When Will You Be Home?

It's, you know, pretty much the same. You haven't really missed much. They tore down that old house that was a part of the Underground Railroad, then moved the Foodland about fifty yards to the left onto the land where it was. They're putting in a day care at the high school, and your brother never leaves the basement, writing the first halves of a hundred good songs.

Why Was I Afraid?

Before she lied we always talked about going to Ireland to climb the cliffs by the ocean, so I decided to go on my own and nearly died when I slid on the rocks and fell to the beach. My mind slipped into the sea and for hours I laid under the indifferent sky settling onto the earth like a black and billowing tarp, a cold, soggy wind blowing sand to mingle with my blood. Before I passed out I remember thinking, that's it? I was amazed that this felt no worse than anything I had already dealt with, that the hardest of life comes only to the tired.

Homemade Nightmares

My optometrist says that if I don't start taking proper care of my glasses my vision will get worse faster. He says I should keep them in the case at night and clean them every day, but some things are better than being healthy, and I'm addicted to the way dirty glasses catch the light. Everywhere I go, cobwebs of passing ghosts swim to the sky and my heart seizes just before I realize.


Impossible terror, then a matchstick of hope.

Answers

Dear Braxton,

How do I propose to my girlfriend? Like, what's the right way to do it? Her name is Florence.

Sincerely,
Anonymous


Dear Anonymous,

First off, thank you for including her name. That does so much for me in terms of information that is important and relevant to my response.

This is how I got my wife (whose name is also Florence) to say yes:


I took her out to a movie and let her pick. I bought her popcorn, but only a small, and under the condition that if she was all right with that I wouldn't hit her in front of people. I managed to stay awake for most of the movie, which thrilled her to death. Oops, I forgot to mention, make sure she wears a skirt (it's vital to the plan). So anyway, after the movie I took her to an Eat'N'Park. After we stuffed ourselves full of shitty food and I didn't say anything to make her start that annoying crying thing she does, I followed her into the bathroom without her knowing.

When she got out of the stall and was washing her hands, I crawled up behind her and ripped her panties off. At first she screamed but when she saw that it was me she went with it. Long story short, I went down on her like crazy and pretended I found the ring in her lady parts. Then I popped the question.

Damn near charmed her to bits.

Go get 'em,

Braxton





Dear Braxton,

Im in 9th grade and I've been dating this guy for three weeks and he doesn't have time for me like 2 hang out with me. I told him if he isn't going 2 put in time 2 the relationship the relationship won't work but he still just lets me down. Im starting 2 feel embarassed 2 ask him because I know what the answer is going 2 be I really like him what should I do?

Charli, MA



Charli,

Don't be such a little bitch. You're barely in high school, of course he doesn't have time for you. You can't cook yet, and I'll bet you don't even know how to curl your lips over your teeth so they don't cut him. Relax, you have a whole life of disappointment ahead of you.

Get a vibrator,

Braxton




Dear Braxton,

Does my ex still like me? We r both in tenth grade n I m a girl. He lives next to my gmas n I went over there for her birthday. He came over n kept tryin to tickle me n stuff. He asked if he could carry me. what does this mean?

jEnNiFeR OK




Dear TYPE YOUR FUCKING NAME RIGHT,

He doesn't still like you. Actually, he probably never liked you to begin with. He just wants to pork you into oblivion.


Read Twilight,

Braxton



hunny nigga Braxton,

i hungry fo a man kno wut i mean? i want sum up in herr i need it like 3-4 time a DAY. Listen he got been had money bringin in them stacks a chee$e fa his gurl. How do i find it i aint plaiyn no mo ya hurr



Dear fellow "hunny nigga,"

I'm not one to stereotype but after reading that I can only assume that you're either black or one of those lower middle class girls that wear the pastel sweatpants with easily pronounced, sexually connotative adjectives emblazoned on the ass. Given that, I would still be willing to provide you some advice were I able to locate your fucking question. Did you graduate from high school? You know, it's legal for you people to learn to read and write now, and I suggest you fully exercise that freedom.

Tell your baby daddy I said hey,

Braxton




Dear Braxton,

I'm going to the beach next week. I'm pretty muscular. No six pack, but I have good biceps and I am attractive. I'm 16 years old. How do I talk to girls and have girls like me?

Toby FL


Toby,

First, don't be afraid of showing a little scrotum, especially if it's a different color than the rest of you. Just watch the stubble.

The second key thing is to use pheromones to your advantage as much as possible. Procure some of your own semen by whatever means you deem necessary, then divide it up among your palms and slap it under your chin like aftershave. This will throw a scent in the ladies' directions that they won't totally be aware of, but it will drive them crazy just the same.

That should get you a fair number of takers, so whenever you get a girl to actually talk to you, here's what you do: Make sure you mention her vagina as much as possible, but don't use the actual word vagina, make up some colorful euphemisms that you can insert into all sorts of scenarios. Also, never say more than ten words without one of them being "titties." Girls are often confused, and don't wield language very well, so it's important to be constantly reminding them why you're there.


Do these things, and you should have not only an excellent vacation, but life as well.

High five,

Braxton



Dear Braxton,

How do guys typically choose to show girls their interest in them? You're a guy. Do they just talk to them when they feel like it and not other times? Please help, I really like this guy and I want to know if he really likes me too. Also, do guys like it when a girl plays hard to get? Or do you think he will get bored? Please respond, he could be the one.

Kat VA



Dearest Kat,

I don't want to sound like a dick (yes I do) but chances are the simple fact that you're a girl with regular girl concerns means you're an irreconcilable bore. Most girls are boring. Most people are boring. That is why so many human bonds are dependent on sex for survival. He'll likely get tired of you even if you don't play hard to get.

That said, playing hard to get in terms of physicality is sometimes a good way to turn a guy on, or a good way to get raped to death under the bleachers at an away game (I haven't decided yet). Playing hard to get in terms of emotional connection is...well that just doesn't happen. Actually, if you are the type of person who makes a deliberate game of playing hard to get, you're not mature or smart enough to keep a fish alive, let alone kindle and maintain the type of relationship you think you're talking about.


Learn to love fisting,

Braxton

I Think It Was Supposed to Rhyme

Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear. Fuzzy Wuzzy had no KY Touch. He masturbated and it killed him. Motherfucker.

A Girl at the Mall One Afternoon

She stands before the pretzel place,
Perched on an ephemeral pedestal
Pretended in the peripheral of every male passerby,
One hand affixed to where her hips should be.

Her lips,
Two carmine collagen blimps
Pursed in pained selection,
A calorie-counting cacophony
Of muddled brain chemistry.

Onyx dusted eyelashes
Bat idly at the boy behind the counter
And somewhere a rabbit is tied down,
Eyelids clamped open,
A chemical administered,
Inconsolable squeaking
And a wretched pop
As its spinal cord is torn asunder
In the want of an escape.

She blinks triethanolamine stearate.
She blinks hydrophobically modified cellulose.
The pretzel boy wants her number.

He thinks of kissing her cheek,
His lips lifting traces
Of the phenyl trimethicone
That gives her face pigment,
Of holding her bronzed hand,
Running his fingers over
The Erythrulose and dihydroxyacetone
That brown the cell-thin deadness
Encapsulating her.

In a building full of cages
A dog in a gas mask,
Un-anaesthetized,
Coercively huffing
A contained cloud of experimentation
Until the poison takes it
Or its stomach ruptures,
Muffled yelping
Crumpling in a dead heap on the floor,
And she’s so sexy.

There is a World

I have a friend who can play anything on the acoustic guitar if you give him a minute, and if you think he is cute he's a great singer too. Every week night he'll sit on the porch of his fraternity house playing until it gets too dark to see, and on the weekends he takes a picture every time a girl hugs him. I looked through all of them the other day, but I'm funny with stuff like that. Can never figure out why they always stand so close, blocking out everything beyond them.

Easter

"Some mornings it's all I can do to get out of bed," God says.

"There's a day coming and I'm not ready for it and sometimes I think they can sense that, but then look at the ones who believe in me now who think they aren't a part of the planet I put them on, and I'm going to have to show them, I mean really show them. It's all very tiring. I never stop being tired."

Status

Ready for my ideal social networking site? You sign up, make a profile, upload all of your photos. You search and search for other people's pages but no matter how long you spend posting surveys and doing quizzes, nobody else is out there. Your internet self just drifts, and every time you log off after checking just in case, there is a weight in your heart that is easily understood.

Weekend

When the world ends
Will it be like just another party?
Your ex girlfriend is there
And you worry for a second
About having to talk to her.
The noise is stifling,
A bubble of vibration,
And your friends are lost in the bodies,
Pressed together
Shifting like tall grass caught in wind.

When the world ends
You will be there just because it’s Friday.
Desperate drunk in everyone’s faces,
Following that girl to her car,
Careening into the neon-threaded black,
Howling at the stumblers on the sidewalk
Where you’re going next.

When you awake in a stranger’s bathroom
Vexed
Perplexed
Wearing only a song stuck in your skull since Monday,
If the sun has disappeared,
Just wrap yourself in the shower curtain and go home.

Frequent Moderation

If I matched gin and tonics for sneers that are as petty as they are laughable, you would be entitled to make those barbed observations about the fact that I drink every day. If I guzzled a scotch and soda for every failure to understand having a drink because it tastes good, I'd lose sight of how that makes you the alcoholic. What about the fact that you despise yourself so vehemently that your body rejects it, pouring on others your repugnant and manifold inadequacies enough to fill more tumblers than I will ever touch?

Friend, I don't drink to solve my problems, I do it to create yours.

Will Disparage for Food

"Hey lady, I'll finger ya for a sandwich, ya slinky cougar!"

No one knows why he dresses like that, hands tucked into the quintessential fingerless gloves and holding a cardboard sign, naked fuzzy legs jutting out from a wounded, sodden trench coat, feet in filthy Ugg boots that smell like sour milk and the washed up piscine entrails of the riverside. Jerry isn't homeless, not even close, so people just think he's got something wrong in his head, but I don't know. All people spend most of their lives experimenting with veiled, elaborate ways to tell everyone exactly how much they should fuck off.

Time Passing Without Us

The stairs have rubber mats laid over them that make it easy to descend in silence if one treads softly. At the bottom, a thick metal door will open relatively soundlessly, but the lock clicking into place always echoes down the dormitory hall regardless of how gingerly it is shut. I walk heel first, laying down the soles of my shoes gradually on the dirty tile, passing every numbered door with nearly surgical care. In the dank grayness of Mary Beach’s first floor, it is vital that I am not heard.
Slowly, with measured breaths, I drag my keys from the front pocket of my asphalt colored jacket. I can see my door’s handle up ahead, almost shimmering in the sparse, sterile washes of light that have managed to crawl in from the fluorescents in the stairwell. This is the farthest I’ve ever gotten. This time, I may have just done it.
There’s only so much I can do to minimize the soft tinkling sound my keys make when they collide as I sort through the ring in muted haste. Then a soft grinding as the key enters my lock. Then, a vociferous whir as the door next to mine is flung open and Chandler Wittel slides into the hall, clad only in blue green boxer briefs, eyes already fixed on me.
I’m not sure what I was expecting from college life, exactly. Poorly written, gimmicky teen movies and failed-journalists-turned-traveling-motivational-speakers had me at the ready for adventures in glorified debauchery perpetrated by hosts of stereotypes wielding benevolent but unapologetic eccentricity. Nobody ever said anything about being charged nearly every evening by a mostly naked, Transformers obsessed product of American homeschooling that, if he caught me, would proceed to hump my leg with gusto. Neighborly? Not hardly.

“Whoa whoa whoa! Chandler stop! Chandler, no. No!”

But he was already barreling towards me, focused in sick determination. This is the part where I always panic and my hands shake too violently to get the door unlocked in time, so I have to try to run to the other end of the hall or duck under him. It never works. Despite being shaped like a pear, he’s surprisingly spry, and he has considerable upper body strength from all of the racquetball he plays. I could always throw a punch to spare myself, but I try my best to be a pacifist, and I also don’t really want to touch him. I shouldn’t even have to put up with this. Yeah, maybe it was a bit much to break up a bagel into fifteen pieces and hide all of them in different parts of his room, and I may have gone a little over the line when I tricked him into downloading naked pictures of Daniel Radcliffe, but nothing I’d done in the first three months of our freshman fall semester could possibly warrant retribution this heinous.
I’d always wondered why people in movies had to scream like they did in times of crisis that weren’t even necessarily surprising. Experiences like this resolved that query. Apparently mortified squealing is just something your body does for you, like sneezing or remembering to breathe. I wish my body could have come up with something more useful to do as Chandler bear hugs me and I am helplessly bludgeoned by his pelvis into the painted cinder block wall with enough force for the sleeve of my jacket to erase everything on the small white board outside my room.
These exchanges always end the same way: I pretend not to be unequivocally violated, talking briefly with him about the classes we share or the latest fake news story he’s read, and then escape into my room to sink into a chair and bask in scarred relief. I often try to console myself by thinking that, should I want to join a fraternity in the future, I’ll likely have an advantage.
Really, these attacks are not instances of sexual assault as much as his newest manifestation of aggravated retaliation. We’ve been going back and forth since day one. I’d steal his cell phone, he’d steal my laptop. He’d make off with my shower caddy, I’d spray shave gel all over him at four in the morning and watch him roll in it, still asleep. I would get on his computer while he was in the bathroom, changing important settings and all of his Facebook information so that everyone could read about his affinity for pedophilia. He would write “Who is the Asian chick you were showering with earlier?” on my dry erase board so that I would invariably be awoken in the middle of the night by the chastising knocks of an RA. Now, somewhere along the line of the myriad personal inconveniences we so loved exacting on each other, Chandler had discovered the effectiveness of genital intimidation.
Forcibly repressing the thought that I was just grinded by a dude, I let myself fall into the wobbly chair at my sickly wooden desk. It seems awfully paradoxical that my family had just spent the price of a new car on me living in what amounted to a baseball dugout full of furniture likely carpentered by a friendly retarded man. The walls of the place are the same cinder block as the hall, painted the muffled color of dirty eggshells. The floor exudes a blank sloppiness that makes me think of wet cement, and drawing the blinds means jettisoning the observance of night and day. The encroaching silence of the surrounding stone waits for me to sit alone like this, to catch me in between bouts of busied scurrying to remind me why I’m here. For me, this life wasn’t so much a choice as it was the dictation of circumstance, of necessity. Marietta did not belong to a lengthy list of hopeful possibilities, surviving to the end by bedazzling me with all its promise. In fact, no such list ever existed. I never got the chance to make it.
In a way, the decision that I would be attending Marietta College was made before I was even born, and in the time it took my grandmother to postulate that problems she didn’t acknowledge were problems she didn’t have. My future was sealed in something that that poor, stubborn old woman crinkled up in the back of her mind and left there, and I’d known it since an evening in the December before my arrival at Marietta when she stopped breathing and my mother came down to the basement to tell me she’d called an ambulance.
Time has a way of passing without us, and the causal pivot points of our lives seem to connect only when our backs are turned. Joellen Fury’s misstep was that she never turned back around to see what her life looked like all strung together, and for that she would pay dearly. She’d always been a bit of a naive recluse, perpetually planted in a recliner in her part of our house, sequestered in a burrow of books and forgotten newspapers, watching Judge Judy, but my mother and I had begun to notice an ever-expanding dullness creeping over her that we both agreed was just her old age as we pushed down a secret anxiety.
She repeated herself more and no longer spoke deliberately, but rather her words billowed faintly from her like thin smoke from a jammed machine. The already obese woman started swelling, started hating everyone she could no longer remember, started falling and remaining cursed to the floor until one of us would rush from work or school to come help her up. Her bullheadedness rivaled her decay. She hadn’t been to the doctor since my uncle was born, no reason to start now. But there was a reason, and it had risen from a sea of willful self neglect that winter night as the sirens wound their way up the hills and my girlfriend squeezed my hand and mom did her best to cry softly.
It was congestive heart failure, an adorably amiable doctor told us at the hospital, and it would have taken her had we not convinced her, for our sake, to come that night. Two valves in her heart had given up, letting fluid collect in her body, causing the swelling and suffocating her from the inside. The fuzzy senility was her brain screaming for oxygen, letting go of her memories and thoughts in its struggle to stay afloat.

“So, what can we do?” my mother pleaded, a week at the hospital and a hundred plus pounds of drained fluid later.

Funny. I had spent my sophomore year of high school having people apologize for my father’s cancer, then my junior year sharing the house with a paranoid schizophrenic stranger, each beginning and ending with my mother or me proffering that very same question. You’d think we’d have learned by now that the answer is always the same.
Our options were to go forward with a surgery she wouldn’t survive, or put her on a strict diet that would involve more pills than food and administer frequent breathing treatments. Even with the medication, the physician told us, she would slowly fade over the next year or so, but it would at least give us more days to remain a family. I liked the word he used: fade. I pictured my grandmother growing infinitesimally more translucent with each day, until at last we came home to nothing. I thought of yelling across a still lake at night, the sound waning as it sailed, losing itself peacefully against the tree line. If only. Knowing her, we’d find her at the bottom of the driveway, spread eagle on the pavement, frozen in the spiteful act of trying to get the mail just to show us all she still could. Or maybe she’d stand on tradition. I could see a familiar Thanksgiving dinner, the three of us sitting down to a meal that mom spent all day on in our poorly lit kitchen. My grandmother would complain about the food and jab my mother with false inadequacies in a confused effort to be part of the dinner conversation, then instead of retreating back to her den mid-forkful to catch Survivor and forget what she said to upset everyone, she would pass quietly while mom sobbed over the stove and I feebly tried to compliment her in between confounded bites of stuffing.
Toggling through these scenarios in my mind, I knew there was no way around it. While everyone else in my senior class had conniptions over getting accepted into choice schools that would get them good jobs, my criteria revolved simply around my being able to make a frantic drive home after a phone call that was certainly coming. If I couldn’t be there, my mom would have to deal with everything alone. That put my choices at either Marietta College or West Virginia University at Parkersburg, a local community college which, while I’m sure at one time it offered a quality education, was now more closely representative of a cheap clinic for people born without the parts of their brains that hold aspirations.
So I filled out all of the paperwork, moved in, went to the activities and played the games enthusiastically designed to get scared teenagers to start talking to each other and make the transition into becoming familiar, scared teenagers. I went to my classes. By all appearances, I was a college student, but in my head I wasn’t really anything.
While my mental space didn’t accompany me to Marietta, it didn’t consciously dwell much on all of the last days at home I was missing, either. I could still laugh, make jokes and dear friends, but when all of the white noise this new segment of my life offered died out, I was trapped again in a mental purgatory, in a cognitive destitution that told me I wasn’t in control and that I shouldn’t ever expect to be.
Still at my desk, my phone begins to vibrate, and my heart jumps as the screen comes to life, but it isn’t the call I’ve been expecting. I lean back in my chair, rubbing my neck to warm my hands, unknowingly pricked by the first crippling pangs of what will become a two-year exhaustion. Down the hall, a door closes. The smacking of bare feet grows steadily more audible, cut off by the deadness of a palm thrust firmly into my door.
Chandler’s mousey voice floats in through the cracks, promising he won’t try anything if I open the door, asking me to come with him to the gas station so he can stock up on more chocolate and energy drinks. I crack a smile in spite of myself, thinking of how later this creepy little ingrate will shuffle up to the girl’s dorm and move from door to door, handing out fun-sized bags of M&M’s and asking them how they are. I think of how, later still, he’ll find a way to trick me into downloading those same damn pictures of Daniel Radcliffe. As I tell him to hold on a second, I don’t think about how we so often let life teach us what it is, what it means for us. While I tie my shoes, I wish it would occur to me that we get too comfortable thinking that things have to be a certain way. Leaving my cell phone behind on the desk, I open the door not knowing that every sick surprise Chandler has in store for me is a friendly reminder of how up for grabs everything is.

A Whim to Pass Our Days

The world really is your oyster, child, it's up for grabs and just outside. You can eat cereal whenever you want, drive a truck full of frozen pizzas, have a dog and a woman to keep in your house. You can be a shoe horn maker, fill gumball machines, lie naked on your kitchen floor as you feel the need. You can get on a plane, take control of it with your knife, and run it into whatever your little heart desires.

Fallimur

When the apocalypse came, it was not brought by our advanced robotics or a sudden deluge or ceasing of childbirth, but by our ineptitude at accomplishing anything more than fancy and clever ways of moving stuff around. I figured it's our time, that this was bound to happen eventually, so I'll just putz around in my hometown with my family while we see this thing through. As I listlessly kick pine cones around a plaza parking lot, I watch my little daughter futilely scoop up stray hamsters that amble out of the pet store next to our old favorite Italian restaurant and place them carefully in a dirty suitcase bound with shoestring, humming songs from her favorite musicals, so I yell over to her, "Honey, it's over, there's no point in taking them."

For a moment, she stares pensively at a fuzzy brown lump nestled in her palms, before saying, "But daddy, if this is the end, there's no point in leaving them either."

System

She plods across the midnight pavement in the shadows of skyscrapers laid out in a grid ahead of her. Even at the foot of these dead winter obelisks, filled to the stars with degree-toting throwaways, there is a trustful presumptuousness in her step. I'm going to show her how invisible the world really is. I'm going to show her that civilization is just something we teach ourselves, like wrapping a brick in an old handkerchief to deaden the sound it makes against cheekbones, teeth rolling into the gutter like dice.

Voice of Truth

Stunningly made up teenage girls sing into wireless microphones with their free hands reaching out to something invisible above their heads while parking lot boys bang away on acoustic guitars in name brand hoodies and distressed jeans, all of them careful not to let the electricity of their praise knock over the projector for the PowerPoint presentation the preacher needs to cry in front of later.

Behind the cameramen and hysteric members of the congregation being dunked in hot tubs, God is slumped in one of the perfectly manicured pews, head in His hands, chanting to himself,"I promised not to flood again. I promised not to flood again. I promised..."

Just Can't Win

"I can't believe you said that, you're such an asshole," Anthony's girlfriend snaps, looking around the crowded coffee house to make sure no one heard.


"Oh come on, when the UN left Darfur, they weren't on the road for five minutes before they heard gunfire. Entire villages huddle with their families in hospitals, praying their pink little palms off, and they're still hacked apart with machetes like prime rib and dumped into the rivers by the thousands. Sweetie, not even Africans like niggers."

Folly

Father Connor slips his shoes off in the front hall, ready for a drink, but God is waiting for him in the kitchen. He grabs the preacher by the front of his shirt, and slams him into the refrigerator, sending magnets of cute aphorisms scrawled in calligraphy clattering to the floor.

In the saccharine waft of a time release air freshener, God leans close and whispers,"When you were a kid you told your friends that aliens had landed in your neighborhood, and they would start to see them too, just to be a part of something exciting. Don't you ever, ever, get up on that podium and talk about me like that again."

Probability

The man and his stepson try their damnedest to live, but the fire has been set deliberately. The fluid tongues of heat lap across all of their possible exits, digesting their air and possessions.

Drew stands in the yard waiting for the police, wondering, should he have done it this way. These people would have screamed the same at gunpoint or in the river, direly, as if they were going to miss something special.

Unlisted

Linda bursts into the bathroom and grabs her little son by the arm, letting his toothbrush clatter into the sink behind them. She moves swiftly and without a word, followed by the desperate pattering of tiny feet against the fluffy carpet. As they run, Linda ducks into each room to flick light switches and yank lamps from the wall, telling her boy to be quiet, to just come with mommy.

Finally she kneels behind her son in the cimmerian hush of his bedroom, hand clamped over his mouth until downstairs the relentless thunder of fists against their front door fades.

For a Reason

Adrian stands at the top of the staircase in his house, and lets the round glass paperweight slip from his hand. There is a thud as it strikes the hardwood, and rolls almost lazily down each step until it stops at the bottom on the air conditioning vent. He calls his girlfriend right after and dumps her, then goes out the next day and buys a pack of cigarettes and all the books and dorky hats he can afford.

With no God comes no worries.

Quality Time

There are certain moments or feelings that, being a blissfully married millionaire, go unexplored in my life. Sometimes I have to play little games with myself, like throwing baseballs through my imported windows or not paying my bills until the electricity gets shut off.

"Oh, don't use that bathroom, honey, I seem to have shot the toilet to bits!

...

Want to go down to the hardware store with me and help me pick out a new one?"

Sunday Best

Hank all but struts up to God, feeling the exhilaration of the Spirit warm him. Always he has served in the ministry of his savior, preaching the Word, letting people ahead of him in traffic, and he knows that the Lord will surely praise him for the life he led.

The Creator shifts in His seat a little, clearly He has been waiting for this.

"Hank," He says,"do you, perchance, remember that time in the seventh grade when your mom caught you in the bathroom getting your jollies with a grilled cheese sandwich?"

The Little Things

Bueford loves applesauce cake. He loves it like vegans love saying things they haven't thought about. Loves it like fat girls love getting their hair braided. Adores it so much, he's sort of okay with having herpes.

The New World

It's easy to see how painfully disappointed Declan is, sketching on an Applebee's napkin the floor plan of the place he is going to build for people to go to when they realize that sex gets boring, even when it's with with the pretty girls who have collagen-filled lips and seemingly no fear of having to wear adult diapers thirty years prematurely or with the chiseled boys who are dumber than wheelbarrow handles. Megan Fox, Mariah Carey, Lady GaGa, all siren arbiters of the biologically entrenched, illusory distraction, but Declan will invent a utopian harbor to house those left disillusioned in its wake.

There's only one problem: what exactly could Declan offer those people?

It's like when he outgrew the Ninja Turtles and, looking out upon a sprawling frontier of empty time, had no recollection of how it was filled before.

Contentment

Madison is a kind of tired that goes all the way through, and drunk by herself while outside it snows to beat hell. She went to the Cheesecake Factory this afternoon, the one up in Easton, to have lunch with her stepfather. While he talked and talked about her mother, she gazed over his shoulder at a man sitting near the entrance looking lonely and so perfect. It occurs to Madison that perhaps she should be worried about finding a man like that for herself instead of wondering whether or not she has enough energy to play Wii and masturbate in the same evening.

Fury

Every morning I wake up alone and see a machine, so vast and intricate. I watch it malfunction, parts added years ago going bad and too deep inside to change. Even if we wanted to, today, could we stop and start over? Maybe the best I can do now is let gears have my body, and hope that, catching on my bones, they are the ones that let the whole thing keep running.

Divine Providence

"We all used to believe in You, you know," I say in Wal Mart as God switches the pregnancy tests with the thermometers,"We carved an angel out of this enormous red oak at the city limits, then lightning struck the head off, and someone put an exercise ball with this ridiculous smiley face sharpied on in place of it. That pretty much did everyone in."

God frowns slightly, pushing a thumbtack through boxes of Trojans and hanging them on the racks beside the Hannah Montana clothing line.

"Well...I thought it was funny," He says.

Gatherings

Martha May stands by the long table of food in the community building, holding her camera, shouting,"Everybody say 'Papaw is a stinky pants!'"

Cousin Ferris spikes his low ball glass into the off-white tile, scattering jagged shards and spackling the disposable tablecloths with Jim Beam.

"It's grandfather!" he barks. "Grand-fa-ther, you miserable sputtering shitcunt."

Missing

Driving off of the bridge, past the concrete towers making clouds in the distance, Sandra slams on her brakes at an intersection.

"Jesus," she says,"They really need to put a sign here."

In the back seat, her little boy is puzzled.

"Mommy, where do they keep all the things that should be there?"

Mistakes

"Honey, relax, things are getting better every day," Angelo's girlfriend says,"We're learning from the mistakes of our parents, and we will be okay. We know about the diseases. We know about the poor."

Angelo looks out the window and doesn't tell her about driving around at 3AM, about all the bedroom lights still on.

Damn It, Anyway

I really don't know how to tell you what an unlucky person Michael is. His father died on the way to a family reunion. His best friend survived prostate cancer, only to be killed by a heart attack. He likes a girl.

Initiative

Gregory is worried that he may become a child molester. When the girls get out of the junior high beside the bakery where he works, walking across the crosswalk in their short skirts and low cut tops, what they would look like naked just pops into his head before he can do a thing about it. He wonders what is stopping him from pulling up beside a group of them one day, promising them alcohol, bringing the takers back to his house. Then again, he also wonders what is stopping him from going back to school and getting this weight off.

Confidence is Everything

The key is don't be nervous. Open a cooler or two, pick up an energy drink. Ask the guy behind the counter how the pink grapefruit Tic Tacs are and toss a pack of them onto the counter. This way, when you reach for your wallet, he isn't ready for the gun.

Guess and Check

When a doctor says something like "You only have about a month to live," how do they calculate that exactly? Is it just a guess or from experience, or maybe they have a Facebook quiz-like thing that spits out a number when they bubble in my information? I marked the date on the calendar, but I think you, your mother and I should go down to the Ruby Tuesday the night before, just in case. Anyway, this isn't a very good bedtime story, is it.

Another American Legend

There was no Rosa Parks. There was no Harriet Tubman. No Maya Angelou.

There was just James Earl Jones, cross-dressing in his time machine.

After

I don’t know what to do with our big house on the hill. The steep climb up the driveway seems longer than it was before. The pavement looks more cracked, like a sea of shifting plates instead of a long contiguous strip to drive up. It’s a box, a six thousand square foot leviathan of sprawling brick and bay windows.

At night I can almost feel the tendrils of ivy swallowing it, squeezing it, daring it to crumble. I was never the one who kept the wood spiders from taking over the back porch. I never figured out how to keep the deer from eating all of our flowers. What do I do when it starts raining and water trickles through the walls in the basement? Where do I need to kick the furnace to get it working again? The gutters are too high. It will always be too dark.

All that space.

Just something to get in the way when I want to see the stars.

Mission

Walk the path backwards
To the bus station where Jesus might have been crucified
I bought a souvenir
Lions with lambs
Adages on placards
And a cold steady stare
From the Bedouins that raise goats
And know
In the air something hangs
That I'll never find

Friend Request (version 1)

I can’t even walk into the store of a cell phone service provider without feeling like my penis is hanging out or something. My hands won’t stop sweating in this bustling digital beehive, barely middle aged women in slacks and navy blue button-ups shuffling their awkward proportions back and forth between their postmodern-looking stations and some mysterious back room, leaving you alone in a chair that’s too high off the floor to sit in without your feet dangling like a little kid getting a root beer float at the counter of a drug store in the 1950s. Their impatient words escape from behind teeth as white and straight as a picket fence in a contrived homemaker’s imagination, their faces bright and overdone. Take away the gender neutral work apparel and they could be wives from the congregation of an overly evangelical church, faces perpetually wrenched upward into radiant, hollow smiles. I get the impression that they were all named after various scented candles, but I can’t bear to look at their name tags. They’re pinned too close to the breast and I’d feel disrespectful.
There is always a line of six to eight people, and there are only two chairs. The rest of us have to stand against the walls that are actually big windows and timidly jostle out of the way of the endless stream of individuals coming in just to pay their bills on the ATM-like machine to the right of the door. We are surrounded, and the only way I can get my legs to quit shaking is the more terrifying notion that someone could think I’m doing a pee dance.
“Can I help whoever is next?” The employee has dyed cinnamon cockatiel hair, and the top part of her work shirt is unbuttoned, revealing enough cleavage to make me stare at the cars passing outside and wish I was young enough for my grandmother to hold my hand and lead me across the street to the campus of the high school, like she used to. Every day I would run through that grass and pick the bark off of the dying maple tree there, watching the ants scuttle up its frail trunk.
She takes my information, punching things into her computer like I’m not even there, eyes wide and lit up by the blue light of the screen. The clicking of her shimmering, painted nails against the keys is almost enough to cover the drags of my irregular breathing.
“Ok, sir, what is it that we can help you with today?”
“Yeah. My-my phone. My phone is, uh, broken. Well, the-the keypad isn’t working. The numbers.” Stammering incoherently, I try to tell her how the numbers on my keypad have ceased working properly. They lag behind what I’m typing, registering at random. Then, that T9 thing takes my typos and auto-completes them into words I’m not trying to say. The button that lets me turn it off is completely broken, and the button that lets me initiate calls and choose the recipients of my text messages works without any detectable rhyme or reason.
The employee stares at the air over her shoulder for a moment, sorting out to herself exactly what it is I just tried to communicate to her. The subtext of her body language is blaring: Her shoulders want to go to a bar and her pursed lips say go home, you stupid faggot.
“Hmm. Ok, sir. Well, what I’m seeing here is that your phone is past the manufacturer’s warranty, and you don’t seem to have insurance. Unless you’d like to purchase a new phone today there’s nothing we can do for you, I’m afraid.”
“No. That’s ok. Thank you very much.”
I can never bring myself to get angry or argue in a place of business. Sometimes it’s that I’m too relieved that the experience is over, but mostly it’s that I’m worried that my fury would come off as silly or insincere rather than intimidating. Really, I can deal with my phone’s malfunctions. It’s not that big of a deal.
I wait until I’m outside to put my jacket on and zip it up so that maybe no one can see me miss the remaining arm hole and flail at the autumn wind, or take a few extra tries than a normal adult would to get the zipper to catch. The metallic whir of the passing cars sounds just like the elevator in my building. There’s nothing I need to do now, but I can’t bring myself to go back there. My therapist says these things get easier every day, but I’m still not ready.
It would surprise the few people who know me that I could even walk into a mall, let alone go there and visit Erin like I’ve done nearly every day since what happened with Lisa. Amongst the sprawling slalom of bodies strolling side-by-side, it’s surprisingly private. They sell my favorite banana flavored milk at the ice cream place, and there is always a table open in the food court within view of the smoothie kiosk.
The smoothie kiosk is where Erin works. She is about 19, I think, with hair the color of Coca Cola and a smile like my grandmother’s back porch. She is always very nice to the customers, that hair of hers spilling across her shoulders when she turns to re-tie her burlap colored apron and mix their order. It’s a genuine smile. A smile she doesn’t use her face to make, quite unlike the ladies at the cell phone store. Erin is pregnant, but not in the way that would make you think any less of her. I can’t decide if she knows who the father is or not, but I usually think she might be better off without him. Things must be so difficult for her already without having to depend on the type of boy who’d be so careless.
In my back pocket I keep a small notebook that I can pull out and write important things in. Flipping past Claire, Eloise, Margaret, all of the other obsolete predecessor names that belonged to Erin before, I finally come to her fresh page. I’ve set up everything I know about her in a format similar to Facebook: lists of the things she likes to do, her college major, the parts of herself that she so wants the world to see. Each time her name changes, those things change with it. I used to try to write diary entries in her name, but the flesh of illusion wore thin very quickly and I felt like a creep. Nobody lies to their diary. Mimicking things like Myspace makes it seem more concrete to me, makes me feel like there could be a real person out there just like my Erin. I could even meet her if I clicked in the right place. The mall is closing up, and the reality that I’ll have to go home settles in a powder of quiet panic. I pull out my phone to text Lisa wondering would it be imposing if I asked her to hang out with me for a while tonight. My phone stops halfway through, T9 word taking hold and sending “wounded immigrant possum dick” to my boss’ cell phone instead.
I’ve lived in this town for so long I don’t have to think while I drive. Tonight, though, I would give anything to have something to focus on other than my apartment. That drab little piece of shit I can’t even afford anymore, wedged in a corner on the third floor of the building. I’m trapped with the elderly, with the crocheted crosses on their doors and their four o’ clock dinners.
I feel like my lock should stick or something, like my apartment should hate me and want to oppress me into leaving it alone, but everything works fine. The landlord maintenances it regularly, the thermostat is responsive. I toss my keys and busted cell phone onto the nursing home couch in my living room. After I’ve taken off my shoes I step into the kitchen, where on my counter the CD sized strip of clay with a paw print pressed into it lays in a Ziploc bag. Across the top, in a semicircle around the print, is stamped the word “Bananas.”
When I brought her home as a puppy, after getting her acclimated to the apartment, she would sit on my lap on the couch and try to stuff her head into the cushions while growling softly and making snurdling noises. Every evening after Jeopardy I watched the news, and this one particular night there was a segment on how spiders have been known to lay eggs in the tips of bananas and that consumers should be careful. The information came as quite a shock, and I fell into a panic thinking I would forget to not eat the ends of bananas if I didn’t write it down immediately. After raiding the place and not finding the pen that I write in my little notebook with, I named her Bananas as a last resort.
There’s a little note card in the bag that has directions for baking the clay print to make it hard. Preheat the oven to 275 degrees Fahrenheit and place the clay onto a pan. Bake for fifteen minutes. I preheat the oven and carefully place the clay on a cookie sheet, set the timer.
I didn’t realize Bananas was sick. One day she stopped eating like normal, and started throwing up most of the food she did eat. The vet didn’t know what was wrong with her, either. It took several weeks of tests to figure out that she was born with kidneys that were too small for her body. There hadn’t been any noticeable problems in her first years because I had taken exemplary attentive care of her, but now we’d begun a crawl to the end that the nice woman in the white coat and dark grey slacks assured me was inevitable.
We started Bananas off with pills of some experimental drug that the vet felt very positive about, and medicine meant to bind the phosphorus in her bones. Instead of watching Jeopardy, I administered an IV of saline every evening to flush out the poison her little kidneys couldn’t manage. Aside from trundling around for about an hour with a slight hunchback from all the saline, not much was different. Bananas still pranced around when I came home, toenails clacking against the tile, rearing back on her hind legs to be picked up. She still hogged the center of the bed, even though she had a whole side to herself, and demanded fresh water every morning.
What few differences there were I accepted with as much grace as could be expected. I couldn’t walk her anymore, so we took frequent car rides. We’d drive through KFC to get chicken for me to hide her pills in, and she’d get a treat from the girl at the window, crunching benevolently and sprinkling crumbs all over the passenger seat. There were more naps in the afternoon, more potty breaks, and I’d carry her to the elevator and through the lobby.
The timer goes off and the clay is a dark, dirty orange. I pull out the sheet and let it cool on the counter for twenty minutes, like the note card says, then thread the tiny hole at the top with yellow yarn. My knees sinking into the couch cushions, I tenderly hang it from the nail between the only two decorations in my family room: a wooden Anglican crucifix and my framed and autographed vinyl copy of Modest Mouse’s Building Nothing Out of Something.
It took an entire month. First, the weekly tests that had been showing gradual decreases in her internal toxin levels began to plateau. Then they came back up. One daily IV turned to two, more and more food was left in her bowl each night. The phosphorus binder quit working. Summer waned, and she with it.
Then she was frail bones that didn’t eat or take pills. She’d sneeze and there would be a faint crackling sound as a few teeth would skip across the kitchen tile, sliding under the dishwasher. We didn’t watch TV at all. The end of the day was spent trying to get her to take her medicine. Huddled on the kitchen floor, Bananas in my arms, crying as I shoved a tablet of some fucking stranger’s experiment with hope to the back of her throat, gagging and writhing, and I’d put my hand over her muzzle to try to suffocate her into swallowing. She started hiding behind the couch. Nobody greeted me when I came home.
It gets to a point where even love isn’t worth it. After a violent seizure I took her to the vet, and we made the decision together. Lisa held my hand while the needle went in. I hurt her, squeezing hard to not cry in front of the doctor. I wrote a Myspace bulletin in my head about how brave I was being, and cycled through the flood of comments. Pages of support that I could read again and again and feel warm.
I grab my phone, slamming the buttons to make them work, texting Lisa saying I’m sorry, please just come over. “Ho snore please my convict” goes to my therapist’s cell.
Where are my keys? I need my fucking keys. The couch cushions are on the floor and I find them, cramming them into a jacket pocket and letting my door slam, leaving it unlocked. In the parking lot it takes me three tries to get into my car. I start hyperventilating when I pass Lisa’s house.
I met Lisa four years ago, just after my mother died. At the funeral distant relatives I’d barely spoken to before told me to call them if I ever needed anything, vague acquaintances gave me one-armed hugs, murmuring about how if I needed to talk to someone they were there any time. I had a panic attack at the reception. On leave from work, I spent the next few days at my computer on a chat site that paired you up at random with another person online. Lisa was the first one to not log off upon learning that I was male and over the age of 15. Talking to her was like reading a story about a witty version of me that didn’t have to take a pill to leave his apartment in the morning. I stayed up all night telling her everything. When I explained about losing my mother, she wrote, “Aww I’m so sorry! Maybe you should get a dog or something so you aren’t all alone in that apartment. My puppy always keeps me company :D!”
We chatted two or three times a week, each of us learning about the other, becoming a more integral part of the other’s life. Eventually I knew everything about her. She was the sweetest, most honest person I had ever known. She used to have a boyfriend who would sit in his truck in her driveway all night to make sure she didn’t go anywhere and maxed out her credit cards so she couldn’t go back to college. She thought I was funny. I was in awe of her, and wished desperately that people as interesting as her lived around here. It took us nearly three years to figure out that, not only did we live in the same town, but Lisa lived a block from my building.
The pain in my chest comes while I’m passing the movie theaters, thinking about that first year after Lisa and I started speaking in person. I wasn’t afraid of her. My hands shook only a little. I didn’t compulsively check my fly. Everything felt like it was covered in syrup, and made my stomach turn like I was about to go down the first hill on a roller coaster.
I think maybe some food will help balance things out in my head, I just need to stay calm, so I turn down the road past the sprawling brick school near what used to be my grandmother’s house towards McDonald’s. This is where I asked her to move in with me.
I guess it never really occurred to me that the featureless building across the street from my old high school is an abortion clinic. Every summer, the lit up sign in front says in thick plastic letters “Guys what if she’s pregnant?” but when the 27th of August has come and gone it simply reads “Welcome Back Students” and lists a phone number underneath. I remember the silence in Lisa’s eyes following the question as we walked past the clinic and she said, “I was almost engaged once.”
“Really? What happened?”
She pointed to the sign, “Apparently one of those costs about as much as a ring.”
I can smell the McDonald’s before I see it, bright and putrid against a cod-liver-slathered parking lot. I want her to know that I don’t care. It doesn’t bother me. I can work around it. I pull up to the speaker, pushing against the impending anxiety attack, and try to text her one more time. “I need you, stay with me” turns into “I need to stop doing this giraffe” and fires off to mom’s old cell phone number.
An electronic voice says, “What do you want?”

Beset

Pleased to the core
The disease of the whores in our homes
Our homes revolving doors
Stability resides on the floor
But I slither on the ceiling
Afraid of feeling anything other than high
My mind is a fucked apart dead thing unless I’m having fun
My feel-good adage rolls off our tongues
With the weight of an anvil that falls like envelopes
Postmarked for now
Our destination is the ground
Without sound they fall in pendulum motion
To rest in silence

Where is home?
I lost it
I made it look like an accident
How was I supposed to stay?
It was supposed to be my place
But I filled it with my guilt
There was too much to fit in my purse
So I packed it in every crevice
Every prom dress
Every “feel better”
Every love letter
Then spun around
And walked out
My existence, my experience
Dripping behind me
One of us is dying
Maybe both
Rendered by choice
Ruptured by ignorance
Raped by truth
Bleeding love that pools in bills on the carpet
Essence lost to substance
“I can’t live to know”
“I can’t feel that anymore”
I need a drink with my friends
Achieve my cherubim balance
Held up by slanted bookends
My path prescribed
All I need is a glass of water so that I may take my contentedness
And slip into dreams
Before I turn back to God or home
And be forced to salvage my own wreckage
Why should I?
Someday someone will go back there.

A Neologism for Progress

Where do you go when empowerment has become the new stereotype?
The removal of exclusion
Assimilation and extermination of partitions
Shape shifts into a suicide mission against accommodation
You’re your own person now so you’ve got your clearance
To guide your moral compass with magnetic interference
And in your elation you missed
What you’ve become

Everyone can feel the crisis unfold
We’re ten years old and on the playground
Trying to balance the teeter totter
But it’s not built like a scale
And always we’ll fail to be truly equal
One of us that much higher
We wait until that one falls
And we’ll laugh as they bleed in the mulch
Then stand against the wall
Knowing next recess we’ll be the ones who’ll sit that tall

So burn your bras with tired psychology
But gender roles are dictated by
Physiology
Personality
The reality of all of us
And nothing more
But we’ll listen in the schools
And to the card castle fools playing by playground rules
Do you have to have labels for everything?

I understand
You were sick of being a slave
In your kitchen of a cage
Domestically depraved
Holding the unmarked page of history to your chest
With poignant rage repressed in your objectified breasts
So you stepped up to the plate
For the dawn of a new age

Hearts limitlessly heavy
Possess the momentum to beat faster
So brave and so righteous
Your chains fell like robes
Your voices cracked plaster
Femininity parted the sea
Your head says you’re free
But there’s just a new master.

Between Silences

Between silences
Words come out of her
They sound like
“I have to go to the bathroom
I’ll be right back”

Between silences
Her bare feet impress the carpet
And her bones and muscles shift under the smooth taut tarp of her skin
My plate rings from fork stabs
A door clicks shut

Between silences
I wonder what is taking so long
Foggily stirring my noodles
I tap my foot
Her plate is pristine

Between silences
The exchange is made
She trades what is inside
For what she wants to be
But as always ends up empty


Between silences
Dresses are donned
Happiness is hurried
Makeup is morose
Tranquility is a tourniquet

Between silences
I hear the ever fainter creaks
Of her stepping on the scale
Pounds are the lightest of all that is falling
The refrigerator humming and the beat of sorting mail

Between silences
My perfect portrait purges and shrinks
Clocks rewind forward
Fear speaks without sound
And my love for her is unheard
Between silences

A Funeral in July

She was Hispanic
He was his panic
And she loved him
Because he knew to be afraid
When she walked away
She could be who she pleased
A grown woman
Who no longer prayed on her knees
But wished she could know longer
What made them weak
And keep it
Place it within his voice when he speaks

A funeral in July
A sunny warm welcome release
A eulogy given by a diary clasp and tire tracks
They all just say wonderful things about him
With that hope resting under their feet
His first bicycle still leans in the shed out back
But who brought the pasta salad?

Towards the end
He saw the faces of the deceased
In everything he was trying to keep
We all know adults don’t exist
But that’s what we all choose to be
Living in debt
Like God isn’t free
And the Devil never sleeps

She was Hispanic
He was his panic
And she buried him
In a fifteen thousand dollar shoebox
In this city’s backyard

A Fake

Why teach?
No one’s listening
They’re just waiting for words
So they can decide whether they’re going to be Dr. House
Or that kid in the back
And they’ll carry all the books they want everyone to know they read

They want to be suffragette mini boss goddesses
Rustic visionaries with minds like your favorite cigarettes
Quirky concierges of a lap dog ingenuity
That licks their empty embroidered palms
As they regurgitate their ornate subversive gospel
So fucking rad, I tell you!
Basking in our awe
Perpetually pregnant with innovative perspectives
Like they fucked every book in the library
(But with more reverb)

They chuck abstractions and proofs
Into the dark
Over their shoulders
And we’ll gather the crumbs
Of our vicarious individuality
So terribly special are we
Who have those to teach us what is special


They’ll assemble a punch drunk canon
Of high brow assertions of guilt
And we’ll get all Pentecostal
Whenever Ben Gibbard falls asleep on a synthesizer

When they humbly walk on our heads
Having read less of the Bible than Christians, even
We’ll try to peak at the letters they are writing
To a God they tell us is too dormant to be real
(Actually I think they just hate the idea
Of someone else being smart enough
To fuck with them)
They’ll tell us to think that we shouldn’t let anyone tell us what to think
And we’ll fall soothingly asleep
Little birds in a bed sheet dark

You can’t teach an old dog nuclear secrets
What does that even mean?
I don’t know
Buy this shirt?

Feats Worse Than Death

I accept the seventh drink someone hands me because, at this point, I realize that I just want to live in a movie, and tonight’s as good a night as any for one of my more memorable scenes. Everything already looks so perfect. Colors seem darker, and blur together when I move my head. All the lights are spherical, adorned with fuzzy halos like a holiday scene in a worn out VHS tape from the 80s. Everybody is laughing. Everything is ambiguously endearing.

When I wake up tomorrow, I will remember all of this. But my ownership of these memories will leave with the alcohol in my bloodstream. In the morning, each slurred and euphoric scene will be detached; will belong to someone else’s life. Not mine. It will be like looking through the sloppily filmed home videos of a stranger. No, I don’t know who that scrawny, shirtless guy wearing the army green fishing hat is. You’re right, he is trying to recite the pledge of allegiance and standing way too close to that girl. How embarrassing. Voila. A movie. This is what I’m aiming for.

Across the room, I watch a guy a little younger than me, I’d guess about fifteen, light up a cigarette with one of his friends. It’s clearly his first time. He chokes immediately, and amidst the sputtering and watering eyes tries to play it off like none of it had to do with the smoke. He just choked on his spit. Don’t worry, he can handle it.

I used to find lung cancer to be quite the novel concept. There’s just something about the notion that a person’s stupid habits will someday eat them slowly from the inside. I mean, if I was God I couldn’t have come up with a better design, but I’m not, so all I can do is wonder why the real God didn’t. It was an awfully harsh punishment for my grandfather’s single vice.

Mom thinks I’m still in shock, and that’s why I couldn’t cry or anything at the viewing or the funeral. Apparently shock and relief are easy to mix up. I don’t see how I could be shocked that the man died; it’s a day we’ve all known was coming for months. Like Christmas, only shitty. The real shock was seeing what he turned into before he passed.

Drink eight tastes like a snickerdoodle that’s trying to break into my car. I don’t know what is in it exactly, but Leanne made it for me, so I have to drink it. I’m going for those brownie points. Tonight is the big night, that awkward stage of a friendship where said relationship’s potential for upward mobility is decided. I’m going to ask Leanne on a date. I’m going to do it right, too.

Unfortunately, planning is no longer an option. The planning mechanism in my brain has been confounded by the simpler things. Walking feels like perusing over an expert level USA Today crossword, and proves to be as difficult a task to complete correctly. Every motor function is now a brilliant feat. People keep telling me that comprehensilation is not a word. I feel brave.

Why the hell a microphone is lying idly around at a house party without a DJ would be beyond me even in my soberest state, but God must be on my side. It’s one of those cordless numbers, so all I have to do is flick a switch to turn it on. I switch it on, and before I can say a word my face is flooded with indescribable warmth and luminescence. This is it! I was supposed to do this. I am exactly where I’m meant to be and Leanne is going to say yes and this is the moment that turns everything around, that makes it all worth it.

I’m not sure where the PA is, so I speak robustly into the mic. Not everyone turns to me, of course, but a great deal of people do. Leanne does. I confess it all. Everything. I tell them about granddad and the uncle who isn’t dealing with it very well. I tell them about how I might actually still be in shock, and that I ordered all the seasons of the Dick Van Dyke Show on DVD. I tell Leanne how I feel about her, exactly as I’d imagined.

Everything I say is lost against the wall of their confused laughter. I feel blinded now, instead of warm. Why are they laughing? Nervously, I look down and fiddle with the microphone. Around the edges, towards the top, where you speak into it, something is written. I’m too drunk to see it clearly, but it comes into focus when I bring it close to my face. It says “MAG-LITE.”

The realization reaches me in stages. I can’t hear the throng’s laughter anymore. Suddenly, it’s as if I’m in the room alone, and all I can hear is my grandfather breathing that last night sprawled across his bed. Oxygen and wires to other things I didn’t understand, everywhere. Rhythmic, and heaving, like an animal. His head tipped back, mouth agape, two rows of black teeth on display. A corpse that just kept re-inflating itself.

Everyone gets quiet when I smash the big green bottle of that licorice tasting stuff. Leanne actually gasps. I don’t know what to do, so I start telling jokes. I like my women like I like my movies: silent, I say. The room gets quieter than before. I may have forgotten to mention that Leanne is a feminist protestor, and all of her like-minded friends are here. I…I can’t come up with new jokes, so fuck it, we’ll just keep this’n, I slur. I scan the crowd. I like my women like I like my hot fries: taste good stale after I ignore them on the floor for a weekend, I tell them, I like my women like I like my neighbor: He’s ok. I mean, he’s a solid dude. I grip that flashlight as tight as I can and pace like a televangelist, all hunched over as I spit, I like my women like I like a good drink: refreshing, but after three or four they’re all the same. I have warped my relationship with the crowd to the point that terms like “onlookers” or “mob” feel more appropriate. I cadence my presentation by yorking all over my shoes.

I wake up on an unfamiliar bathroom floor knowing full well that I’ve ruined everything. Judging by how sloshed I still am, it can’t have been long since I passed out. I rise up to my knees, preparing to vomit into the toilet, but change my mind. I put the lid down and let it go all over the soft fabric lid cover. I turn over the trash can and throw up all over the bottom of it. He was just lying there that night, motionless while we all stood around him saying our goodbyes. My mom patted his head and my uncle kept rubbing his feet, the only normal part of him left. The rest had shriveled into a boney sack. My grandfather would have fit in black and white pictures from the Holocaust. I stand up so that I can heave again, this time into the curtains. He looked like a wrecked kite, crumpled and feeble. His eyes were glazed. There was no grandpa in there anymore. Every now and again he would nod and gurgle. I open the shower curtain and wretch into the tub. Everything is backwards anyway. I didn’t get to see him actually die. I had to leave, had to get outside, make sure it was all still out there. My uncle told me he’d go with me. He rubbed my grandfather’s foot one last time, smiling, and said, sweetly, I’m going to walk him out now. I love you. No partying while I’m gone.