One night in a cramped office I was contemplating suicide while entering food prices into a restaurant database. I’m a manager and my neck and lower back were throbbing and aching. Scroll, click, type. My eyes felt like they were bleeding. Someone knocked on the door.
Continue reading “Can I Still Work One Day a Week by J W Kash”
It was a day he learned too much about himself when the judges announced his drawing, 1st Place, and he heard the applause, and that night at the party, drank whisky for the first time, and loved how it made him feel. He was eighteen, and in a few more years, he flunked out of community college, and kept drinking anyway, until his wife, a local girl who gave him a son, left him after tolerating more humiliation than most women, but oh, he wasn’t done yet; it took until he lost his job as a used car salesman even though if he’d been sober til noon it would have been overlooked. He had nothing left, and sat in the common, and told passerby’s that life was unfair, and the townspeople knew who he was, and his story was nothing new.
My parents gave me a horrible name and I decided I had to get them back for it. They were old hippies; well I guess not that old but when I was twelve they seemed pretty ancient – probably like thirty-five or maybe even forty. To get revenge I got one of my pals to go in with me and we set out to make ourselves a dope shack; a hang-out where we did everything that was wrong and pretended that it turned out right.
Did you ever wonder what it would be like to be a newt? To reside peaceably in an aquarium, rising every so often for a gulp of air, catching a worm in your thin amphibious mouth and being generally content? I often think about that. This is about a time when I thought about it a lot. It was the summer when I worked as a student intern at a senior center near Brighton Beach. I was pursuing a social work degree at Hunter College, and sharing an apartment in downtown Brooklyn with two other graduate students. It was a lonely time for me, and I kept several spotted newts in a terrarium for company, and a five disc CD player that I had on continuously when I was home to ward off the isolating silence.
I was fishing off the bridge over the Ipswich River, a few hundred yards from the Topsfield Fairgrounds. This was a day nothing was supposed to happen, but you know what they say about that stuff… it usually does, like Mike Murphy’s Law or Charlie Poulin’s Law or whatever they call it. Yet enough had occurred already in the last twenty-four hours and the odds were in my favor, or so they said.
Continue reading “Decisions on the Ipswich River by Tom Sheehan”
He sits at Anna’s bedside, unnoticed, working a crossword puzzle. Sometimes reading. Sometimes just waiting. Watching. Counting breaths until it’s time for him to do his job. Anna knows He’s here. She’s been expecting him.
Even though she cannot speak, I can hear her words to him, “I’ve been waiting for you,” Anna says. Her eyes are closed but she sees him. “Why are you taking so long? I’ve been ready for a while now.”
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The next morning I arrive at Judge Fong’s office at 7:30 am as ordered. I’m suffering a headache hangover. I’m mildly irritated to see the Judge’s Clerk beaming with excitement. “What’s up Bob? You look remarkably bright this morning.”
Robert “Bob” Mitchell gives me a classic shit-eating grin. “Tecumseh, your ass is grass. The Judge’s mad as hell at you for letting your client get killed. What the hell was that all about? That’s all everybody’s talking about is the Mayhew mess. The word is he was practicing voodoo–”
There’s a wrinkle of land in Stone County, an isolated pocket valley so remote you can hardly find the sky. My wife Sarah and I were happy there. A nearly feral cat lived there too, a scruffy calico that hung around to avoid coyotes. Sarah called her Josie. That cat was neurotic, delusional, paranoid and pathologically afraid of me though I never gave her cause. For three years all I ever saw was a flash of motion or the tip of her tail disappearing around a corner. The exception was anytime my wife ventured outside. Josie would glare death at me and sidle by on stiff legs, back arched and tail fluffed, to get to Sarah’s lap. I didn’t resent it. Sarah could talk tadpoles from a puddle, chant clouds from the sky, charm ticks from a mule’s hide. She surely charmed that cat, and the cat was good for Sarah. I’d leave them to practice their healing magics on each other and go find something useful to do.
Continue reading “Chasing Josie’s Ghost by Domenic diCiacca”
Michael the orderly, before it had all come down to the most private of acts, remembered his wondering if Marty and Valerie, in their lives beforehand, before the catastrophic crashes, before cement and machines and phone poles adjusted to flames around the piles of their motorcycles, he was a bull in bed, she was the puma come down to drink. Images loomed early on, lively, kicking images on how they must have cut a path to the heart of their appetites, their excitements, from what he heard up and down the entire east coast. Even pinned now to lives in rolling chairs, they evoked a fierce amount of energy, fire and brimstone, taste and distaste. Even then he thought the world of them, wanted to be god on the hill for them, Thor or Odin or a damned good magician with a damned good wand. Hell, he had the black skin; all he needed was the black hat with a few secret compartments.
The grass needs cut and I’ve returned to work after a week off. I hate gardening and I especially hate working. So I apologise for the depression that is oozing from my pen. I have watched Bambi’s mother being shot fourteen times in a row to try to cheer me up. It just made me hungry. But that soon stopped when I remembered I was heading to work. It takes the notion of food away from me. It also takes away any thoughts on being sociable, helpful, understanding and committed. I don’t think I like working with the public.
Anyway, I thought about what to write. It came to a choice between this posting and a suicide note!
Continue reading “Literally Stories – Week 65 – Getting Nowhere”
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