The Everyday Life of Phineas Q. Mongoose

Scenes From a Laundromat: Charity

2011-12-02T20:22:00.000-08:00

There's a girl here--14, maybe. She's hunched into a corner, scared, and from the marks on her face it's her father or a boyfriend she's afraid of. She hasn't got any laundry--barely has any clothes, just a t-shirt and jeans. She doesn't seem cold, though, even without something to cover her pale arms. Most people take her for homeless and ignore her. When I approach her to maybe give her a few bucks or offer her lunch, she backs away. As she slides out of the corner, her hand falls into a ray of sunlight from the glass door of the laundromat. The second it does, she howls like a cat that just got its tail stepped on, startling the whole place. As she pulls her hand back, I see faint wisps of smoke rising from her pale fingers. Wordlessly, I pull off my hooded sweatshirt and hand it to her. She looks at me, almost crying, and wraps herself in the too-big sweatshirt. She pulls the hood over her head and smiles at me weakly from under the hood. I sit next to her on the floor while my drier finishes. It's the holidays, and charity extends even to monsters.

Scenes From a Laundromat: Queen of Air and Tumble Dry

2011-12-02T20:19:00.000-08:00

There's this woman wearing this crazy necklace--runes and everything on it. She smiles wide and makes small talk with everybody. What strikes me about her most is she doesn't have a container of quarters: I have a baggie, some folks have old margarine tubs or zip-up coin purses, but she's got nothing and is running three driers on it. I don't figure it out till she goes to get a Dr. Pepper from the vending machine. She lays her right hand on the side of the machine, fingers spread and eyes closed. I catch the briefest glimmer of light from her necklace, and a pair of 20 ounce bottles pop out of the machine. She offers one to me. I politely decline, remembering all too well the legend of Persephone and the dangers of accepting hospitality from one of their kind.

An Additional $17 Materials Fee Will Be Assessed To Defray The Cost Of Pentagrams

2011-06-14T23:25:00.000-07:00

COURSE OUTLINE
SMN 301: Shaping and Conducting Pure Evil
Grupert Hanley, Instructor

WEEK ONE

Tuesday

Students are introduced to the concept of inner darkness, and allowed to explore the evil that lurks in the hearts of all men. The instructor will demonstrate basic techniques for extruding evil from the human body. Read chapters 3-5.

Thursday

Students are allowed to begin practicing the techniques previously covered. Students are encouraged to dress in active clothing for this session. The instructor will begin demonstrating techniques for shaping pure evil into useful forms if time permits. Read chapter 7.

WEEK TWO

Tuesday

Guest lecture. Students are encouraged to take notes, as topics covered will be visited on the final exam. Students are also encouraged to bring a change of clothes, as the scent of sulfur will remain pervasive throughout the lecture hall during the duration of the presentation.

Thursday

Quiz. Students will be tested on proficiencies in a variety of real-world situations. Please ensure that the Enrollment Office has a current Waiver of Medical Liability on file. Students are required to have completed the optional "Death and Dismemberment" portion of the Waiver of Medical Liability. Read chapters 10-13.

WEEK THREE

Tuesday

No class. The Feast of Saint Fidelis of Sigmaringen is held. Read chapters 16-20.

Thursday

Students will continue practicing basic techniques in shaping and extruding pure evil. An extra session will be held immediately before the scheduled class period to allow students who have not yet demonstrated sufficient capacity for evil the opportunity to sacrifice themselves to students who have aptly demonstrated the capacity for evil. Credit will still be given for students who exit the program at this point, if the class is taken on a Pass/No Pass basis. Consult your program counselor for more information.

WEEK FOUR

Tuesday

Intermediate techniques will be discussed, and applied to a variety of real-world settings. Students are encouraged to wear clothing that conceals the face and any identifying marks. Students are encouraged to retain legal counsel. Consult the Student Services Office for more details.

Thursday

Guest lecture. Interested students will be given the opportunity to form a Dark Pact with The Lord of The Forgotten Ones. Uninterested students will not be given the opportunity to refuse to form a Dark Pact with The Lord of The Forgotten Ones.

WEEK FIVE

Tuesday

Mid-term exam. Students will be assessed on their progress via passage through the Hall of Impossible Trials. Students who exhibit poor performance will remain within the Hall for a theoretically undefined amount of time, as the Hall of Impossible Trials exists orthogonally to time as it is perceived by all men.

Thursday

All students exhibit poor performance within the Hall of Impossible Trials. Class invariably cancelled. The metaphysical remains of all students are collected by The Lord of The Forgotten Ones.

Acceptable Loss Code 4: Breakage During Transit

2011-06-11T23:09:00.000-07:00

It's funny--I never lost a man, not a fucking one, when I was running blockades for the Confeds. Did that all ten years of the war, and a couple before the Declaration when things were still cold. Running freight for the Gens, though, I always end up flushing two or three of you out with the fucking trash.

You can't ever pull as much drive power as those fucking tanks do and not brown out the transfer buses, especially once that old piece of shit gets up past one-tenth Cee. That always gets one or two of you, and there's always an accident or something, crates jostling around cracking those damn cheap plex tanks. Fucking Gens won't ever pay to do that shit right.

Fucking Gens. Can't work for anybody else cause they're the only ones that ship intersystem, can't get off the ship cause of the Quarantine, can't fight back cause they'd blow you out the sky if you loaded anything more potent than a mining rig on your own damn boat.

Fucking Gens.

It was the goddamned catwalk that went this time, the support brace breaking clean in two because the fucking inertial compensator went haywire during braking (fucking during, can you believe it?) on approach to the transfer station.

I don't know why the hell I carried you all the way up to the medical bay.

Maybe it was because you were still breathing when I found you. It wasn't your looks, god fucking knows, rows and rows of your same damn face staring me down every run. It ain't like the Gens are gonna pay for you now, they're just gonna write you off as spoilage and look at me funny for not flushing you. It was just you, a broken tank, and a puddle of that fucking synthetic amnio messing up my goddamned cargo floor.

Medical unit says you check out fine, but you're not waking up. Do you even? Do you ever?

You and me, we're the fucking same, you know? We're both what the Gens made us.

Dead Letters

2010-11-14T14:06:00.000-08:00

On a very literal level, every human interaction is a relationship of give and take. Ideas are exchanged, transmitted, and the process by necessity requires an incredibly minuscule amount of psychic energy to change hands, like an electron moving from one atom to another. Phone calls and text messages, e-mails and dead tree letters all served as carriers for these motes of thought and will.

Of all the ways human beings are able to correspond, it was the labyrinthine machinations of the United States Postal service that most interested Christopher Markham, and not only because of his own high position in that particular bureaucracy. Christopher knew that the envelopes he watched over contained more than words and paper, and was one of perhaps three dozen alive who did. What mattered, though, was that he was the only one in a position to do something about it.

The Office of Dead Letters had long been considered a backwater position with little possibility of advancement in the higher organization. For a young up-and-coming executive in the civil service to actively maneuver himself into the directorship of that office was nearly unheard of. To his credit, Christopher ran the Office well, cutting costs by closing the San Francisco branch of the Office and consolidating operations in the main Mail Recovery Center in Atlanta. The savings masked a need to get a warehouse of undeliverable mail away from the untamed water of the Pacific Ocean, and a need to eliminate prying eyes looked better on a balance sheet as "staff cutbacks", but the efficiency was real enough.

Processed by fewer hands, the undeliverable mail piled up. Patrolled by understaffed security, the warehouse went unobserved for hours at a time. Christopher recalled every day of the years that led him to his one big night, as he began to distribute gallon jugs of gasoline throughout the darkened warehouse with every bit of the efficiency that marked his tenure as Director of the Office of Dead Letters.

He would be moving into a new position very soon.

Fires broke out all over the warehouse in unison. Disconnected alarms and sabotaged sprinklers let it spread. Letters burned, and as the paper envelopes were destroyed the fragments of will that were attached to them flew free, beginning to swirl around the warehouse in an invisible maelstrom. Christopher opened his mind, calling out, reaching, hoping, and--

They came to him, like millions of miniature planets orbiting and falling towards their star. He could feel each one as they entered him, filling his mind with thoughts and feelings that weren't his own. Fragments, initially, but as they came together they knit themselves into something more complete, a new collective unconsciousness becoming embodied in the person of Christopher Markham.

Already, what he could perceive passed the bounds of nature. Already, his mind moved into places that no mind was meant to occupy. Already, Christopher was becoming a god. The God of Dead Letters.

Six Points

2010-11-09T00:40:00.000-08:00

The chair used to be scary, like a cross between one of those old-fashioned hair dryers from beauty salons in old videos and something from the Spanish Inquisition, but after three months Amanda sat down without any qualms. The needles snaking their way into her skull were scary, too, at first, but it was amazing to Amanda how quickly she could get used to being injected with microscopic amounts of a potent (and highly targeted, the company doctor assured her) bio-toxin. Ignoring the sensation, Amanda passed the time by starting into a small pile of fashion magazines. One of the ads captured her image and superimposed six different hairstyles over her own. Amanda flipped between them, wondering if she could convince the tech to make her hair grow out red after she got off shift.

Fifteen minutes later, Amanda stood and shook her head from side to side like they had shown her in the training session her first day. Her hair fell all at once, trying and failing to stay rooted in follicles that were no longer alive. A jet of compressed air blew down from a vent above her, automatically sweeping stray strands from her face and clothing as a hemispherical cleaning bug slid out of a recess in the far wall to gobble up what had been left on the floor.

Amanda made her way to her station, and sat down in front of the same technician she had sat down in front of for the last three months. She didn't know his name, and didn't really care to. She wasn't even entirely sure the techs were human behind their surgical masks. The techs never really fraternized with the subjects, except maybe for one or two trivial warnings about the procedure.

"You done antlers before, right?"

"Yeah, I already know about the neck brace."

The worst part about it was she couldn't move her head to read her magazine. She had to hold her arms out straight at shoulder level, like a zombie who was really interested in Cosmo, and that made it difficult to pass the four hours of her shift. It didn't hurt, though, when it came time to cut the antlers off. They usually slipped an anesthetic in with the genetically recombined follicle transplants and accelerated growth factors and all that. Besides, how else would some hick in Iowa or wherever get a nice set of antlers for his den? Kill some poor defenseless animal? No thank you!

It could be worse. She could have been assigned to steaks.

The Long Count

2009-11-14T13:30:00.001-08:00

...and I saw the number of my days on the big stone calendar. I saw them given out, each given their own names and set aside for their own uses. See, father, these years are yours, given over to the work of my hands as established by your example. See, mother, these years are yours, given over to your memory. See, brother! See! These years, the best and choicest, have been reserved for you! This stock of days I carry are colored by you and remain yours, long after your own meager calendar has come to an end.

Papa Legba

2008-06-20T08:14:00.000-07:00

You left your crazy behind, babe, failing and fading it clung to me and it's your sleepless nights I'm hit by like bullet after bleary-eyed bullet.

Is this what pushed you out over mountains?

sgt.mongoose@gmail.com

2008-04-05T12:17:00.000-07:00

We learn our names all over again in this world--the tap of fingers substituting for words. That's simple, we know it, it's obvious. There's a magic, though, to your name when you hear it or say it, and the names we make up for ourselves in this world are no different. There's muscle memory there, typing it to identify ourselves, and the tiniest rush of happiness:

This is who I am. This is who I chose to be.

And I Can't Say What I Want To Say

2008-04-02T06:09:00.000-07:00

You. Will. Not. Come out of your house and that is okay with me, I'm not standing on no front porch waiting I'm warm in here. I'm across the street (you're across the street) and we can see each other and wave, looking up from our knitting.

We'll never leave, but one day we'll hold up our arms to show that we've both been working on the exact same sweater.

No Man Is An Island

2008-03-14T00:51:00.000-07:00

He makes with his mind, out of ectoplasm or thought-energy or whatever astral plane BS George Noory is on about tonight.

In his room there are universes after school, places where black eyes fade and humiliation is forgotten and she's there, all of her, the only girl who knows his name.

He hears his dad at the door and everything disappears. He can't know, he'll never understand.

Gathered Their Books and Burned Them

2008-03-11T02:51:00.000-07:00

I don't know how it was possible for this whole generation to have kept the same secret from each other, but there you go.

See, in the old (ha! what am I, 23?) days, we kept it all under wraps. Sometimes you knew or found out, always in rumor, always about somebody from across town, heard across the bar from friends of friends who knew a guy who knew a guy blah blah blah blah blah. It was always the same story and it was always "us" and "them" and even though every single one of us knew that we were on the wrong side of that equation we all pretended just because you felt slightly less alone when people would still look at you.

And then, then one day, "us" became "me" and it wasn't so much a line as a fence and I forget who it was that first looked up and around and realized:

We all feel like this, every day, and it is okay.

We all came out of our apartments and said it to one another, and the years came tumbling off our faces like landslides.

Setting It In Stone

2008-03-05T02:36:00.000-08:00

Inspired by this picture, it would do you good to look at it before you read. Kind of playing the home game here to keep my brain from shriveling up from lack of writing things.

----

There are four hundred and thirteen thousand, nine hundred and eighty-six bricks (visible) in the tower. The tower is one hundred and thirty-seven feet and three inches high. The clock faces east-northeast, aligned along 78th Avenue conforming to the regular city grid.

I usually (no more than five days a week, no less than three, Sundays and holidays omitted) stand fifty-four feet from the tower, next to a bench (Municipal Model 394-D, manufactured by Heich Public Ironworks). I am most often positioned west-southwest facing the clock and 78th Avenue.

78th Avenue carries an average traffic volume of ninety-eight cars per minute. This volume spikes at two hundred and twelve cars per minute at 7:32 AM (weekdays). There are three stops for the 78 bus within view, as well as an additional stop reserved for the 78 Express situated out of view behind the tower. The 78 Express departs from its stop exactly on the hour each hour from six AM to ten PM.

The tower bells sound each hour and half hour. The clock is two minutes fast, but otherwise remains accurate. At noon, the tower bells sound a short melody (thirty-two seconds in length), popularly believed to have been derived from a work of Schubert. It, however, is not: the short series of notes sounded by the tower bells bear no similarity in substance or style to any known Schubert composition.

My father was struck and killed by the eastbound 78 bus (2004 Model D4500CT, manufactured by Motor Coach Industries, operating number 1034) as he crossed the street. The bus was traveling twenty-four miles an hour. His body flew seventeen feet after the impact, taking six seconds to return to earth. Emergency personnel were dispatched from the nearby Presbyterian General Hospital (paramedic unit 8, responding EMTs Allison Marshall, Joshua Smith, and Eric Seydall) and arrived in three minutes and twenty-eight seconds.

Doctor Phillip Miller pronounced him dead on arrival.

He died one hour and fifty-six minutes after we had met for lunch at the Sandersson Deli (corner of 78th and Banks, closed Saturdays). I had the reuben, no dressing, soup (chicken noodle). He had the turkey on wheat. The total was twelve dollars and ninety-three cents, including tip. He wouldn't let me pay.

As he left my company, he pointed to the inscription on the tower.

"Be a good kid," he said. "Make me proud. Fly from evil, you know?"

He laughed, then.

I don't understand laughing.

What exactly is evil? I'm...I'm having trouble quantifying.

Broken Down

2008-02-04T21:41:00.000-08:00

They…they tell you that it’s always been that way-—or that it always should have been that way. It’s not right, you say, it is different and it cannot be quantified and it is somehow wrong, a pure, invisible wrongness spreading out in front of you like the sun just decided to rise purple.

Keep moving.

It’s not so bad, they say, and although you are to be commended for pointing out that particular flaw in the system there are a team of technicians on standby and they are entirely focused on planning for the resolution (preparing to plan for the resolution) and you really don’t need to concern yourself with technical matters when there’s work yet undone, do you?

Keep moving.

I understand, they reply—-with a distinct lack of courtesy this time-—but your unsubstantiated concerns, as worrying as they may be, are standing in the way of the Plan and may even be construed to be anti-Plan, as much as I hesitate to use the phrase. We certainly have done the best to foster a certain spirit of discretion among your team but one wonders if we haven't done too much, hm?

Keep moving.

Do you consider yourself, they ask, a patriotic man? Of course you do, who doesn’t? Knowing that, one must wonder at the level of attention you have paid this particular matter. It certainly seems contrary to an acceptable love for one’s fellow man to worry so much over this one trifle, doesn’t it? Don’t the stakes demand that you concede to authority? We’ve been trained and equipped for this situation, all the best classrooms covered in precise technical drawings describing this situation were made available to us from a very early age and I assure you, sir, that this is all entirely under control.

Now.

I feel that you have put me (and the Plan, no less!) in a rather difficult position, but I must this moment demand that you either return to your duty and keep moving, or formally refuse to serve-—and I am exceedingly sure you are aware of the consequences of that particular choice.

There’s a good fellow.

Don’t worry about it stopping outright, mind you. That’s a difficulty best left to our sons.

Keep moving.

Serpentine In Body And Voice

2007-06-10T13:59:00.000-07:00

There was an oracle in Nacogdoches, or so we heard--Robert and I made the trip over spring break, disguised, hoping to hear what she had to say...

I had a dream the night after we crossed the state line. I was in love with a blind girl, beautiful as anything but no sight to speak of. I remember it being tough, she'd always kiss my shoulder and I'd be forced to wonder if she was actually kissing my shoulder or if she had been trying to kiss my face or chest but had somehow missed.

She was always surprised and alarmed when I tried to get to second base. I guess you'd normally have a number of visual cues that something like that was coming.

Like I said, it was tough.

I'd always feel really self-conscious about her in the dream. Like it made me seem somehow less, like people would be talking behind my back about how I was only getting a girl as beautiful as all this because she was blind and couldn't see how--I'm not ugly, okay? I'm not, but I'm no Matthew Broderick or anything.

She was always wearing a tank top that said "Breathe" on the front in white letters. I think.

I was quiet the rest of the trip. Robert told me later that he'd had a dream that I would and that he wasn't supposed to say anything or turn up the radio real loud, even when his favorite songs came on, and I have to credit him with that. That's why I asked him along. Most people don't keep from blasting Duran Duran out the windows just because they had a dream that their best friend needed some thinking time and didn't want to know exactly how Hungry Like The Wolf Simon Le whoever-his-name-is is.

I needed it, the driving and the time. I had to pull the blind girl back out of dreams and into memory. I had to frame her, name her, because I knew that loving her in the dream meant something and I didn't know what and I knew that's what I had come to ask the oracle of Nacogdoches even though I didn't know it until just now and I kept wondering what she'd say if she'd name names or just bullshit me like all those other oracles or if we'd even find her or maybe we'd go to her house and her son would walk to the door and tell us she died three years ago and get off my lawn thank you very much and what if what if what if

Breathe.

The theme from View To A Kill came on, there was a marathon on the Top 40 station in town, some sort of 80's thing.

Robert sighed, and clicked off the radio.

We navigated a maze of stucco and streets named after saints I was sure didn't really exist but made mental notes to look up later. We had to go to the library and look up the address on the internet, eventually, after three solid hours of prowling residential districts we weren't welcome in.

As the sun was setting, I found her door. I knocked timidly. She answered the door. Everything was different.

I've been to every oracle within driving distance of the tri-county area, and some that weren't but came highly recommended. That body of experience had prepared me for a crone with a crock full of chicken entrail--oracles are nothing if not true to the stereotype--and by this I was sorely unprepared for 25 and gorgeous.

"Come in," she said testily. "I've been waiting since you crossed city limits, and I've got appointments that won't wait for some dream and his best friend who wants the lotto numbers."

"How'd you--" Robert began, standing behind me awestruck.

"Twenty-eight, thirty-four, twelve, seven, fifty-six, nineteen and no I'm not giving you the powerball have fun with your hundred grand and shut up I'm busy," the oracle replied, leading me by the hand past a beaded curtain and into the back room.

"Now," she said after we had sat facing one another across a card table, "this girl. Obviously, she's a representation. Duh. I might be able to say what of but that's going to take some time which kills my schedule for the night which means that this is going to run into serious money. Ten thousand dollars," she said, with all the ceremony of somebody asking me to go pick up a case of Coronas.

I was crushed. To come this far for nothing but a dream I couldn't interpret, it felt worse than nothing. Of course I didn't have ten thousand dollars, and said as much.

"That's the talk of somebody whose best friend didn't just get lotto numbers from me," she said, grinning fiercely. "I'll expect the check two months from now."

I looked up at the ceiling and whistled. This woman was something else, putting on loopholes like lesser women wore earrings.

"Go for it," I said.

She took my hands and I felt the room fill and shrink and change somehow, everything close and far away at the same time, contradictions blooming to life and dying out and coming back again faster than I could blink.

"She comes running," she said, eyes closed, "a full and true Daughter of God,"

"Wait."

"What?" The room died.

"Aren't they all?"

"All what?"

"All Daughters of God. It's the same as calling someone 'girl' or 'woman'. He's omnipotent, right? They're all His daughters."

The oracle smiled, not at all kindly. There was menace in her eyes, and the flash of a fresh memory.

"That is something, my dear man, that the majority of your gender seems to forget at the most inconvenient times. Now be quiet and stop asking questions."

After a pause to re-center herself, the oracle began anew.

"She comes running, a full and true Daughter of God, blind-eyed and mad from exhaustion, running up to you in your weak strength to take shelter from the sirocco. Your world will become hers, your beautiful words painting color into her blind eyes. You will write her the stories that tell her what the seasons are--you will name for her the trees and oceans. The words of your mouth will become her sight, and the strength of your shoulders will become her direction."

As the oracle slowly opened her eyes, I slumped back in my folding chair, trying to drink it all in. Looking impatiently at her watch, the oracle was the first to break the silence.

"This is prophecy, Tobias. We write this stuff down."

I did, and I carried that sheet of notebook paper folded in my wallet all the way back home, telling Robert everything. He was my best friend, after all.

When we got back, he took some of his powerball money and threw a kegger so he could invite every blind girl in the tri-county area. That wasn't what the oracle was talking about per se, but God bless him for trying.

Press Conference on the Discovery

2007-03-24T23:30:00.000-07:00

He makes, literally makes, with his hands. Creative genius and the gift of the gods, shaping air into dust and dust into everything--back again, too, if he wanted. We are talking serious Lathe of Heaven shit here, people, and I am not speaking for myself when I say this is a bad thing and that absolutely nothing good can come of this.

What was that?

No, not you. You in the back. What was that?

No.

No.

Okay, the Lathe of Heaven thing wasn't exactly an apt analogy, sure, and we don't know how he does it and I'm sorry. I just was searching for that generational touchstone to put everything we were afraid of in context. Won't happen again. I promise.

We Also Advertise In The Back Of The Local Alternative Weekly But Are Not Exactly An Escort Service

2007-02-12T00:54:00.000-08:00

Muse work is hard work, inspiration never came easy to anybody. But I was hard on cash, and the ad on Craigslist said 'No Experience Needed' so here I am in your apartment and you expecting a beautiful girl to help write your screenplay.

I should explain, it's a service I work for, we get a three by five card with an address written on it and we drive wherever and inspire people to greatness. Most of it's distasteful--anybody who needs to call a Muse that makes seven dollars and fifty-three cents an hour is obviously in a pretty bad way.

So you didn't get what you were expecting. Maybe you can work that in there, disappointment or something. Maybe go in sort of a sitcom-y direction, there's not a lot of good sitcoms on nowadays, right? That's a gap you could fill. You could write the next Friends or something. Shame how none of those people found good work after all that ended, but I guess it's like Star Trek or something where you play one role for a decade and everything gets unpleasant. You know, you could just put in a part ready made for like David Schwimmer or one of those guys, get a name people know but one you can get on the cheap. You could half sell a pilot on that, the way they do things down here and all.

That helps? Yeah? Feeling inspired?

Figured it would.

Listen, I better be going. You seem to be set, and I got a speechwriter to cajole, some rot about the war or something (politics nowadays) and you just know that's gonna be most of my day. You let me know how that screenplay works out, okay?

Life In These Confederate States

2007-02-08T00:57:00.000-08:00

"You see, my dear, you shouldn't worry about changing history at all! What we did in the past already happened--they were writing that little gem into Twilight Zone episodes long before we realized it was true--it was supposed to happen and don't you forget it. Why, if the South ends up winning the Civil War, lucky for them they got the one time traveler who listens to Lynyrd Skynyrd!!"

I chuckle into her silence, the haughty laugh of a jaded jet-set time traveler.

"Excuse me, but Lynyrd who?"

I am awestruck. This is the worst date ever. I am going to be alone for the rest of my life.

There are four words written on my thigh in red scar tissue: DON'T MAKE SKYNYRD JOKES. It is a very embarrassing scar, I keep it under a bandage when I shower. They were written by my Second Grade teacher, when I was in Second Grade. I remember myself, a confused seven year old, as Mr. Smith traced on my skin with a soldering iron while all the other kids were at recess. What I remember most is how Mr. Smith spoke to me, how he reassured me in calm, even tones that everything was going to be alright. "This is all for the best, Jimmy." "I'm sorry Jimmy, but science has proven that the best time to give a child an embarrassing scar is when he is in the Second Grade, the skin is softer and the kids aren't as mean."

At the time, I didn't understand. The cops went to arrest him for child abuse, but he had vanished and was never found again. The state paid for some very good therapists and I had largely come to grips with what had happened to me until just this moment.

As my last chance at true love saunters out the door, I dig out a picture of Mr. Smith from my wallet. It's strange that he looks so much like me.

Rapture

2005-01-19T00:02:00.000-08:00

She was rock guitars and cynicism, Mormon too; that made it all the more interesting. You couldn't find that kind of thing anywhere else in Bicknell, and I doubted that I could find that kind of thing much anywhere else, even if I took the bus up to Salt Lake City and spent the weekend looking.

So I stayed, and stayed longer than I should have. I was there every day and most nights at her apartment, her and me and whatever idiot kid wanted a crack at her. They never lasted long, a trickle of guys who had made an effort to drive two hours to the nearest Hot Topic and buy whatever worthless trinkets they could afford. They were nothing but leather and metal (and cliche combinations of the two), tofted up to the nines without even realizing it; looking less and less like people and more and more like peacocks that Tim Burton had gotten a hold of.

We talked about things, her and I. We talked about books, important ones, and music and movies and all those things that people our age were supposed to talk about. The conversation invariably stalled. There was always that idiot kid, always sitting way too close to her on the sofa, always trying to interject and explain to us how much he liked Green Day or how deep and insightful he thought The Matrix was.

I'd smile, she'd smile, and she'd wink at me in this completely disarming way that made me twitch the first time I saw it.

Yeah, he's an idiot.

She didn't have to say it out loud, of course, and we'd joke about it after the kid had gone and we were drinking tea and the conversation had turned back to whatever we were talking about in the first place. I'd laugh, and she'd laugh, and I'd turn away for a moment and cry.

She was perfect, you know? She was...balanced, somehow. Like you could see her anywhere, equally at home in a mosh pit or in a pew. Every time I saw one of those gilded faux-punks slide up to her and try to put his arm around her, it killed me. Why couldn't I do the same thing? She liked me, you know. We knew each other in and out and up and down and a million other directions that would have to be invented just to explain how well we knew each other.

It wasn't like I was afraid of her. I don't think it was possible to be afraid of anything when I was around her. There was just something around her that kept me from telling her what we already knew. I think I loved her enough not to make her life that complicated.

Maybe that's what she wanted me to do the entire time, waiting for me to say something. I don't know. I keep thinking back, you know? I keep trying to get my hands on every little word we shared, sifting them like sand and hoping some shred of meaning falls out onto the floor.

What's the use? She left two months ago. She's in New York or somewhere like that now, far enough away that I won't ever see her again. I moved into her apartment, she didn't want the furniture to go to waste.

The place still smells like her, you know? Some nights I can't even move because of it.

Teens In Love

2004-12-06T02:02:00.000-08:00

He's doing better than I am, no doubt about it. He's got everything I wanted, everything. Looks, brains, everything. He's a fighter, he could take down every man jack of you and no mistake. So what if things are hard for him, we don't mind. It gets better, he loses love just so he can find it again a week later. That's called pathos, or at least that's what he'd like you to think is called pathos. But everybody has problems.

She's doing better than that other girl, all brash confidence and revealing nightwear. We don't like to talk about that kind of thing in public, it disturbs some people. She knows what has to happen, and she thinks she's going to do it. At least I think she thinks she's going to do it. Warm Wednesday nights give way to cold Thursday mornings, and nobody seems to notice the difference except her. She's beautiful, in a torn sort of way, like a dog-eared script to a play you've been rehearsing. Familiar like that, the lines of Thornton Wilder's Our Town on a high school stage every night until bedtime.

They found each other after three years of looking, and we were all happy for them. Gene Wilder came up and called us the dreamers of dreams. It was nothing new for us and him, but we thought he was dead so it surprised us.

But then again, it would have surprised us more if he really was dead.