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Last Night As I Lay On My Pillow

September 24, 2011 3 Comments

The man never notices anything because that’s his business — not
noticing. He gave me the key like a bribe. The yellow bulb was gone out
at the door that was my ration. I held a lighter up to the knob and
there were ten thousand stab wounds all around the lock. Thirty years and more of lemme in lemme
in lemme in. You could almost feel the heavy paper sack in all their other hands.

The clock is banging on the seconds like a railroad spike. I begin to wonder if a man doesn’t really die, just dissolves slowly in the rain. You try alcohol but it’s not a preservative.

There isn’t a floor crooked enough in the wide world to make that chair sit flat. You lean at the jalousies and watch the nobodies go nowhere, and smoke. A jalousie apparently only has two sides: dusty and dirty.

There’s people next door going at each other like strangers. They’ll wish they were strangers again soon enough. The other side is teevee teevee teevee.

The neon across the street flashes out of time with the clock and you’d like to meet that man, that neon man. You’d like to meet him like a train meets a cow out on the prairie.

There’s an odd number of pulls on the dresser. There’s an even number of tiles on the ceiling. There’s a smell like the laundry in a funeral home in the bedspread. You know why people smoke now. There’s nothing and nobody in this world but the faint orange spark at the end of your nose. 

The Curse

May 24, 2011 1 Comment
A toymaker grown old
Moiled away, day by day.
Kept a self up on a shelf
Because he was perfection.
People came to give him sums
Then went away with a prize he devised
None as splendid as the one.
One day the manikin spat out his dust
And spoke: Unjust!
There will never be one fine as me
I’ve seen you labor every hour
Since birth, unplanned, made by your hand
You kept me for show, a quid pro quo
But you could do it only once.
Thousands pay and go away
With my form, deformed.
Lanky; squat; beautiful or full of knots.
But not me. Never me.

It Was The Tin Man That Had No Heart

April 20, 2011 6 Comments

Dad was always in the kitchen when I got there and that made it home.

I remember the patterns of the place. The linoleum swirled and looped this way and that, colors revealed and subsumed again, made still more random by the scrape of a million footfalls in a way no mechanism could replicate. The radio was molded hard, but still looked like the kind of plastic mash it was made from, and fought a determined rearguard visual action against the battered red dinette tabletop. The chrome legs stabbed at the floor.

There was a strange man there and I mean it in every way. He had a pinky ring and smelled like cologne instead of work and his suit was shinier than the table leg ever was. He had a gold tooth and a galvanized smile.

“We’re not getting any younger, you and I…”

My father was the you. I immediately got the impression there was no I there.

“Climbing a rickety ladder every year, and for what? To do it all over again next year. You should be at the ballgame, not scraping and priming. Our space-age aluminum siding never needs painting, and once you set it, you forget it. Our easy terms put it in the reach of even a family with a modest income…”

He kept going, but I was distracted by my father. He drifted from his usual quiet self to an Easter Island face. The man was pushing all the buttons, as he had done before countless times to numberless people, no doubt. But all men’s buttons are not the same, are they? Or maybe the buttons are all the same but are mislabeled on some people. The man was trying to talk incessantly without saying anything, but that’s hard to do. Can you do it? The man reminded father of things gone, but not forgotten. Of wear and tear. Of loneliness and loss. Pain and regret. Of sitting alone at a battered table under a picture of your life gone away.

“It will always look good from far away, and every day that passes you’ll thank yourself for forgetting it forever,” he said, and held out the pen.

My father seemed startled, and he looked at the picture of my mom, dead and gone fifteen years, that hung over the table.

“Get out of our house.”

Jupiter And Mars

March 26, 2011 11 Comments

That kid he bombs around the lot in my Caddie and I’ve got my heart in my throat just tossing him the keys but he never misses so what the hell. He’s dressed like he’s waiting for an organ grinder, not me, but the missus think’s he’s some kinda handsome and what’s the harm in that. Young man should be handsome and see some hubba hubba wife now and then so he knows why he’s groping that neighborhood girl in the back of a jalopy for.

Jesus she steps out like a queen. The monkey missing his tin cup holds the door and she puts out one leg with the seam running up the back and he’s transfixed like he’s a gimp at Lourdes and she’s coming down from a cloud. She’s got a halo of perfume and radiation from the silk and glitters a bit on the fingers. We go in and the Caddie gets a workout.

There’s the maitre d and he knows me and there’s no fuss except the fussing over a guy likes. The wife inspects the ceiling and Rocco says his little prayer of a tip and massages me a bit. He inspects the long memorized seating plan like it’s a lost scroll instead of his reason for being. “I might just have something near the floor ’cause I know missus, well, she can dance is what I’m sayin’.”

The coat check girl is the homely one, and even she could start a knifefight on any corner in Naples just by walking past. The girl who takes you to the table could get the Pope to reconsider.

There’s too many onions but they’re sweet. The wood pressed into a little quilt reveals itself as you make your way to the bottom of the bowl. Bread in a basket, O and V in the cruets, two ashtrays. Chianti, Franco; ten bucks and it’s the best Chianti in the world, with the cock right there on the stripe like back home. The stuffy guys, the dentists with Yankee names come in here and order sangiovese for their stringy wives to ooh and aah over and pay twenty ’cause they don’t know no better.

The dentist Yankees drift by on the dance floor and you can see them eying the real woman you got, pushing the limits of her dress every which place — Bam! Boop! Bap! — and he’s got the skinny sorority girl who moves around like a giraffe in a straightjacket and you know right off that she moves like that everywhere. That’s why he can’t stop robbing a peek at the missus when he can; they always sneak out of the house in their mind in here, the white bread. They couldn’t handle a woman like I got anyway. They should stick to the ingenues who reach for the diazepam instead of the kitchen knives when you piss her off.

In other words, please be true. In other words, I love you.

(Reader and commenter Misterarthur sent me that video, for the Hammond. Guys from Detroit know Hammond)

The Regular

November 15, 2010 4 Comments

I’m here regular.

I’m not no drunk. Drunks don’t make it to work on Monday. I never misses. The young dudes they come and go, but we old fellers stick to it. They think they know everything, but we was young guys, too. They’ve not been old yet. And when we was young, we were younger than them — I know it’s true even if it doesn’t sound like it makes no sense.  They never been to Okinawa. They think a headache is a cancer.

It’s familiar here, and familiar is good. Dink knows I want Cutty and that’s that. No waving the bills and waiting and looking silly and friendless at the rail. There’s always somebody to buy you a drink and you buy them a drink and Dink does his arithmetic funny and it’s less than it ought to be, and we all knows it. We all get enough, until enough is enough.

We’ve worn a rut in the saddle and there’s a dent like me in the seat, and there’s a cobweb behind the teevee that an architect couldna made. Time goes by here, like traffic passing by you can hear but not see. Let it go. The door shifts back to its place and the dark settles on you like a blanket. It’s always Christmas and New Years and Easter. Let’s have a little party.

I been alone all these years now, but not so lonely anymore. The boy went wild after his mother, God bless her soul, was gone. He didn’t remember her in the bed calling for one more glass of water over and over. He was little. When you’re little there’s just a hole with nothing to fill it. I fills it here.

[Inspired by The Regulars, at the always fun Square America]

Tag: flash fiction

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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