Introduction - A Selection from Candy Bar

Robert Brendan is a writer who resides in Edmonton and was born in Calgary in 1979. He is collaborating with Edmonton based illustrator Patrick Henaff on a book of short stories entitled Candy Bar.

Four stories are presented here for all to see. If you are interested in contacting Robert or Patrick, please do so. Please write 'CANDY BAR' in the subject line to get a response; be you a reader, writer, illustrator, or if we could be so lucky, a publisher. Thank you for reading, and be well.

Please forgive some of the formatting. The transition from Open Office to Blog form is not without its quirks.

Oh yeah:

The following is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Uh huh. Yeah.

The Accident

HE made sure he was in the waiting room when it happened. Things had been planned out along the loop and he had worn his best suit. Brown. Not black. That was something for mourning, and that wasn’t for anyone today. Things were worked out. The loop always ferried itself to the curry. The walls were white and his suit was brown. He moved his hand into the pocket and waited for the last thing he said to sink into her eyes. The loop was right, she would stop him.

She was standing there, in that little blue thing that she wore on the days when he liked her and all the moments around her best. It was always the wonderfulest when she had that thing on. It was all he ever wanted on the loop. To see her wearing that thing with her skin underneath it. Sure, there were the parts he could see on the regular. Her legs and her arms with that light moving down across it the way she walked. It wasn’t the shade or the sun of the day that made it out of her. It was that walk and that lilt that carried him. Let’s just be friends. It had always been that way. It was going be all the proving before he could take that. Just a fadeaway to the see you later and a how doesn’t it suck that we have to get different jobs away from each other. He was a smart man. He was an intelligent man. That was the barrier need for the wearing.

Would you come with me to the doctor’s office? Sure. No problem. Of course. It’s alright, isn’t it? I mean, it’s going to be alright, right? Yeah, of course, it’s just; I’d like it if you were there. Listen, we’ll go for something at that place with the brown walls like basement wood paneling that you said we’d like when you walked past it. I’ve seen it. It looks like a good place. Oh come on, that place is so expensive, I mean, I’m a regular girl. I don’t need that sort of thing. I know, I know, but you’d like it. We’ll go, alright? We’ll go, and we’ll have a good time. Come on, I bet those drinks are the same, but out of glasses like that it cant be that far from something right? Lets’ try it. Okay, okay, we’ll go. But only if everything’s going to be all right. It’s going to be all right. Trust me. He’ll probably tell me to pucker up my baby fat or something. Baby fat! What are you talking about? Any thinner and you could pour yourself into one of those fancy glasses.

He didn’t want to fuck her. That had never been part of the loop. It was always them just lying down together, him touching her and kissing her a bit and then a bit of a repeat fade right to the beginning. Something that would pull her out just a bit closer to that little bit of him that was in the loop. Just her in that little blue thing with no one else around for a while. Then her time. She would be there, the face in his face of daywake. They would stick, and there would be none of that. There would be something forged, because, if the loop said right, that was all they really needed. All those things about her with those moves her arms and her legs and all the other amazing visible parts of the outside of the little blue thing would be clear in him with him and there would come the gamble of next. That’s when it would all get together and the new would begin. He had never been one for planning ahead, but hell, he wanted that. Hell, it wasn’t going to work any other way.

Would you like to hit up some coffee this afternoon? How bout a drink? Ha, sure, a drink. How bout it huh? Sounds gooder! Ha ha ha ah. Shared. A hundred of these. All the times together. Over at her house. Sitting next. Touching a bit. That one time with all that booze when her friends were over and that roommate that wouldn’t get out of the kitchen long enough. Just grabbing her that one time. You can either be my lover or my friend. Something a bit extra. In that second. Just grab me. I can’t. Why not? I respect you. Shut up! Shut up! I want that all right?! I want that! I just… What? It’s not enough! Just take me from the back of the head and pull me back you understand? Either or. My lover or my friend.

Either or.

Something a bit extra.

So it had gone on like that. He had not been able to do it. Not the whole way. Oh sure, he pulled her hair back and shoved his tongue into her face and sent it down there and poked around. Even grabbed a bit of that breast. No real mystery there. It was a nice one. Exquisite. A regular handful. A cheruberry. Plump and small. She had something crawling down there though. In the dark. It was all over the beat. Something a bit nasty. Little things that lotions and sprays and injections and surgeries could not take care of. Genetic. Mutation. Transmitted. Bad business, up and down. A chain letter that didn’t work for anyone.

She was a dollymop all right, but she was his dollymop. There wasn’t much outside of those little flakes on the skin of his water. Just the clothes he wore and the actions he committed. Just something exciting, looping about. He had seen it in his dreams to the where when it came out of his mouth in slobbering laughs. I’ll do it! That’s the point where I’ll remember again how it happened in my sleep! Yeah cool. Deep. Crazy. She’ll stop me, and then it’s going to have to come out the right way. Why don’t you just chill out? God that little blue thing she wore. The slit at the waist where the match of bottom opened showing the tattoo just above her curve. That kind of mystery. The bulls flag. Not that he was any bull. Slight build, missing the packages sent delivery from discipline above the waist even through all the apropos infrasupply was there. He was a scaffold of admirable and limited probability.

All those nights. Wow. Couple of days too. She had held his head and one time he had even cried after all the time drinking and standing up and running his mouth that fast blabber that made them go wild with wonder. One time a girl, pretty, had put a note written on the torn off portion of a cigarette pack in his notebook. Never forget you have a beautiful mind. He’s just found it. Right there in between the ages of a few things jotted down loose on the lines and some other close and tight with the paragraphs making the edges and running back to the next.

Beautiful minds if there was a use for it. It was hardwired to resist in the worst way ever. Looking for that little bit extra past the accepted method. There was no end to the kiddieland. That need and crying lust that all the leave behind just wasn’t in him. That game wasn’t in his reach. He’s spent time studying the rules. The meat practice of the theory kept getting away from him. He was a smart one all right. He understood the theory. It still walked away from him. Always the loop pulling him back to the initial appraisal and double treble directional side pulling him out to the start, where it was raw and willing to challenge. Repeated futility presenting only understood future failure. The double see-ya-later.

Hey, are you all right? I’m okay, I’m okay. Hey, you want to go down to the valley later, or to the hill under the telephone building? We could just sit there, chill for a while. Smoke a joint or something. Yeah! For sure. Let’s grab a six pack along the way.

Going up to the office now. The magazines were always too old and smelled of fingers. The trees on the way were still growing and the cars on the street were still burrowing. They were making it all right, up the stairs now. Almost time to call it off. There's going to be an inquest and what are you doing? This doesn’t have to happen. No, the loop, that’s the deal for it. It’s been forever the dream predict now. He was at the point where he could tell what the topic of the next serial cartoons was going to be just by remembering it in the shower. This was to be trusted.

Up, up up, step step step.

That one time at the restaurant with those paintings of hot dog trees on the wall. How am I going to find a good man? Help me find one! She was holding his hands with both of hers and she bent her head down to the table. You’re looking at one right now. She gave the grin, that sorry grin. Fuck, who needs the metaphor gang when we’ve got her face right in front of us? That squeeze after, her eyes looking up, we’re walking in the country of the paddled arse. This is the gang bang for the face plaster. Here is the brain tonic of the present. All the fuck abort here. Too bad there wasn’t a crowdacrows joining in on this, it could be dispelled amongst them. No, this one is all mine, with the artificial plant hanging against the paint on the walls like the bulbs are still burning. A good man right here. Nice little smile. Change the subject. Did you get the salad?

Nothing changed after that.

Step step step, up up up. Almost there. Devotion.

They got in there and the light was white. Magazines hanging on the racks. Toys in the corner with the rug creeping up over the kiddiepen partition from the floor without interruption but a seam. Couple of them were in there. Little rollie pollies, fumbling with blocks and discarded imaginations. Few doors, one leading off into an area where there were samples and equipment on the walls and desks and counters. Another into the examining rooms, lined up in march.

HER NAME. He said. What? His hand went into the pocket and he pulled out the silver with six chambers full. It came up and there were a few gasps and after those the clackle of a telephone receiver and then a mumble of presses on keys. The receiver went back down, then there was snap snap snap and then a more concerted and brief mumble of key clacks. A bit of a shriek came out from one of the others, but she only gasped. Just like in the movies, and to his surprise, in real life, her hand went to her chest and then to her throat.

He put it to his head and said “I’m not going to be able to take this much more, and it has less to do with you than what it has to do with me.”

His fist tightened and following so did his finger around the steel. He paused for that one single beat and trusted the loop. She saw and screamed and splatted her hand from her chest out to his wrist and it went off in the white room around his brown suit. A little black hole appeared in the wall next to a magazine rack. It was part of the scenery now. It had worked, she had stopped him.

In the seconds after, over the screams of the people in the reception, was the wail of a mother in the next room. Screaming for her four year old son to wake up, and that this wasn’t happening.

copyright 2004 robert jay lutener

illustration copyright 2007 patrick henaff

Bright as Night in the City

SOMETIMES stars go out. Snuffed by the dark matter of human interchange. The monsters lurk around the corners and under the futon. Our living rooms made death chambers. The proffered hand of assistance and thrusting renewal finishes the brightness.

The boy did not have one friend at the entire school. His pants were a bight fluorescent orange. On other days he wore cotton green pants. The demands of the tribe spoke of denim accoutrements or venom in the absence of that fabric.

The question on the lips of the elite when the arrival of a new student made its way through their cobwebs of communication was always “Do they dress well?” The assenting nod a seal of acceptance no matter what their fiber. They had made the grade.

The boy was out with these, and with everyone else. He was out with the geeks. They had denim jeans as well. Their survival depended on their scorn of the boy. He was out with the jocks. He could not run fast enough and could not name a single player on the sport shirts he begged his mother to buy from the thrift store in an effort to bay them off. He brought those shirts to school on his back and with it he brought the smell of blood to the ocean of sharks. Goading them to snarl and circle, continuing the isolation in a fervent progress that they saw as duty and sport. Shark dogs.

Ignoring them, finding his own spots to sit and wait out the time between the refuge of supervised classes brought them to close in packs. Sight of his person in the halls or the seating areas triggered the response immediate and their howls were as dogs and their teeth white with Colgate perfection.

They would pull his pants down in the halls when he had no option but to walk by them. No strategy from any book or after school special worked a wonder on them. Bravery and a straight back only created the image that he was not beaten, and their lust was a freshly challenged force, their actions further in intensity.

The pants being pulled down, the utter humiliation. The other students in the halls stopping and standing around for the show. Worse than the time where the boy put his hand to the back of his jacket at the arcade down the street from the school. Feeling the clumped communal sputum of a score of faceless gargoyles that had been unable to contain their laughter after standing behind him at the machine. Slapping his ears, the back of his head. The boy had ignored all these things. They had been frustrated that the old tricks were not working. They combined their spit and made a gloss of mucous on his jacket.

The boy had drawn his hand back from his jacket as the imped howls of the other boys had coursed out of them, unrestrained. His hand covered with bits of peanuts and half-chewed gummi bears held in gelatinous goo. The fluids of the dogs.

It was an ageless ritual. The days stretched to damp hours that hung on each threat and betrayal. For hours at a time they would say he had taken enough. That he had toughed it out. That he could begin to climb the ladder. He had a chance at a rung they said.

Within moments of his cautious move towards their huddle they would be upon him again. Stealing his cigarettes from his hands, a habit he had taken up only to fit in to the round hole with his right angle edges. Kicking him in the ass when he would turn to confront the thief. Turning to face the kicker with a shriek, another square in the ass from the one who had taken his smoke.

This was the kind of thing that bred shootings. The imagination of the boy was filled with a thousand sequences of gore. Each of them more creative with drama. Scripted with the cadence of comic books. This energy, applied to the sciences, or the creative arts might have fostered incalculable boons and given him the moniker of prodigy. Instead, his free time in the prison of his movements was spent on the defense mechanism of creative revenge.

The studies of the boy faltered and sputtered. Nose dived, and then crashed. As close to zero as the testing and faculty could allow without the need for outside counseling merited by regulation. Meetings were held. The parents of the boy despaired over the performance of their offspring.

“But he has some of the highest scores in the province on his aptitude tests!” his mother protested in the vice principal’s office.

“Yes Sally, we know. And to add to that his IQ scores are…Brendan, could you leave the room for a moment please and wait outside in the office?”

And it went. The counselors explained that his future would be a tossed ruin if he did not begin to apply himself.

In class he would read unassigned books. Fiction from the library. The teacher bringing attention to him in class.

“Brendan! How many times have I said that you are not to read in class? Now pay attention, it is unfair to the other students when you go off into your own little world like that!”

The dogs seeing an opportunity and reason enough for another go at him after class.

Brendan was sitting on a patch of grass behind the basketball nets when they walked towards him. He got up and started to leave and they closed on him with speed.

“Quit disturbing the class faggot!” one of them shouted in his face when they got up to him, punching him in the face.

“Yeah! Some of us are trying to learn and shit!” another one screamed in his face. Then one of the other boys held him and the screamer shoved dirt and grass into his mouth.

“Open up you little fuck!”

The boy did not say a word. The boy began to cry.

“Look at this fuckin’ pussy cry!”

“What a faggot!”

“Quit fucking crying or we’ll cut you up!” another one yelled, pulling out a jack knife from his pocket, unfolding it, and motioning it towards the boys face.

The boy wriggled out of the hold and started to scamper away, tripping in the middle of them with his hands breaking his fall. A foot in front of his face and then his face into the ground, the foot on the back of his head. They started kicking him now. Laying it into the boy’s ribs and his back. His ass, his legs. There was no escape. The boy got out from underneath the foot on his neck and began to crawl away. Another foot came down with a stamp on his hand.

“Aw, leave him the fuck alone.” Said a voice that was walking away.

More request than demand. Hope in the process of being dashed. Not a glimmer.

They continued.

The boy sat alone as he always had. Jeans today. Shielding denim. He even caught odd looks from the teachers in the halls. The boy had begged his parents for jeans and now the day had come. Blue denim around his hips. A band of protection.

He stood up from his spot in the hall, a different one every morning. He began to walk towards his locker. Every hallway in the structure held terror for the boy like vines on the side of the walls. He was sick with fear all the time. His belly rolling with acid and nervous fear.

“Nice fucking orange tabs faggot.” Said one of the boys in the hall.

“What?” the boys asked, eyes wide.

“What, are your fucking parent’s on welfare or something?” the other boy asked, leaning against his locker, one of his friends standing there next to him. This other boy came around Brendan and looked at the back pocket on the right hip. There it was, a little orange tab sticking out. No wider than a folded match. No taller than a cigarette filter.

“Hey! Look at his orange tabs! Nice orange tabs loser!”

“What’s the goddamn difference?” the boy asked.

“Watch how you fucking talk to me skid!” the first one said. Pushing the boy in the chest.

In the most uncharacteristic response possible, Brendan shot his leg out, going for the boys balls and succeeding with a connect to the shin.

The other one from behind sent a punch into Brendan’s ear. It flared, and Brendan turned, dropping his books on the floor. One on each side now, normal odds.

“You fucking kick me huh!” the first one said, pushing Brendan into the lockers with a crash. The first one’s coming up into Brendan’s nose, bloodying it.

“What’s going on here? Break it up!”

It was Mr. Duncan, the science teacher. Crippled at nineteen in a car accident, he rolled on up in his wheelchair.

The first one pushed the boy again into the locker and spat into his face. Making the suspension worthwhile. Fighting of any kind at all in school, when caught bought you a three-day vacation.

“Fucking faggot. You’re fucking dead, you know that? This time we’re really going to kill you!” the first one yelled into his face, his friend standing back, playing it for a stern lecture and not the three day home stay that the first one was sure to get.

“Stop it! You,” Mr. Duncan roared, pointing at the first boy, “with me. You!” pointing at Brendan, “You too! And you!” pointing at the other boy, “You go to class.”

“But I didn’t do anything!” Brendan protested. “I just had orange tabs on my jeans and he started in on me!”

Brendan was near tears again. That and now this. When did it end? The office! Suspension! His parents! It whirled his mind to a spinning pool and that pool flooded out of his eyes in tears. Other students walking by saw the crying boy, the teacher, the popular boy. They pointed. They laughed. Brendan turned and faced the lockers.

“To the office! NOW!” Mr. Duncan roared, grabbing Brendan by the arm and turning him around.

They walked and rolled down the hall, the three of them. A procession. The first boy sullen with act, angry with performance, he made sure to walk behind Brendan. The first one walked on Brendan’s heels with his shoes, scraping the tendon through the blue denim of his orange tab jeans.

They entered the office.

“You sit here.” Mr. Duncan said to Brendan. “You, come with me. We’re going to have a nice little talk with Mr. Gardner.” He said to the first boy. Mr. Gardner was the principal. The door to his office was open. Mr. Duncan wheeled his chair to the door and the first boy looked back and Brendan and made a gesture across his throat with his thumb.

There was one other person in the waiting area and Brendan sat next to them on the only other chair available. Tina McDuggan, the prettiest girl in school. A star in anyone but a fool or flits eyes. Straight blonde hair. Figure of light. Legs with red tab jeans on them. Her smile would stop the devils of hell from their advance.

She sat there, looked over at Brendan, saw the mark of tears on his face, and said it.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

She looked right at him, into his eyes with hers of silver gray and broke out that smile. The boy could not say a thing. It was the first time in two years that someone his age had set anything to him that was not a set up for the barb or the sting of the thorn.

“Are you okay? You can talk right?” she asked, and shone the glow of that smile onto the boy’s face. Glory of miracles that smile widened to a curvature even more wondrous.

“Yeah. I’m Brendan Stevens.”

“You’re Brendan Stevens?” she asked with astonishment, her eyes wide.

“Yeah. I guess that’s reason enough huh?” he asked. And Brendan, the boy, smiled as weak as his little pole arms. Her smile returned and the warmth from it brought out the first full grin he had exercised since camping with dad three years previous.

“Well, you seem nice!” she said, and patted him on the leg with her soft white and. Twice.

Brendan was in love.

Tina was in the office because she had sworn out loud in class.

“All I did was call Nathan Page a stupid shit. And he is a stupid shit you know. You can’t get anything done in class with him always saying shit and bothering everybody,” she whispered to Brendan.

“Why are you in here?” she asked. “I know it’s because of him, but what happened?”

“Because that guy there, he punched me and did the regular right. Cuz I’ve got orange tabs on my jeans. But that’s not it. It’s always like this. I could be dressed in gold and this would happen. I’m just that guy in this school. Like in bad stories. I can’t buy clothes! I don’t have any money. My dad just started his own business so they can’t buy me the best stuff. Like red tabs. I didn’t even know! I just wanted jeans because I thought that maybe they would leave me alone a bit you know? Now he says that they’re gonna kill me good this time. Worse than ever. Every day it’s like this for me. It’s always something. I can’t do anything. It’s all because I had long hair and sweatpants in the first month of school.”

Brendan looked down, not sure of anything.

Then she did it again. The star alighted her had on his right leg, on the top, and said, “Hey, don’t worry. In a year you’ll be in a different school and you’ll be nobody. New friends. Everything. And after that, it’s over. My sister told me. She’s a hairstylist now. She said that it’s all just a joke, and it goes away so fast when it’s over that you don’t even think about remembering it.”

“Really?” Brendan asked.

“Well, yeah. It’s not all good though. My sister has a hard time making rent, and she drinks. But that’s how it is. Nothing’s easy Brendan.”

“Easy for you to say.” Brendan said.

“What’s that?” the star asked.

“Because you’re so pretty. People’ll always be nice to you no matter what. Guys’ll fall all over themselves trying to make sure you’re happy.”

Brendan stopped. Screaming at himself inside and hating his stupid words. She’d start calling him a goof and a faggot and a crybaby any second now. Oh he’d messed it up all right. He just knew it. The star was going to become a moon. A black moon in the distance of his time here. Luna Negra.

Instead, Tina threw her head back and laughed. Water and sunshine the sound out. The secretary in the office looked up and saw Brendan and Tina sitting on the chairs at the sound of the laughter. Two small bodies just starting to make the move from little tall to the awkward mechanics of the pre age they were entering.

The laughter was a field of sprouts on the walls with the lurch of a billion puberties. The secretary smiled at them before returning staring at a corner of the desk.

Brendan just sat there and looked at Tina. Afraid and in love with that banana sweet sound. His stomach did not feel so bad now. Hell, it felt good.

“You’re a funny guy Brendan!” she laughed. Still shaking the flavor from his skin, the worry from his tense body. The boy began to ease.

“If that’s so true Brendan, why does my boyfriend treat me like shit?” she whispered, mindful of the penalty for cursing in the office of all places. Double trouble.

The mention of her boyfriend made Brendan ill with jealous hate. Matt LeBlanc, one of the worst kids in the school. He had pulled Brendan’s pants down in the halls and told him that if he didn’t bring twenty dollars the next day for him then Brendan would wish he were dead. At that point, Brendan always wished that he were dead.

“Because Matt is the piece of shit.” Brendan said. “You know it. He’s not even smart, at all. He’s just going to wind up selling drugs or stealing stuff when he’s older and you know it.”

“You’re right Brendan,” the star said. She lit her hand on his leg once more, for a couple of seconds. Brendan could not believe it.

“Ms. McDuggan, the vice principal will see you now.” The secretary said from her staring.

“Well, I’ll see you around. Don’t be a stranger okay? Even if they’re around.” The star shone, and walked into the vice-principal’s office.

“Helloooo Ms. McDuggan! And what causes you to grace my…” The door closed and the false bellow became a fraudulent murmur.

Click, clack. The door do the principals office opened, and the first boy walked out of it into the back of the office where the auxiliary staff room was, sending eyes Brendan’s way.

“Mr. Stevens, would you please join Mr. Duncan and me in here?” the voice of the principal intoned from inside his office.

Brendan stood up out of his chair and smiled. He walked into the office, and did not feel scared anymore.

“Hey Brendan! How’d it go in the office?”

Brendan almost jumped out of his socks into the shoes of the air. No one had ever greeted him like that before in his life. He had heard other kids talking like that to each other sometimes, but he had always tuned it down.

There she shined, bright as night in the middle of the city.

“Uhh, I got suspended. Three days. My parent’s are going to kill me.” Brendan said.

“Well it gets you out of here for a while right?”

“Yeah, but my mom won’t let me do anything. She doesn’t work so she’s always at home. Same as when I’m sick, I’ll only be able to stay in my room.”

“But it must beat this place right?”

“Yeah, it does.”

“Well have fun all right? Remember, this’ll all be over before you know it.”

“Thanks Tina. You’re real nice you know that?”

She blushed fast as flame to paper. Just like in a storybook. The boy had never seen it before. Now it was his. Trophy enough and not a plastic angel with hands held high in false glimmer. Even stars can blush, he thought.

She stepped up to hum and that put her arms around him and brought him close in an embrace. One squeeze. His first. God she smelled good, the boy thought. If the fires at the edge of the sun had a smell, this was it.

“Hey look Jamie! Faggot’s got a girlfriend! Dontcha know faggot’s can’t have girlfriends?” a knife of a voice cut across. It was another boy, one of the regulars. Standing just down the hall, Jamie Rohaten walking beside him. The week past Brendan had been drinking chocolate milk in the hallway when Jamie had walked by and kicked the container in Brendan’s hand right into his face, covering his shirt with brown milk.

Brendan came loose quick from Tina. She did not want to let him go from the hug, but Brendan wriggled out and stood back a step.

“You’re gonna be nothing but a crack smoking loser your whole life.” Brendan said, the words too big for his mouth. It came out in a gusher of rushed bravado.

“What’d you fucking say to me you little shit?” the other boy stammered. It had never gone like this.

“You f-f-fucking heard.” Brendan had no cool to lose. His arms began to shake with adrenaline. Tina stood back a step.

“Tina? What the fuck are you doing hugging this fag? Don’t you know who he is?”

“Why don’t you losers just leave him alone?” she said.

“You’re fucking dead man. She’s Matt’s girl. When he finds out you touched her he’s going to cut your fucking throat,” the other boy said.

“Fuck you, and Matt, and you too Jamie. You guy’s are nothing alone. All you can do is fight and be a dink. Even if you beat me up, you’re still nothing,” Brendan said. Rushing it all out in a flood. Arms shaking as if they were touching live wires.

“You little faggot!” the other boy screamed with his breaking voice. He came towards Brendan with his fist.

Brendan, who had only gotten beaten up and had never hit back until earlier on today, shot his right arm out at the other boy’s chin.

It hit the button, a prizefighter would have wondered at the comical and unbelievable success of the strike. It connected with a thud and a small TINK sound came from the other boy’s mouth. One of the other boy’s lower teeth flew out of his face and hit Brendan in his right eye.

“Ow!” yelled Brendan, his hand going to his eye.

“Ack!” the other boy screamed, holding his mouth, beginning to cry.

“Pick up his fucking tooth you faggot! Pick it UP! You fuck! Look what you did!” Jamie screamed.

Tina turned and ran one way. Brendan turned and ran the other. Down the hall, out the doors, and into the hot sun reflecting of he stationary chrome peppered around the bike racks. He slowed to a trot and began walking up the street back home, the only place he knew to go.

On the way home he passed Matt LeBlanc’s house. On the driveway was Matt LeBlanc’s moped. Matt drove it with Tina riding pillion on the weekends. Brendan hated the moped, hated Matt Leblanc, and hated the house where he lived and had since they had gone to elementary since the third grade. He wanted to burn the house down, with Matt in it.

He wanted to start the moped up and the drive it into Matt’s house while it was on fire. Chasing Matt up his own burning staircase into his room where he would run him out the window he would crash out of onto the barbecue below. His spine would shatter into a million fragments.

Brendan looked around and saw that the street was deserted. He walked up to the front door and rang the bell ten times in a row in an impatient symphony. He didn’t even have a cover story if anyone was home.

No one came to the door, all he heard was the sound of a dog that was more rat than canine coming from behind the door. Pitiful little scratches came from low behind it. Brendan walked back onto the driveway and took his book bag off his shoulders and put it on the ground. He opened it up and took out his geometry set and his pair of scissors from his pencil case. Good long steel ones.

Brendan too the compass out of the geometry case and jammed it as far as he could into the moped’s front tire until he heard it go pop. He really had to work at it. Then he went and popped the other one, this one twice as hard, but he got it.

Then he took his scissors and cut three of the hoses on the moped. He put his things back in his book bag, and slung it over his shoulders. He took one more look around the deserted street to make sure and then kicked the moped over onto the cement of the driveway to a scratch and denting sound of metal on stone.

He walked down the driveway, turned onto the sidewalk, and started walking home again. His stomach was a roiling see inside of him, green foam and lightning hovering above it.

“Brendan! Phone for you!” his mother called from the basement. She was on the couch again. Full of pills. She had watched her mother get slowly eaten alive by cancer over the course of a year two years before. It had destroyed her. All she did now was lie on the couch, take pills, and watch television.

“Coming!” he yelled back. No one had ever phoned for him except the library when his books were overdue. He always got a yelling to about that from his parent’s. It would be just what he needed.

He walked into the kitchen and picked up the phone.

“Got it!” he yelled.

The click in the receiver signaled privacy.

“Hello?”

“Hey Brendan!”

“Tina?”

“Yeah. How ya doin’?” the question followed by a sparkling giggle.

“Fine, okay, yeah. Hey, how did you get my number?”

“The phone book silly. You’re the third Stevens in the neighborhood that I’ve called. Matt told me that you live in Knotwood. You went to elementary with Matt right?”

“Yeah, yeah I did.”

“Yeah. Someone smashed up his bike real bad the day before yesterday. Cut a bunch of things and popped his tires. No one was home so no one saw anything.”

“Really, that’s terrible.”

“Well,” she said, “I was sitting here, thinking about you, and thought I’d give you a call to see what’s up. What’s going on? You enjoying your suspension?”

“It’s okay. I’m just reading a lot. My mom says I’m not allowed to go on the computer or watch TV while I’m suspended, which is fine.”

“What kind of book are you reading?”

“Oh, just this thing about dragons and stuff and knights. Geek stuff.”

“Dragons huh? Is there a princess?”

“Not a princess, but there is a pretty girl who is sick and they have to bargain with a wizard to get the cure, it’s like halfway through the book where this is happening so there’s plenty more to go.”

“Cool. But you should put that stuff down for a while and go outside. Just relax. How are you going to get a girlfriend if you’re always buried in a book?” she said as she added another sparkle of a giggle.

What was she saying? Besides what she was saying, Brendan thought.

“Well I’m just not the girlfriend type I guess.”

STUPID, he thought. Perfectly nice conversation and he was playing the prick all of a sudden. Trying to act suave when his experience consisted of the two conversations with her previous. He had blown it, he thought. Into the air in a cloud of smithereens. Smaller than smithereens. Just smithers.

“Ha ha ha! You’ll get all the girl’s with that attitude Brendan! I’m serious you know that? That’s great!”

“Are you being sarcastic?” he asked.

“No! Girls love that. The guy who plays hard to get. The one who pretends he doesn’t like a girl. It drives them crazy. Don’t forget that!”

“I won’t.” said Brendan.

“You’re funny Brendan. You know that? And nice. How’d it go with Ryan?”

“Ryan?”

“The boy whose tooth you broke out! It’s practically all over the school! He want’s to kill you.”

“Yeah, what else is new.”

“You didn’t even know his name did you? Do you know any of their names?”

“Some, yeah. I mean, I hear them being read out in class, but I don’t know. I know you’re name though!”

Lame, Brendan thought. Real smooth.

“Yeah, you sure do, and don’t you forget it!” she said into her giggles to laughter. Starlight edging over the copper wire into the receiver. Into the boy.

“I like it when you laugh,” the boy said.

“That’s real sweet Brendan. You know…Oh! I gotta go! My moms home. I’ve gotta help her with the groceries. I’ll call you before your suspension is over, okay Brendan?”

“Yeah, that would be nice. Thanks.”

“Nothing of it. Take care okay? Stay cool. Remember, everything is going to be okay.”

“Okay Tina, thanks a lot.”

“Bye Brendan.”

“Bye Tina.”

She hung up.

So did he.

She called once more the day before his suspension was over. Eve ry time the phone had rang that weekend he had raced to it like a dog after excitement. Going for the rabbit on the heels of Hermes.

“Hello?”

“Hey Brendan, miss me?”

“Yeah, uh…No!”

“You’re learning! You are! Hey, I talked to Matt and told him that you and me are friends, so he better leave you alone and tell the rest to do the same.”

Oh no, Brendan thought. He was finished for sure. They would kill him and kill him and swear him to silence. Matt would thump him the most. What had this girl done? Didn’t she know?

“Don’t worry!” she said. “It’s not what you think. I know what you’re thinking and it’s not like that. We girls have a few tricks that you don’t know about.”

“Okaaay, uh, thanks Tina.” He did not know what else to say. What do you say? To anyone? To the sun, the stars? This star? This friend? This new?

“You’re welcome. I don’t know why they do it anyway. But you don’t deserve it. No one in the school gets it like you do. Even on TV kids don’t get it as bad as you do in school. I remember hearing it all the time from them, hanging out with Matt. ‘We got Stevens good.’ Or them laughing how you couldn’t run away because someone else was stepping on you. It’s disgusting, and you don’t deserve it.”

No one had ever spoken like this to Brendan. Not even the teachers that saw it all going on. He got the feeling a lot of the time from them that they thought that it was him that started it all the time. That he was getting what had been coming to him. They liked Brendan even less than Matt and the rest it seemed.

“So what have you been doing all weekend? I want all the details.”

“Well, I’ve been mostly playing around on the computer. I do stuff like make my own games on it eh?”

“The computer?! It’s been so nice outside, look at it today! You should be in the sun, running around, riding a bike or something!”

“I like doing stuff on the computer though.”

“Do that on rainy day’s Brendan. There’ll be plenty of time for that later, when you want to make money doing it. Who’s gonna hire a thirteen year old boy to make video games anyway?”

“Well, I don’t know. I guess, yeah, I should spend some more time outside.”

“You’re damn rights you should. Like right now! It’s gorgeous outside. What are you doing right now?”

“Just sitting around in my house really.”

“Well get out there silly! Take a walk! Anything! The sun is SHINING!”

“All right! All right! I will!” Brendan said, laughing.

“Good! I’ll see you at school okay?”

“Okay Tina.”

“All right, now get out there! See ya!”

“Bye Tina.”

Click.

The next morning the boy walked to school. It was the best he could remember. His orange tabs on his legs and a pair of Converse One Star’s on his feet. The sun was shining. Earth’s star. He passed Matt LeBlanc’s house on the way and saw a tarp over the moped with locks fastening the bottoms together like a cocoon. Brendan smiled wider.

The school approached over the hill as slow as his steps carried him. How would he see her? In the hall? At the smoking area? No, she didn’t smoke. Stars burned, they didn’t fume he thought. Maybe in the field? Or by the nets?

He came to the bike racks outside the school, just over the little hill before them. The bikes leaned locked in the racks, secured.

He walked towards the entrance when he heard a voice.

“Hey Brendan, have you seen Tina?”

He turned around and saw the girl who was addressing him. It had sure been a week for firsts. It was Angela Casanova, a name he remembered since she had been excluded from the sexual education classes on the request of her parents. They were Jehovah Witnesses. Brendan had guessed that the parents didn’t have sex if they didn’t want to let Angela learn about it. Maybe they were trying to protect her from their pain.

“Hey space cadet, have you seen Tina?” she asked louder with insult. The type of speech that implies that you’re an idiot.

The question sent a shock through Brendan; it’s oddness hanging over the air like a web.

“No I haven’t yet. Why?”

“Haven’t you heard?”

Brendan’s stomach became a green rolling sea.

“Heard what?” the boy asked, time slowing down. The air more clear, his view molasses detail, every angle curve and color possessing more power.

“She’s missing. Some guy picked her up in a red truck right here yesterday after school and she hasn’t been seen since. Did you see a red truck?”

The world died and Brendan rotted with it. Tina, gone to horror and away. Tina, his only friend. Tina, the corona who crested the copper wires and burned his face with a smile. Tina of the banana laugh. Tina, the shining star. Gone.

“What’s with you?” Angela Casanova asked, looking at the boy with the same face of anyone else in the school. “It’s not like she was your girlfriend. The police are here and are asking everybody questions. I’m talking to them in first period. There was an announcement.” As she said this she put her hands on her hips and stuck her chest out a little but with her chin angled quickly upwards.

The boy, Brendan, turned and walked to the little hill before the racks. His bag fell from his shoulder to the ground with a limp movement of his arm. He slumped to a sit and stayed there.

“Weirdo!” Angela Casanova said.

The boy, Brendan, put his face into his hands and could not weep. There were no tears to do it with.

That night at dinner, after the announcements on the address system, after the quiet stares in the classes, the loud talk in the halls, and the hushed whispers in the cafeteria, Brendan sat with his parents as the news came on TV.

“The case of a missing young girl in the south of the city has become more tragic and frantic as the man suspected of abducting her Monday afternoon, Gary Mackistalker, was found dead in his home. Police are ruling it as an apparent suicide. Tina McDuggan, fourteen years old, described by family members as a shining star in their lives, was a student at…”

Brendan left the table with his dish, his parent’s watching him and washed it up in the sink. He put the dish away on the drying rack and walked to the patio door and opened it. He walked out onto the deck, put on the pair of shoes his father always kept near the door, and walked out into the yard.

The boy walked to the back gate, opened it, walked through it, and began to move through the grass in the field beyond his house that led to the edge of the city.

He looked around and saw the setting sun. It looked like any other, this time with some purple in the clouds. The boy turned and walked in the opposite direction.

copyright 2004 robert jay lutener

illustration copyright 2007 patrick henaff

The Rabbit in the Dark

KEN walked the day to night and his fingers were dirty. Only thing it was missing was a steak and twenty bucks. Boy golly! His cane swinging between his feet, a fedora on his head, a bandana under it, a dog end in his mouth and the jitters of awake chill in his step. His face was thin, hollows in the cheeks. Pits before the eyes. His hand moved with a twitch and the cane still swung in the hard dead night, his body moving the bone dance.

The lines ahead of him were predicted purpose, and he saw through his gift golden towers lining the edges. Families of small nine legged fairies working diligent requirements over their charges. He looked again through the faze of his view and saw only the walks on the side of the road.

His hand worked into his pocket and around in it. He brought it out, saw thirty-five cents, a booklet of matches with the name and number of a potential client who wanted a mural, and four codeine tablets. He picked the tablets out of his palm with his thumb and forefinger and dry dosed them one at a time. The change and the matchbook stayed in his dry palm.

The pills went down with their own grimaces and he put the remaining detritus back in the pocket. He started walking again. The houses on the sides were trees with tentacles of light working across a lake where fantastic fish the size of cars were floating over an illuminated bottom. Blue glowing phosphorous soaking the ruins of a leftover message from some electric people who made the smoke into garages.

Ken had not slept in four days. Ken smoked and snorted crystal meth. Ken, was a junkie. Ken, was an artist. Ken saw his world wherever he went. Ken created fantasy, and could replicate anything. Every form was his, become his own. New, fresh, and unknown. Ken, was one of those people who came to the earth once every two hundred years or so his friends would say, shaking their head at the lines of filth on his neglected palm. Ken just very well may be leaving this world sooner than those who loved him would care. Ken, walked down the street, looking like an eighty year old man. Ken, was twenty-five. Ken made a photograph the first time he used acrylics. The friends saw it and walked past, sitting in front of the painting and making comments. Genuine, real, hard, and elicited by a wonder they could explain only by it’s presence. Blood and truth the surprise guest. Hot gushers out of all their mouths. A host of accolades.

Ken came up to the house where the girl on the bus the day before had told him she lived. She was a tweeker as well. Little sores and thin sweat on her face. Sticks of arms. Rail ribs and small unformed breasts. Once a pair of something’s, now lilting small nothings on a frame of even less. Karen she had said her name was. Her voice a cracking whisper. A hush forced not by decision but by circumstance. Karen smoked the glass exclusive. Her effect had been the crickle and crack of her voice box. Now it was an old wooden one with wires frayed at the edges sticking out.

Karen had said to knock on the door to let her know so she could let the rest know. Karen said that there was always someone around, it didn’t matter what time. Did she live with a boyfriend or anything Ken had asked her? No she said. Just her dealer, his girlfriend, and someone she said was ‘real scary, this guy’ who did security for the house. That’s what the dealer had said. Security, they needed added security.

Ken saw a candle on the porch, took that for a sign, and walked up the front path to the screen door. He went in, looked down, and saw a sleeping bag with a pillow laid out, a small table with the candle in the night, a bottle of wine, and two glasses. Ken marveled at the tableau, wondered at why and where, mumbled something to himself, and sat down in one of the chairs.

Where did she get the money for the wine? Was she loaded? Parents? First tweeker he had met with such class. The thoughts were a hamster of eyeball activity and they trailed into spun word vomit. Small strips of newspaper linked together with pulp and fallow to the burnt soil of the ground beneath his tired, constantly walking feet. He opened his mouth and saw them pouring out of it, though the observer would have only seen his chapped and bloody lips moving in pained jerks over the thick film that coated his teeth and angry red gums.

Oh, his feet, the socks around them alive with the days passed in them.

The city night with each step! Bright days paced by the rhythm! Quick sounds from the grass of the future burning his ears! Walking always walking with dimensionless purpose. Caught in the twiddle of addled mystery. Fought movements transferred onto the history of the spent landscape. There was never romantic nobility. There was never truth in the gift from the vision. There was fantasy. There was illusion. All was Maya and the glammer held enchantment from the plastic shards utility. His shoulders gave the lurch down of the circular thoughts the crushed everyone. If it has two legs and belt loops, it’s a pair of pants, never mind to color.

He went to his bag that he had placed at his feet and opened the flap and began the rummage. His hands were all the eyes he ever needed when it came to his possessions.

He found the little brass case with the edges of his fingers. Out it came from the sack. He looked at the surface in the candle and read the engraving.

FIVE A DAY

The latch popped open with the required amount of encouragement from the trustful thumb and forefinger combination and he looked at the two cigarettes left inside of it. He took one out, put it in his mouth, closed the case, put it on the small table, and sparked her on up. He inhaled, tasted the oil soil and combined effort of fifty years of men in white coats’ diligence, coughed, brought up something thick and yellow, spat it out on the ground, and coughed again.

Ken secured the smoke nice and tight in his mouth and started the rummage through anew. Out it came. A small rabbit with and plastic body, and felt arms and legs. A fuzzy head, pink, with fuzzy ears and a fuzzy red smile on the head at the top. Right where it should be. The body was hollow, and there were cigarette butts in the hollow the body. Ken put the little rabbit on the small table, and looked at it through the smoke that made his eyes squint for a little while. His body turned in adjustment in his chair and he took the open bottle of wine and began to pour it into the two glasses on the table. His lips pumped on the end of the cigarette and the taste was over the grooves in his face.

His flake found the candle and he saw the small bumps where the wax was working away from the flame in the middle. The candle was standard in design, red, and the small bumps were regular around the diameter. Ken saw each of the bumps and the lines that would move from the tips of them if rays were steel wires and could be drawn in purpose for infinite duration. Ken saw them as they moved to where they would meet his chest and wondered if they went far enough if they would crest through the atmosphere to space above. Cutting the gesture to God across the surface.

He placed the cigarette in the ashtray on the small table and took a sip of the wine with his dry cracked bloody lips moving rough on the smooth surface of the glass. The wine touched the bushed skin of his lips and the moistness made them a bed of comfort. Small curls of blood ran into it from the splits in his lips. The wine moved in his mouth over his tongue and began to slide down his throat, a thick current. He felt something in his throat that was thick and not solid dislodge and move down to where it could presumably be put to better use.

His stomach received the wine and the lump with frantic need, processing it immediate, searching for some sustenance. Value. The muscles of his stomach smashed together and against each other, bleeding the membrane. The wine sloshed and smashed inside of it inside of him and Ken sat there on the porch in the light of the candle, the taste of his cigarette a forgotten curl behind the interruption of the grape.

Where was she? Ken thought. The jitter of his mind holding through the grim instability of its past endured. The important issues, the particulars, they stuck and railroaded through the tracks of importance. The procurement of the need, the next rendezvous, the new distraction. All had the same equal virtue and power over Ken’s action. They held him with their own gravity. Ken was a planet with five shifting moons and a thousand different tides.

The candle moved down to the table and the smoke continued to rise against the face of the fuzzy bunny. Ken looked over at the bunny and then to the front door, where he thought he had detected movement. Ken sat rigid and straight, his pores and glands working away at creating and negating the compounds that ushered from his form. Keeping checked balances ready for disaster Ken’s body pledged constant fealty, even through the treason of his actions.

He started taking stock of the surroundings. Tired door, wooden deck inside the enclosure of the porch. A bundle was approaching the corner but not quite making the press to the edge of the house. The middle was territory enough. The bundle was long like a sleeping bag. There were bumps in the bundle high enough to make a waist or a chest. Was somebody there? Had somebody been watching? The thoughts were faster than hands of poker with the rules little understood and Ken started in his seating position. Discomfort was the ruler of his tense back and wire ready arms. They were at his sides on the rests of the chair but here was no relaxed average to their configuration.

A lean forward to the bag on the chair with a monster creak and the nervous jitter without physicality came from inside of him and stopped at the end of his flesh. Dangerous movement. He arced out the chair with his knees pressing to the boards of the porch and creaked towards the bundle of bag with his eyes on the possible movement behind the door. The gambling twitch coming from the stars and the lines and the wax into his actions. The bag did not move. Ken did not move. The only move came from the night that mumbled the incoherence of the collective symphony of which it was the steward. Ken stretched his hand out and began to punch forward, balance and weary condition the culprit, the victim being only stealth.

His knees crashed. His chest fell forward onto the bag. His chin slapped against it. God! His mind cried. God! Where is the safety net? Why did you abandon my faith? Where is my light? Where goes my soul? What fakes my catch? Where fires the fingers?

The lumps under the bag did not move. They did not give with the soft water of the flesh supported by calculated calcium. The lumps were hard and jutting and the lumps were now his chest’s bed and no sleep would come from the jitter. Faith alone saves! Five prayers and number same the day! The lumps were not moving. No groan, no shriek, no cry and no bellow. Nothing.

The only sound the conducted night and the rustle of his chest and his chin against the soft sleeping bag. Space age material for earth bound excursions. Ken reached orbit. His blessed taste the arc of his fall. Ken moved about, wriggling worms of his coil and the sleeping bag stayed there as a juror waiting for the judge’s instruction. Ken raised himself up on his arms and they gave a bit under him and his knees and balance were his only support.

His hands were on the bag, reading the contours of the lumps beneath the landscape of nylon. A hard part stuck out from below the surface and his hand held there in betrayed pause.

Pressing down his hands with the grime over top of them a crawl of irritation, he raised himself up with the rupturing crack of his knees. The sound loud enough for the gods to hear and the sleepless night to swallow whole. Dark the night, bright the day, brighter the indoors, hotter the seating. His body came up in a cereal crackle lurch and he steadied himself with the delirium of the blood swoop in his cranium. The porch whirled around him and the universe remained as old as the distant reaches of it’s observed characteristics. Funny thing about light, it might take years for it to reach your eye from the stars, but it was beating down a constant beat even when you weren’t looking at it, so the asphalt can get a view as well.

He sat down on the chair again and sipped some more wine. There had been no one there. It had all been a hoax. Just a low down trick. Something outside of him that he couldn’t explain. He hadn’t even checked to see what was under there. He hadn’t made a move.

He got back up out of the chair and walked over to the sleeping bag, he made care this time and his body was filled with powdered glass. He pulled back the sheets. Flower pots. Some of them broken. A couple of candlesticks and an old video game system. Cords. Pads. Box with cartridges. Ken started picking up the pieces and putting them back together in his bag. His bag stuffed up. It was full. The night was empty. His teeth were yellow. His ears were prickly. His back was sore. His feet were stinking. The night was empty.

The candlestick could be made into a knife with a skull on it and a small painting inside a box made out of duct tape and warning labels. Put on a stand. The blade pointing upward. The skull with horns. Something else. He looked through his bag past the new acquisitions and found a small glass marble and a pen. He started balancing the marble on the end of the candle stick holder with his pen held in between his thumb and forefinger. The marble was the world and the candlestick was the turtle beneath the earth. Holding it back on its enormous girth.

There was no food in his belly. Dark cabooses of hunger bouncing from the squash court. Squash. Dad had played squash. Bang bang bang. Boy that place stank so bad. All those different rooms with the glass in front and the upper level with the glass roofs pulled back from the walls. It had stunk in there. All over the walls the smell crawled and stained. Nicotine of human usage. The white towels everywhere. If he ever painted a squash court it would have white towels all over the floor and the yellow would hang from the ceilings like tapestries.

The fraud of his existence was held in the lost rails of previous conflict based engagements with others of the same stock. He was tired. Very tired. The photographs in the shoebox called to his eyes with megaphone blare. About one thousand of the artwork, and about three thousand of the ex girlfriend. It worked the sweat. Boiled the belly. Murdered the past. Old bones in older carriage.

Where was she? Hadn’t she heard anything from out here? What was she doing? If she had a spread like this out then she must have some dillies. Some. Just a bit. Always enough to pull the water back long enough to sit in the wet sand and prepare for the next wave. Had to. Ken began to worry. What if she didn’t? What if they had to call, and walk, and wait, and walk, and call, and sit, and call, and wait, and walk, and climb, and sit, and wait, and then, just maybe, score.

Did she have it? The night rolled the question back to his tired sore feet. The stink from them coming up just around the top of the socks where the sweat and previous days ingestion had fused the cotton to the flesh and hair. Was there some? Waiting? And if she did, why would she share it out? It was hard, so hard, to find and link on the steady. Every need a black adventure. The bus lines and cab rides and rides from those with those rusted out tubs filled with wax coated fountain pop cups. The paper. Always paper on the floors. Over the hard plastic mats. Every movement a scrunch and bumble. The hard sound coming from the floor as the machine coasted its growl over the destination's blockade of road. A new worry every moment. The driver yelling to keep it down back there, he was trying to concentrate on tooling the rusted out beast to the goal. Once they got there, everybody won.

Free prize inside.

Another sound from beyond the light in the screen door that the mesh held reflected. A computer door! A door with a screen that could solve problems and act as transportation system for the citizens of the frame and the latex paint that fucked the elements right off. That was the ticket. Always imaging, civilizations of little people, each with their own concerns and wet desires to ache the loins, living breathing, moving and perverting active commerce across the surface of a screen mesh. Powered by hallway lights. Energy receivers microscopic in the iron filament. Safety nets and gantries and complex power distribution systems that could be used as a defense shield against their ancient enemy: The Moth.

Wine was still sitting in the bottom of the sand burns. How hot it must have been. How very very very hot to be the sand. Lava sand kingdoms, populated by the perfect people. All inspired by common motive and fairy tale purpose.

Broken lost books and the dog still tuned back to look at the one it had just sniffed. Days in the park. Little tribes with drums in the background. Everyone sitting. No ones head bobbing. The men with muscles with their shirts right off. Out, in the sun, when it, was out. In, under the brella, when it, was open. Hot angle. Acrylic. Yeah, try three. Make it come alive. Dance paste. For sure.

Fantasy pull it. Artist’s inner torment cooks the marble. The thing just wouldn’t balance on this candlestick. It was falling apart. The candlestick was inside the air now. Nothing was free. The jitter was out. Ken stopped. Nothing was pretty out of little circle vision. Everything was edged out to fuzz. There wasn’t a storm.

The wine was cold and thick in the glass with black standing. The glass was nearing cold light and the thick knuckles in his hands worked the clock closer to shutdown. Things were not going well.

He started up right then when the door banged open. There was a woman standing in the door with her hand pressing it against the exterior of the house. She was over thirty, and no prize besides. Fat hair, dog jowls with snoop droop cheeks. Little bits of pink flesh coming out in mushroomed spots from her surface. Brown things hiding in the middles of the folds, waiting to come out.

“Who the hell are you?” she asked. She was a whale of a woman. Her bosom was a bloated swell of a fruit that looked as if it had fallen from a tree in an amusement park for giants. Her face was a collection of flaps. Ken could smell the clam sweat beneath the flaps. Drying out, sweating up. Her dress was old. Holes toward the bottom, stains up the top, identifiable only by the gray spots the bleach in the wash had transposed them to. Holes in the bottom, stains at the top, now those were hard fucking times. What was with the wine? Who had the class? Where was she?

“I’m uh, waitin’ for a friend of mine..” Ken lamed. Surprise and clutch in his hands, the top of his bag just open enough. Don’t look over at the sleeping bag, Ken thought: That’s going to be bad, I just know it. Just let me know where she is and then I can talk to her, somewhere, out back, on the street, not here, with you. Do you know? Are you? What do you have to do with all this? Too quick for his mind to make answers or theory the questions came. The fear shock of seeing this unidentified whale from the future deadliness was pulling the taffy of his brain to extra long strips now. Sleep would be a game. Sleep would be a home freaking run at this point. But not here, not in this chair.

“You’re not waiting here for any damn person at all. No one here that you know! No one at all! Now..hey! What they hell you been doin' messin’ with my wine?!”

“I thought this was my friends…”

“You thieving bastard!” She screamed. Shrill and high and her arms raised up and then flapped down in a parody of the wave they do at the sporting games. Ken hadn’t been to one since the year before the teens. Ken made his mistake, one of the many that the night had drawn him into, but the only one that would make him laugh harder as the night ended. This long four day night. Ken laughed. Just laughed. And years later when he would laugh the hardest it wa’nt cuz of a funny joke or a compact run up to a tit pop of an event. He would laugh the hardest later on when he thought about that night he had laughed. It would be his gut puncher, no matter how blue.

“What the FUCK do you find so funny? You’re lucky my husband isn’t here! He’d have your guts out you hear? GUTS OUT! OUT!” she screamed. He arm pointing like the Colossus of Rhodes at the street that forget his name each time he walked on it. Big flaps of flesh hanging down, useless only unless she planned on a long trial in the desert with only her urine to drink. Then she’d have all the insurance she would need. Would the company cover the goods from under the bag where the magic person had not been?

Ken kept on laughing, his teeth doing this little scrape together, paining him so. Fuzzing the teeth with paste wasn’t really on the priorities when you jagged this long. No no. When was the last time? Must have been weeks ago now. A couple anyway. Last time he remembered the bristles it had hurt boy golly so. His spit has been red and pink in little clots and runs. They didn’t put that one in the advertisements anymore. Where had he read that? Years since a book. Words just seemed to crawl right off the end of the tablet to the floor when the glass was in full effect. Dribbling down out of the air before he could eat ‘em up. Maybe that’s what he needed. More words to eat, it might help with his gums.

“Quit fuckin’ laughin! Now you get out of ere you bum! You little shit!”

And this is where he howled. The moon his sounding board. All his he told himself. This was all his. All of it belonging to him. He was stealing more than a fat ladies wine. He was stealing the night with laughter and he wasn’t going to give it back. Forget the feet. Forget the fumbling jitterbug bone dance fingers with the grime underneath that would make a great sweet treat for any lower life form scraped out and rolled up like a ball of hash in a pipe. All right. It was all right. Thieving, crimes worse than that in Hamurabi’s code. Who was Hamurabi? For that matter what was a code?

“Okay listen lady, I’m going.” He said through the titterbug moves of his mouth. The squeaks of joy bubbled all over the place, making the porch shine just that brighter, stealing the night air. Transmuted into joke current. Pally pal all right things were okay. She would make a great sculpture. Not of her, but just her, covered in epoxy, clumped white so you couldn’t see through at certain parts, but clear gloss on theirs, specially those flaps where he bet that something, hell, anything was breeding. Waiting for a herald call to unfurl itself from the nest and take over the world with a new germ which white walls and cleaner floors had no defense.

“OUT! You little shit! Get the hell out of here! I’m calling the police!”

“Worry is the artifact of a civilization failed and found dontcha know!” Ken shrieked, picking up his pack faster than he would anything that had been left behind; folded green on a floor or walk. His knees glassing protest and the legs themselves ensconced in a nap of their own. He collapsed on the ground, made a wriggling motion and looked up, a ribbon of drool playfully dangling from his bottom lip that he could not feel because of its concurrence with his body temperature. The cool night air had not yet taught it how to inflict awareness on the ribbons or any other host.

“Raah!” the lady screamed, and that was when the hot boot that she wore inside her own house came out in a swoop that would have made any compass in a students pouch proud to the ends of its points. It connected, triangulated, reflected, and twiddled in the air. A sharp announcement was harried over the public address system that God had furnished Ken’s nerves with, and he started into a half roll that looked as much as him turning over in his sleep as it did beguile with his grimace of pain. The door of the porch banged shut from his intrusion of presence and the night remained the same, the drool now flapped across his chin, and Ken’s face was turned upward, feeling the cool half millimeter in circumference of sputum which was his new accessory.

Ken opened his eyes to see. The roof of the porch was made of cedar that had not been stained. Ken looked and thought that the builders or finishers had not figured anyone would have been given opportunity to appreciate the value of a cool gloss over rough boards. Ken ran the strokes across it, and the stain soaked in. The wood drinking the ichor.

There were seas in that trap of drying. Girls with thick blue cords of hair with carp trapped inside the interior were walking through the leashes coiled around the right eyeballs of each. Four at a time.

copyright 2004 robert lutener

illustration copyright 2007 patrick henaff

1994

JOHN was a writer who had never been published and wanted to be the great one on top of it all. He owned all of the books by the master and kept them in a shrine of a shelf. A small picture of the hero hung above this shelf, framed in simple wood.

John had agonized over the placement of the picture. To the left near the wall where the shelf met it, above the beginning where he had started the order of the library? In the center where it would hold dominion over them, the scarred face looking over the sequence of work as satisfied Buddha? To the right of them all? Hanging before the distance of plaster to the edge where the jam met the door, a final resting place near the end, moving with each new acquisition?

He decided on the middle. Buddha Bukowski. He owned all the recommendations from the great writer. The Fante, the Hamsun, the Celine, the Dostoyevsky. John had been unable to wade through the forest of Fyodor Mikhailovich’s search for the man within man. It was a labor outside of the factories or the dull flick of papers bearing importance of shipment. Oh how John wished that his face was a boiled mass, just like the hero. Oh how he puled for a father as cruel as the drunk knights-errant. Oh if only tragedy could be the war of his guts. Oh for the whore’s in a bombed out apartment. Real living, real success. Oh to hate those photographers with their flashbulbs in the flypapered rooms. Real living, real love.

John read the books all night beside his own typewriter in his careful desk space. John walked to the liquor store every day and drank and drank and drank. John did not have to work. John had been lucky. He had his luck from the start and hated his luck since he learned to. John’s parents had died. They were tender, nurturing, caring, and had paid for his humanities education in full. The car crash had been worth a house, which John had sold, and dual policies for over half a million dollars.

John was set for the luck and the life ahead of it. John started reading Buddha Bukowski in college, in his third year. John wanted to be a writer. John started writing. He kept one of he fat books next to his typer all the time, writing the lines as the great dead one had. Every stanza and narrative movement he made alive on the page a dying imitation of the writer’s struggle.

John took the money, the typer and a case to Los Angeles and got a room above a bar. He drank in the bars and tried to meet the whores of another man’s thirty years past. He couldn’t find them. They were all gone. Nothing strange happened. All the people did in the bars was sit and watch the game. Then he understood why. He got the new great Buddha-shit from the store and read the poem about how television was just coming in and something in America had died that day. He understood then, a new revelation of his love from the genius. His future. His work the being he could never be.

He cursed the television. He had cursed his parents, had wondered the luck from their passing and wanted the hard real life and repulsed recognition of the lettered tops of the literary dog’s teeth. He wanted to perform readings. He started performing readings. The poems were heckled and booed with copycat whistles and walkouts. The few who were searching for something new after the impact and lasting endurance of Buddha Bukowski’s bombs yelled the name of the writer out loud in the bookstores and the coffeehouses. “Bukow-ski!”

John went back to his room above the bar and kept writing more and more, his little library there, and the little picture in the little frame, listening to the classical music on a little red radio, reading nothing but the great writer, the recommendations sitting. The sometimes ventured, but unbroken spines the jury of his inaction.

John had not worked in a factory. John had not been a drunk for thirty years. John had bought and paid for two prostitutes but had not lived with any of them. The prostitutes had not been drunks. They had been addicted to cocaine. They put it in their arms. It scared John when they poked. It scared him when they were on it. He was most scared when they were sucking him off, both times. He thought that the cocaine would make their teeth clench at the moment of release. He thought he might become a character in one of the great writer’s stories.

He wrote about the factories and being a thirty year drunk. He was not even thirty years old yet. He wrote about having a mean and terrible father and having to slave over the tiniest for the littlest absence of anything. His lies and sincerity at the discredit of his work a shuffled thing under the rug of mental mechanism.

Day into morning new night he sat at the type. A book always open beside it. He began to follow every pattern and applied his own observations. Nothing seemed to be working out. He was sending it everywhere, just like the roadmap had moved him. To the bigs and the smalls they went out and nothing came back. Not a rejection slip. Not one. There was no receipt for any of it. He entered all the contests and had mailed copies with letters on the front of them to hundreds of agent’s. He called them afterwards, the secretary saying that nothing had arrived, and no, they did not know of any stories submitted to the offices of either publication under his name. And no, he should not call back a little later to see if there had been some kind of oversight and his work had managed to find it’s way to a messiahs blotter.

Nothing was working. John still had his luck, his degree, and the inheritance. He could have sat down and done anything, but John wanted to be a writer. When he sat at the desk, or sneered at the streets, or contemplated the women walking down them, he wanted to be a writer. He worked on his own experiences for a while. He wrote about sitting in his hotel room above the bar and looking at the walls going mad up them with radio flyer wheels. He wrote letters to major newspapers about the struggle with the decision on what buy to eat, ham or pastrami, and how choice was a prison unprotested. He wrote about putting his poems and stories in envelopes and then walking down the Los Angeles hot streets that were long and empty and putting them in the mailbox. The curved chute door slamming shut with the gong of his assured success.

He sent them out to all the same people and places again. If God and a calculator were keeping tally, John spent as much as a compact car on stamps, paper, and pops on the way. The summer melted the envelopes in his hand with his sweat on the way sometimes. He would look down and see the damp splotch on the pulp container and then tear it open to see if the moisture had smudged the lines on the typed pages.

Nothing came back. Not a slip, nary a letter. No one was there. He was hitting a brick wall with little bits of paper. To hell with them, he thought when he walked down to the front desk and the clerk shook his head again before he had made it to the bottom of the stairs. They don’t know the new genius and it’s just going to take time. He sent story and poem to the house that Bukowski built. No response. He sent script and screenplay to all the agents in Hollywood. Not a word.

He mailed the stuff in to the underground papers. Not a response. He called one of the papers up one day, wanting to know why ‘Wicker Dreams’ by Jane Forest had been published instead of his monumental work ‘Two Scotch and Waters Taste Good to Me’. A fifteen page poem about an afternoon where he had drank scotch and waters in a bar and then walked outside and up the street to his hotel where he got in the door and then into bed to sleep.

“Undercurrents.” The voice on the other end said.

“Hello. I’m John Hargrove and I sent a story to you…”

“John Hargrove? Is this the guy who wrote ‘Old Hours Hard on the Sweat Soaked Floor?”

“Why yes, it is.” John said, affecting the gravel in his voice from the quarry of his imagination.

“Listen man. Don’t send us anymore stuff. Even better, quit writing. Or start doing something that isn’t a shameless rip-off of a real poet. This stuff is hackneyed plagiarism at best, dirty piss at worst. I wouldn't clean the underneath of my buggering uncles foreskin with this drivel.”

And with that, the voice on the other end of the phone hung up.

John stood there with the phone in his hand and slammed it down, cracking the receiver along the side. He sat down at his table and looked at his typewriter. Then he turned and looked at all the books along the wall and his three clean shirts folded along the other chair in the room. He got up out of his chair and went to the window and opened it. The hot sounds of the street steamed through. He poked his head out and thought about how good a photograph of him poking his head out of the window would look in People magazine. The caption:

John Hargrove, Contemplating The Soon To Be

Regretted Rejection At The Hand Of An Underground

Newsweekly, Is Poised For Success.

He brought his head back in and then went down to the typer and took one of the books from the little shelf. He opened it up, read some and then started writing a story about a man who worked at a meatpacking plant and wound up having sex with all the secretaries there. Three of them.

One had red hair, the other brown, and another had black hair. The last one begged the hero to stay with her forever; his love was hotter than any other before him. But the hero said that meatpacking was his only game and he had something special to share with all the women of the world. If only for a short time. Then he slapped her across the face and walked out into the cold plastic night. Out to a bar where the booze would never stop from the flow of the stiff severance check.

After he had checked it and rechecked it on the draft he typed it in again. He typed all of his stories even though he could have afforded a wagon of computers to do his work on. He retyped it and relished the hard soul that came out of the page. An immortal story. Destined for the shelves in the future. Some trembling young buck taking it at random from the ledge, opening it up, and sneezing from the gold dust that would have moulded within those pages. The prose a rare and precious thing, the magic coming off the page made into value. The alchemy of his literature.

He gave his head a little jerk real quick and walked towards the door. He opened it up and then walked out into the hallway. He had met no one that lived next to him and they never made any noise. He walked down the stairs and out on the street. He walked down it and then saw a bar and decided to brush up. The door opened in front of him and the smoke rolled out. The television was on and the three people in there, a man, a woman, and a figure in the back were all watching it.

The bartender was watching the TV as well, his elbow a lean on the surface. John walked to the bar, sat down, and worked through the best material. Waiting for the skeleton to dance and the whore to burn. The woman was over fifty years old and her mouth was hanging open. Everyone in the bar except the bartender had a drink.

“Hey.” John said.

The bartender turned and looked at John and walked over to him. He was wearing a white shirt. Not dirty enough, John thought. Where’s your street? He wondered.

“What can I get for you?” the bartender asked.

“I’ll get a … scotch and water.” John said. Cool, yeah. “And a newspaper.”

“Okay.”

The bartender walked off to make it happen. John sat there and looked at the television. Cars, Formula One, lap one hundred seventy five. The green one passed the red one and then gained a bit. The angle changed and a blue one went past a black one close to the wheels. John looked for the rough beauty in it. Searching for the hard truth in the cruise.

Nothing came; there was no fuel or fertile soil. The weeds were choking the new stuff. Where’s my scotch and water? He thought. With command from the third eye the bartender walked up to John with the scotch and water and the newspaper under his arm. He put the drink down and the paper beside it. John paid, thanked the man, and the bartender walked back to the end of the bar where his lilting tilt was resumed without true interruption.

The paper opened in his hands and John got the update. War. Health. Corruption. A monkey that could smoke. He went through the front section, eating the letters to the editor. Chewing the op Ed. Where did they think this stuff up? In their cars or at their desks?

John had known a journalism student in college. Frank Smith. He had gotten an internship at the Clarion Call the summer previous and had said that being a reporter meant sitting at a desk and talking on the phone. Writing had nothing to do with it. The stories just glued themselves together from the talk and the editor took care of the rest. It was easy. He just cut out all the stuff that would get him fired or the paper shut down, called you into the office, killed a paragraph, and then it was time for print.

John closed up the front section, put it down on the bar, looked around, saw that he was the only one left, and then looked up at the television. The red car was in the lead. Lap two hundred twenty four. The crowd was still there in the stands, waiting for something new to happen. A crash, or a fire.

He looked at the paper again, saw the arts section under the handled front page, picked it up, and read the headline.

Charles Bukowski Dead at Seventy Four

He read the article. Leukemia. Six months of rot. He must have been shitting his intestines out towards the end. The services were to be conducted three days from now. John stood up from his stool, walked out the door and up to his room. He picked up the phone and called his friend from the newspaper.

Los Angeles County Hospital had high security. John paid the guard twenty dollars to make it as open as the library at noon on Tuesday.

“You came here to see a dead body huh?”

Smart guy, John thought.

“Yeah.”

“Well, for another hundred, I’ll get you right in and leave you there for an hour.”

“I’m looking for a particular one you know.” John said. The words easy. His calm was steady. It was a dream.

“Yeah. Most are. What’s the name, we’ll go in right now, there isn’t nobody there.”

They walked in the door and down a hall. It smelled like chemical death. No one ever wanted to say what the smell actually was when he or she commented on their dislike of hospital odor. The smell was simple. An obvious mystery. It was death. The smell of the approach and nestling comfort of it for a long time with different candidates.

“How much do they pay you for this gig?” John asked the security guard as they passed through another set of panel doors.

“I get about $8.50 an hour. Same as the guys at the airport. “

“How long have you been doing this?” he asked.

“Three years. It’s all right. Go nowhere gig. Guys like you make the scratch happen though. Everything’s about the side in this world you know that? The honest single dollar stream is gone man. Gone.”

They came to the door marked morgue, went into another one on the side, walked through a narrow passage, and came out in the morgue proper. The doors were steel and flat. There were bodies on stretchers. They were wrapped in plastic for the night.

“So what was the name?” the security guard asked.

John gave him the name.

The security guard walked around and found a chart. He studied it for a bit, put it down, looked at the wall, then at the ones on the stretchers, walked over to these, read a tag on a toe and said “Bingo.”

He pulled the plastic back from over the bodies face and motioned for John to come over.

“This is the one. Fuck, would you just look at this guy. That face. No swan, that’s for sure.”

John walked up to the body and looked at it. It was him. The man who worked at the post office for ten years. A woman in every city after every reading. The face in the photographs. The great dead writer. His. Him.

“I’d like a few moments alone please, if it’s all the same to you.”

“Okay, listen, if anyone comes in here, you don’t know nothing right?”

“Right.” John said.

“Okay. I’ll be waiting outside that door. How long do you think you need?”

“Well, I paid for the hour right?”

“Yeah, yeah. Okay. That long huh? The whole hour?”

“Yeah, the whole hour.”

“Okay, okay. Cool. I’ll be outside okay?”

“Okay.”

The security guard walked to the door, opened it, walked out, and closed it behind him. John looked down at the body and rubbed his hand across the great dead writer’s thin wasted chest. The last agonies had been bad. You could see it. You could tell. The face was a sagging washcloth on the faucet. The edges of it were fuzzy. The eyes were closed. John reached his hand up to the face and pried one of the eyes open with his thumb and forefinger.

The eye looked up and nothing moved inside of it. It looked a little bit deflated. The surface had begun the wrinkle, and the iris was almost soup. The shards of his color had bled out at the edges. The corners were yellow.

John walked around the morgue and looked for what he would need. Nothing had worked, but this had to. It was all he had left. He couldn’t go back in time and beat him to it. Something else had supplied itself and John had latched onto it. Driving here had just happened. The security guard had just, well, happened. The walk in. The door closing. All those things had happened. And now this was going to happen and this was going to work.

John found a little saw, clean as shine, and a small scoop with sharp teeth edges. He found a tray, some gloves, a smock and a cup to fill with water in the sink. He arranged everything, looked at his watch, and saw that seven minutes had passed.

He thought about having a cigarette. He thought to himself that he should have asked the security guard if he could smoke in here, cursed the oversight, and lit up anyway.

He got the smock on, covered himself up, and took another drag from the cigarette he had leaned against the edge of a small preparation table.

He took the little saw and started at the top of the skull, right below the hairline. First just a flap of flesh curved off, and then he hit bone. He sawed through it. He got a quarter of the way through and the saw started to catch. Little bits of red fell off the teeth onto the plastic under the head. He pulled the saw up a little bit and started again, going slower, letting the saw do the work. He got to the base and then it came off, a curved plate with a mass of white hair hanging off the top. He picked it up and put it to the side.

John took the scoop and took out a piece of gray and pink brain. He held it up to his face, looked at it, opened his mouth, put the scoop in, and started chewing.

He stood there in the cold room of dead bodies over the one of the great dead writer and began to chow down. Swallowing every bite, some of it coming out the corners of his mouth.

“It’s working…” John said, “It’s really working…”

John chewed, swallowing and scooping, and finished what he started.

copyright 2004 robert jay lutener

illustration copyright 2007 patrick henaff