The Rehashing of Older Works

This is not a real entry, merely a notification that since the literary magazine I submitted my short story to is not interested in publishing it, I will now print it here. I also want to utilize this ripenisulous 30,000 character limit.

I don’t really consider this Open Diary as “publishing” so my story remains unpublished and available for submission elsewhere! Yay!

Anywhere here it is, blah blah. I think it’s okay, sort of.

-story removed because.

brandon

“You wanna play with me?”

I’d kill for it.

“Not really,” I tell her.

She makes a face.

I walk across our living room to the bedroom. The carpet’s soft and feels lumpy on my naked feet. The floorboards creak underneath with every few steps or so. I step into the bedroom. It’s small but it’s ours. There’s a lamp on my nightstand and I flick it on. The black covers glow under the yellow light. Forty watts, I think, but I’m not sure why. There’s a clock on my nightstand too. It says it’s 9:30.

I’m not tired. I lie down on top of the covers like people do when they’re not tired. Samantha and I used to lie outside all sprawled out like this. We never lied out in the snow though. It’s snowing now. I hope it doesn’t get too bad. I remember when it was nice. Dead space in campus clearings at two in the morning. The grass isn’t cold like the snow. It’s just starting to get damp. We forget a blanket again and our backs get moist. I have a cigarette in my mouth and she shares it, peer pressure I guess. Our kisses taste like smoke. I’m staring up at the sky with her. She kneels over me and puts our cigarette up her nose. She’s the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen with a cigarette up her nose. She sniffs and takes the cigarette out, then covers my mouth with hers and lets her lungs go. She says we’re breathing together. I laugh through lips-touching smiles and ask if she knows she’s insane. I blow back out my nose. I can taste the smoke now, feel her on top of me.

I snap up. The clock says 10:30 and the T.V. is still on in the living room. I go back in and look to sit on the couch. Samantha is sleeping on it. I lift up her legs and rest them across my lap. I stare at her chest to make sure she’s breathing, like she might not be or something. She is. Taco’s curled up on her tummy. I reach to put her on the floor and she gets the look of terror and death in her eyes and dashes to the other side of the apartment. I carry Samantha to our bed. She smiles at me and I kiss her on the forehead. I crawl in with her. We fall asleep and in my dream the phone rings a few times and stops.

Halfway across the state, the sun’s come up and made Samantha’s friends turn from black at night to blue today. Blood stains the torn interior and the radio still plays. Police find them and call the families. They can’t believe it. They tell the police there’s a mistake, it can’t be my daughter, she was just here last night! but it is their daughter and it is her boyfriend and they are both incredibly dead.

I wake up the next morning and I can smell her hair next to me. I turn over and she’s not there. Sound’s coming from the kitchen. Coffee’s brewing. I pull myself out of bed. The sun’s coming in like it does on Saturday mornings in movies. The world is bright because of the new snow outside. The walls are dark with spots of white bouncing off the frost-covered windows.

She’s sitting at the kitchen table with a cup between her fingers and the cat on her lap. She’s wearing a black satin robe. I can see her underneath it. It doesn’t seem as exciting as it used to. I sit down next to her and say morning. She’s quiet for a few moments.

“My best friend died in a car accident last night.”

“Shit.”

What do you say to that, you know?

She gives me the details before telling me she wants to go back home for the funeral, spend the night with a male friend from way back since her parents are out of town. I’m a little upset, but I trust her.

“You don’t trust me!”

“Sure I do, it’s just awkward thinking you’ll be sleeping with some other guy.”

Emphasis on guy.

“Oh come on,” she tells me, “it’s not like we’ll be sleeping in the same bed or anything.”

It reminds me of the things her and I used to tell our parents about us. I point out that it’s not a long walk down the hall and that she remembers when we used to sneak around at three in the morning from room to room so we could avoid her authority figures.

“You really don’t trust me.”

“I do, I do.”

“Why don’t you come with me?” she asks, and I sense the awkwardness of those words before she even says them.

“I’m not good at funerals… I don’t even know your friends that died… I mean… that would be a really uncomfortable thing for me to do,” I tell her, and what I get is basically something to the extent that I’m horrible for not recognizing that it’s going to be uncomfortable for her, emphasis on her, this being the only time she’d be going home in months.

I point out that there have been several opportunities for her to go home in the last few months, and that it’s unfair to try to guilt me into coming. She wants to know how I can be so heartless. She thinks I don’t care about her.

“How can you be so heartless? Do you even care about me? My best friend died! She’s dead!”

“But I didn’t know them so it’s almost like they’re not dead to me.”

Yeah. That’s good. That’s a great thing to say.

“I can’t believe you. I’m going. I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon.”

She goes into our bedroom and starts to pack a bag. All of the drawers slam louder, all the clothes are packed tighter, all the objects are moved quicker. I sit on the couch and sulk. She walks out without looking at me. The door must be exceptionally heavy because she pushes it really hard on the way out.

I say “no, wait.”

I call her cell phone. No answer.

The clock ticks. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. I’m hungry.

I get up off of the couch and pop some bread into the toaster. It cooks for seven hours. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Then it pops up. The butter’s cold and hard since it was in the refrigerator overnight instead of on the table how I usually leave it. I tear the toast to hell. There’s butter and crumbs all over the counter. I throw my butter knife at the sink. It lands inside and then slides out and gets butter on the floor. The cat comes running from a mile away. Her alert must have gone off.

“Alert, alert! Butter on the floor! Acquisition sequence initiated. We have a lock. De-ploying jet boosters (that’s said all hard-ass like DEE-ploying) and preparing to engage. Enemy engaged. Tongue deployed. Yum, sir.”

I let her take care of it. Samantha would be upset.

She’s gone though.

I stand in the kitchen. Slurp Tick. Slurp Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

“Target destroyed sir, de-ploying jet boosters. Destination: over there.”

The cat races to the other side of the apartment.

I’m still hungry so I eat the ripped up toast. It’s great.

Saturday afternoons are the most worthless when you actually accomplish things, so I lie down on the couch like people do when they’re not tired.

She’s driving too fast, I bet, and she’s talking on her cell phone to all of her friends about what a dickhead I am. But after she hangs up, she’s still thinking about me, about us. I know I’m not the only one who thinks we’ve got a problem here. She’s wondering about it, wondering what we’ll do if it doesn’t work out, if our love can’t conquer all, if we can’t reconcile all this shit that’s been piling up for months, if our dreams and our plans and our perfect careers, two point five kids, two cats, arcade machines in the basement of our self-designed house all never come to pass. She’s thinking about the careful importance our lives have together and I’m agreeing with her like she can’t even know.

She’s coming to a tu

rn, I’m thinking, and she’s dropped her lipstick and she reaches down to get it at precisely 12:14, just exactly the time she coasts through an intersection without looking and an 18-wheel truck zooms by and can’t stop in time to avoid slamming into her car and crushing her like her friends, ripping her apart like my toast. Those lips kissed me before they were crushed and dead.

She’s coming to a turn, I’m thinking, and the song that reminds her of us has just come on the radio. She takes her eyes off the road at precisely 12:14, just exactly the time she speeds through a stop sign and can’t avoid the careening 18-wheeler. They collide and explode like the air is gasoline.

She’s coming to a turn, I’m thinking, and she’s dropped her lipstick but she doesn’t reach down to get it until 12:15. She grabs it and applies it and keeps on her way.

I’m coming to a turn. Is it safe to look down and take my eyes off the road?

I stand up what must be a few hours later and see the overflowing garbage, like it’s all of a sudden this magnificent fountain of banana peels, empty cans, chewed up peanut shells (hers).

“I do say sir,” this fine British chap says as I see him approach me out of nowhere with his handlebar mustache and polished monocle, “that is one ex-qu-isite fountain! Five dollars, I’ll give you for it. Ten! Look at the detail, the statements, the symbolism! Your relationship is these empty cans! These banana peels! The peanut shells! Empty casings! Postmodern beauty! I’ll give you fifteen, sir. Twenty! We really ought not dawdle, now!”

I call her cell phone. No answer.

I pull the bag out of the plastic holder and tie it up. I push open the door and I get that sucking noise followed by the sound of me pushing away last night’s snow from in front of the door. I step outside wearing my slippers, a robe with a coat over it, and nothing else. I’m an Olympic games star, hammer throwing my garbage off the porch towards our one-car garage. It plops on the ground and the white bag becomes indistinguishable from the snow except for its bright yellow handles. The gold! I turn around and a blur shoots out of the door and zooms past my leg and down the stairs and for some reason I think about what I’m doing and realize I’m chasing after Samantha’s cat in the latter part of a snowy street on a Saturday afternoon wearing nothing but a robe, slippers, and a coat.

Her friends are as cleaned up as they can be now, the pieces of them are dressed nicely but this funeral is going to be closed-casket. Nobody can blame the parents, did you SEE the police report, but everyone’s lamenting the fact that they’ll never see their friends again. If only they’d stayed the night here like I’d asked, someone thinks. If only we’d have kept eating a few minutes longer, they wonder. But the only thing they can do now is regret.

I’m running down the street and checking every few minutes to make sure I’m not making myself guilty of indecent exposure. The smallish orange cat, no more than six inches tall and twice that long is blazing through the lawns of everyone he feels like, swerving from snow to grass to sidewalk to street, gaining on me slowly even though I’m in full-on dead sprint mode. Taco’s playing hard to get and I don’t even want her. I see that streetlight a block or so from the grocery store that I was thinking about the other night. Taco stops by it and hides there, thinking I don’t see her or something. Doesn’t she know I don’t want to kill her?

I get to the streetlight and she tears off again, this time in the direction of the grocery store. I am pretty sure this could be unfortunate. I see people walk up and the little automatic doors swing over as the people step on the pads. Then it swings open and there’s nobody there except the cat. I didn’t think they worked on cats.

I examine the windows for a “no shirt, no shoes, no service” policy but I don’t see anything and I run in after the cat. That cashier from last night is here. She checks me out again. My wardrobe leaves little to the imagination. So does hers. I tell her my cat ran in here and I have to chase it. She laughs and says she hates cats. I have one of those things where a previously “valid” candidate for your love, were you to end the relationship you’re in right now and instead go for someone else, is eliminated on a technicality. She doesn’t like cats. I’m sure she could if she wanted. I snicker but she doesn’t know our nothing is so over. I dash past the lettuce section, and a few of the heads have fallen to the sides since last evening’s precarious stunt. The comedy movie possibilities intrigue me.

Taco could burst in, jump around on the display of watermelons and cause them all to fall down. She could scare the old lady who would throw her basket of soup cans into the air and break windows or hit me. There could be an unfortunate spill of some liquid or another and it could take weeks to clean. But I’m there seconds before the soup can lady is in this aisle, and the watermelon display isn’t even set up yet, and the mop bucket guy won’t be out for another five minutes.

Taco slips through the metal swing doors into the loading dock area, then jumps out an open loading dock hole. I follow her and then slow down and sit on the edge before I push myself off. It hurts my legs and I’m pretty sure that lady over there just saw a little more than she wanted.

I dart around behind the store to an alley and there she is, sitting right there in the middle licking her paws like this is fun and games but she doesn’t want to get too dirty. I toe this imaginary starting line cause it’s gonna be a sprint, I think. I crouch down and she sees me. I start the countdown out loud so she can hear.

“Three.” She burns paw and flies down the alley.

“You fucking cheater!”

I take one step and fall face-first on the ice-coated alley below me.

It’s kind of warm, so the ice surprises me. Freak winter occurrence in the dead of spring. The sun’s going down already.

I think that maybe if I would have waited a few seconds before I started running I wouldn’t have slipped, or that maybe if I had tried to chase the cat anywhere but here I’d be okay, or maybe if I would have counted down faster or moved sooner or something like that, I’d be fine. But I know that none of that’s true because I can re-play the exact same consequence a million times in my head and it’s the same every time. Sometimes, there just seem to be things you can’t fucking change.

The only thing they can do now is regret. There were a million ways to change it but nothing could have worked. We only get one shot. The only thing they can do now is regret. Samantha is pulling in right now, I’m thinking, and she’s got runny eyeliner even though she’s gorgeous without it, and her friend’s parents come out and they hug and she’s so sorry, she says like she’s responsible because she didn’t call her to distract her for a few minutes so their car would be somewhere else, or she’s feeling bad because she didn’t visit more often, and that’s all fine and good. But the only thing they can do now is regret. And move on.

So this is my life, I’m thinking, and I have one of those moments when things sort of make themselves into neat little pieces and lay themselves all out on the kitchen table so you can see what’s going on. The players:

My shitty job, my trivially

ailing relationship cause it’s just small stuff right, my recent fascination with cause and effect, the snow on the ground, my sore legs, my potential lack of future with Samantha cause I guess it could be serious, the cat’s missing the cat hates me i’m practically naked it’s cold she’s gone forever, isn’t she? and she’s never coming back she’ll cheat on me with that boy i could still go for the cashier my head hurts and i’m whimpering. Real life whimpering.

I give up on the cat, stand up, and go inside the grocery store. I can’t believe I found this cashier attractive. Samantha’s nose is so much cuter. This lady has a man-nose. I buy my first pack of cigarettes in months. I think the cashier lady finds it a turn-off. Our future together is over, now. It’s a really long walk this time. I pull one out of the box and use one of the store-branded matches from an advertisement matchbook (Cindy’s Market! Your best in-town source for healthy organically-grown foods! Call this fucking number I don’t even care why does a health food store sell cigarettes anyway) to light it up. This one tastes like college. I think about our smoking together again.

She’s watching the smoke float up into the sky from her vantage point on top of me. It’s a few months after she’d stuck the cigarette up her nose. She doesn’t like smoking anymore. It’s bad for your health, she’s told me. Tonight she’s telling me about physics and I’m telling her she’s silly for wanting to study something like that. English majors are where it’s at, I tell her, and they never get stuck at shitty office jobs while their physicist wives are doing high-profile research for colleges. She’s rocking back and forth on me. Physics is an every-day science, she tells me.

“Physics is an every-day science, you know? It’s real fucking interesting. More than you give it credit for, my dearest English major.”

“Yeah, alright.”

“Look at my body in motion!”

She suggestively wiggles on top of me.

“You’re such a dork.”

Tonight she’s back in her hometown halfway across the state, reminiscing about the good times they shared and being a crying shoulder for the girl’s mother. She won’t stay with the old guy friend from way back because there is no old guy friend from way back, is there. She lies down on an uncomfortable bed and goes to sleep early, wishing I were next to her. It’s always the worst when you’re in bed alone.

I finish my walk home and it seems like it takes too long. I go through two cigarettes and put the rest in my coat pocket with the matchbook. I walk around back and I see my footprints in the snow. I turn around and walk backwards in them until I get to the base of the stairs. I swivel around and put my foot on the first stair and just about crush the cat. I call her a son of a bitch. Why did I chase her? Why didn’t I let her do her running? Why didn’t I know that she’d come back all along?

I reach down to pick her up and she doesn’t move. To this point in my life it had become a precautionary measure, a sort of game. I’d just reach down for her and she’d get the hell out of my way so I wouldn’t step on her or kick her or trip on her. But she’s just sitting there and looking at me. I reach down again. Nothing. I put my hand on her head and rub her back. I think she likes it. I pick her up and carry her inside. I sort of wish I hadn’t been so mean to her all the time. I think maybe I could have done some things differently. But all I can do is regret.

That night Taco and me have a time. I make her a very own little meal with some milk and some of the pork hocks I didn’t realize we had. She eats her stuff and I have some canned pasta. We finish eating and she comes up and sits on my lap. We watch a movie and she’s falling asleep. I move her over to the other couch cushion and look really close at her to see if she’s breathing, like she might not be or something. She is. I turn off the television and go into the bedroom. It’s warm under the covers. I start to fall asleep wishing Samantha were next to me. Taco jumps up and sleeps on her pillow.

She’s waking up the next morning, I think, and probably before I’ve even gotten a shower and dressed myself she’ll be done with the funeral and on her way home. She’ll be driving along and she’ll realize she doesn’t need to put make-up on today since she’s not trying to impress anyone and I already know how pretty she is. She won’t reach for the radio because it’s flurrying outside and she loves to watch the snow fall down.

I’m standing outside watching the snow flutter down, my back against the wall on the ground floor under our stairs, the flight above me serving as a sort of shelter, a barrier. Funny how such rotten things work that way, I think. I have a cigarette. The smoke mixes with the snow and it looks beautiful really.

She’ll get home safely because I know she can. I don’t call her cell phone. She pulls into the driveway and gets out. She’s wearing a sweater and a short, black skirt. I can see the skin between her hips and her tummy. She walks over to me.

We hug and I wrap my coat around her as she slides her arms inside it.

She reaches into my pocket and takes a cigarette, lighting it with her own book of matches.

“All we can do is regret,” I tell her.

We stand there smoking for a while.

My hammer-thrown garbage bag is almost buried over there.

I ask if she remembers us lying out on the grass and smoking in college. She inhales through her nose and kisses me through a grin. I rub her back.