunted by Michael McCarthy”
He accepted the night. He always had. The street people never caused him any fear. It was a case of if he didn’t bother them, they wouldn’t bother him. The unapproachable demeanour which he carried also helped.
literally stories 