My eyes are either shut or simply not working.
Hoping for the former I open my eyes, face down on the floor, my vision consisting of vague shapes and rough colours. Lifting my head takes muster, my brain reluctant to keep up with the images it receives. Everything shimmers like an old video recording. Shapes flicker but never settle, as though I am travelling through time without any way of stopping.
One thousand and three green squares from one end to the other. Lime green squares, match the lime green jello, match the lime green curtains, match the lime green creamed peas. You get the picture. I’m sure the nurses wonder why I wheel slowly up and down the corridor. It’s the number. One thousand and three. Where’s the symmetry in that? I demand order, discipline. So I count again. To confirm. You wouldn’t think that such a detail would matter in the grand scheme of things, but these days, that’s about as grand as my days get. I enjoy uniformity. Regimentation. Forty years in the military will do that to you. “Career Army” they used to call me. Married to Uncle Sam. I wonder how Lorna felt about that.
The snow reflects the moonlight and the sound of my boots. “I am,” I mutter to myself, “Zhivago, tromping from Yuriatin back to Moscow in the unforgiving Russian winter.”
She has a chain link fence around her place. It’s little more than waist-high; meant to keep her dogs in, not people out. In my condition, it only takes me about fifteen minutes to traverse it. After several attempts, I manage to fall on the inside of the fence.
At time of going to print I was hoping to have done some performance writing but alas, I don’t know whether or not I have!!
Continue reading “Week 83 – Rejection, Rejection, Rejection…”
A few months ago I bought a box of My Powdered Friend, dumped the contents into a bathtub of water, sloshed it around, and went to bed. The next morning I woke up, and there was Steve.
The psychiatric community doesn’t have a name for my problem. Please believe me when I say I’ve looked. Medical journals (both antiquated and current), multiple expert opinions—I even went so far as obtaining and translating some of Kraepelin’s unpublished case reports from the turn of the century—it all leads nowhere. The closest I’ve come is Morgellons syndrome, but that isn’t right. The reality of my condition is much worse than any disease of the mind.
Oracle Park has one tree. It’s a little non-fruiting cherry that seems nervous because cherry trees usually grow in numbers. They typically line parkways and chatter amongst themselves like a backstage gaggle of pink-clad chorus girls. By itself, however, a cherry tree seems fretful. Now, a lone wolf oak is expected—for it has a greedy nature that sucks up the best of the soil and hastens the death of the grass around it. But not the cherry; they are used to sharing resources as though they are swapping garters and smoking off the same cigarette. One suspects that without intervention the little cherry in Oracle Park may die of anxiety, or from overdosing on too much sunshine and minerals. If this one survives, it will most likely grow to cast an uneasy shadow.
I pulled up to the 7/11 and realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d ordered an Icee. I mixed Coke and Strawberry into the biggest cup they had. I remembered when Cheyenne and I were in middle school how we used to mix this with the vodka her mom never bothered to lock up. The girl behind the counter looked like she’d recently graduated from high school, although she held herself with a toughness beyond her years. She’d either shrunk her uniform shirt on purpose or lied about her size, because I could see her belly button ring on her washboard stomach. I looked at the half-eaten nachos behind her and figured she only had a few more years to look like this. She didn’t ask where I was going or where I’d come from. When she handed me my change, I noticed the frenzy of old cuts on her left arm. These weren’t those superficial, privileged, symmetrical cuts girls in my high school had. These were frantic and left her arm looking like an old cutting board. These were the cuts that you get when your uncle’s bent you over a couch for a year and no one believes you. I thought about giving her a hundred dollar bill to impress her. I could tell her where I was headed. She’d be touched and give me her number, and then…what? I threw a pack of Cheyenne’s brand of smokes on the counter, paid with a twenty, and left.
I normally ponder and wonder and look and get angry. That is what gives me the post for Saturday. (I used to write bad poetry, in fact, I still do!!) It is so good not to have to look at the world this week as it is very depressing. I am not sexist. I haven’t a sexist bone in my body but the thought of getting a Conservative Woman Prime Minister makes me shudder and think back to her who made hell a whole lot hotter!
“What was all that fury on our sensors about?”
“A Viridian delegation from Viridian Prime unveiled at close range, sir.”
“Viridian Prime?”
Continue reading “All They Wanted was Angry Meat by Piyali Mukherjee”
literally stories 