OCTOBER 16

TITLE: "Jack Shit"
NOTES: My first completed story for Intro to Fiction,
to be workshopped on the 22nd. It was either very brave or very
stupid to put a first-person narrative (especially one like this)
out there for the first run, since everyone wants to make a good
impression and will probably showcase their syntax with a third-
person POV and pretty sentences. Damn.

-----

So, this one time, I got approached on the street. No shit; some old guy with an impressive paunch and those Jeffrey Dahmer glasses—you know, the tortishell cokebottles—told me he’d pay me twenty bucks if I let him touch my dick. It was probably the weirdest thing I’ve been asked to date, but I just shrugged, walked with him into that alley behind the Chinese buffet, and whipped it out. From his face, you’d think he’d never seen a circumcised dong before, because he sort of sucked in his breath as he touched me. Real lightly, too, like anything more than a whisper would break it off. Didn’t get me hard or anything, since he was so creepy and I was pretty sure that, at any minute, this little tour was going to get interrupted by some unlucky Asian busboy taking out the trash. The perv seemed to get a real kick out of it, though, because he smiled at me when his calluses made me shiver. Like I was some sort of fucking statue in a museum somewhere. A statue wearing five-pocket jeans into which he could shove wrinkled cash.

And it’s not like I needed twenty bucks, either. I mean, my job’s not great or anything, but cleaning puke off the floors of roller coaster cars is definitely a step or two above getting felt up by some dude who may or may not have had leprosy. Didn’t think about it then, but it’s probably a miracle that I don’t have boils on my cock now, or something like that. Not that it matters, since I still can hardly bear to look at it, much less touch it. Which has really thrown a wrench into my schedule, you know? There’s this block of time every day that I just can’t fill anymore.

In any event, I get my twenty bucks, and watch this nutcase walk away, looking a lot happier than he had two minutes before. I thought it was because of me at the time, which was kind of an ego boost—but it didn’t help the fact that I had this dirty twenty in my back pocket; I could almost feel Jackson’s mug burning into my ass. Almost like he knew how he’d gotten there and was real indignant about it. Which is pretty hypocritical, because Jackson pulled some tricky shit and got himself impeached, right? Still, having a president being disapproving every time you sit down (and even moreso when you fart) is no cake in the park or whatever. Plus, I felt a little like a hooker. I don’t know how those whores can live with themselves at the end of the day, really—though maybe it’s different for straight chicks or something, I don’t know. Point is, I wanted to get rid of that money pretty much the moment I got it, so I high-tailed it out of there and over to the convenient store on the next block with every intention of picking up a slurpee and maybe some normal, chick-on-dude porn rags.

Buying dirty magazines had never really bothered me before—they’re selling them for a reason, right? And it’s not like I’m the single sicko perpetuating the industry with my on-again, off-again patronage. But this time, because my crotch was still all tingly and weird like your foot after you’ve sat cross-legged for too long, I felt like a total perv pointing behind the counter and saying, ‘Yeah, I’ll take Jumbo Jugs, Titty Sprinkles, and a Big Gulp.’ You could tell the child laborer there was really getting his jollies by touching the two-dimensional hooters, because he gave me one of those you’re-my-new-hero grins while ringing everything up. He tells me it’ll be seventeen forty-five, so I reach around to my ass like I’m going to scratch my crack, grab the Jackson, and hand it to him as if it’s covered in ants.

It was almost that simple. But this pizza-faced Dudley Do-Right can’t just let me get out of there with even one shred of dignity left, because he looks at the money, then looks back at me and says, “I don’t think we can accept this.”

“What do you mean you can’t accept it?” I asked, all pissed off and flustered. “It’s money, isn’t it?” A line was starting to form behind me, all these soccer moms picking up popsicles for their bazillions of whiny kids, and all I wanted to do was get the hell out of there. Just to drink my forty-four ounces of cola and jerk off to fake tits until it was time to take a massive piss.

But the kid just shuffles around behind the counter, gnawing at his thumbnail, and says, “I think it’s against store policy to accept bills with penises drawn on them.” Then he blushes like hell is freezing over and he needs to keep warm, but didn’t balk or anything when I snatched the twenty out of his hand and looked at it for the first time—sure enough, there’s a giant cock etched on there, pointing right at Jackson’s tight-lipped mouth. And I mean balls and everything, real realistic-like, with shading and shit. If it hadn’t been an enormous dick, I’d probably have it framed and hanging over the couch right now, that’s how nice it was. The whole thing was pretty damn majestic—except for the fact that it was a penis, and my cash wasn’t legal tender because of it. I’ve never been so embarrassed in my entire life, what with all those suburbanites standing behind me gawking and sniggering like a bunch of paparazzi geese. And all of a sudden, I was seeing spots and tasting bile; all because there were balls on my money.

I left the coke and the porn for the audience and made it outside just in time to hurl into that bowl of sand they leave out for the smokers’ butts. There was this little puff of light-brown dirt that made me sneeze and added snot to the barf. Because anything else would have been fair, and this just wasn’t my day; I made sure of that the moment I had those fingers around me, right?

It wasn’t until I was three blocks away, spitting a chunk of that morning’s sausage into a planter, that I realized I still had the Jackson blowjob. Crumpled in my fist, all limp from my sweat. It occurred to me then that if I didn’t get rid of this shame-cash, that’s how my junk would be for the rest of my life (or the day at least): crumpled and limp in my hand. And since I didn’t want to end up like one of those priests with the aching ballsacs who get desperate enough to fondle little boys, I created my own modest vendetta against this ball-bill I’d been saddled with. The thing had caused me enough trouble for a lifetime, and I’d only had it for ten minutes.

For a good part of the afternoon I schlepped around town, attempting to foist off Jack on a whole buttload of fine retailers. The places got more and more low-class as I got more and more desperate, and I began trying more and more clever little tricks to hide the dick until I was too far away for them to shove it back in my pocket. Folding it in half, handing it to them face down, rolling it up like a cocaine addict—nothing. Even that vegetable at the smoke shop—you know, the place where they sell the hemp clothing and ‘decorative’ bongs—stomped on my genius: stoner Sherlock actually managed to disengage the wad I’d made of the bills before I’d even gotten past the bead fringe over the door. I swore at him and he gave me a peace sign, putting my Jerry Garcia commemorative plate back on the shelf next to the dragon figurines. That place had been as close as I’d been able to get to a sure shot, but since it didn’t pan out, I was left with only one option: the porn shop. I mean, logically, if anyplace would accept dick-money, that would be it, right?

What a shithole that place is. No lie, the dildos were dusty—not that I was browsing them for purchase or anything. I did look at some ten-year-old hardcore flicks for a few minutes just so the fetish chick at the register with the veiny tits wouldn’t think I was an impulsive psycho or something. Being more of an internet connoisseur, myself, seeing all those video boxes lined up like a hard-bodied army was something of a mindfuck. I didn’t know which one to choose, but didn’t want to spend so long deciding that Fakeboobs would swoop in to help me make an educated decision; so I just grabbed something with dirty babysitters on it. I could feel Jack pulsing at my hip, which I took to mean that this was going to be the end of the road for my part in his adventure. It was a new frontier from this point on, from my hand to hers. The world was his oyster.

“What, are you some sort of sicko?” One minute, I’m passing Jack over like the Olympic torch, and the next, we’re staring at each other, nose-to-nose. Just like the Big Gulp, my consumerism was chopped off at the knees because my miniature president had a preference for massive penises. If she hadn’t called me a joker and shown me the door with her middle finger, I would’ve used my house key to pop those saline balloons on her chest. Bitch.

It was colder on the street than when I’d gone in, just like when you go to the movies in the afternoon and get out after dark. I was disoriented and dizzy; the Jackson was searing his face into my hand like a branding iron; I couldn’t feel anything from the waist down. This stupid twenty-dollar bill was single-handedly dismantling my life, and I knew if I didn’t get rid of it soon, I was going to go insane. Or, even worse, become impotent or something. I guess that doesn’t really justify anything, but when you’ve got a demon-dong you just can’t shake, there’s no precedent for civility. There was no way that thing was going to follow me home—especially now that the moths were beginning to collect around the streetlights. If I didn’t get rid of it then, there was no chance until the next morning. And that just wasn’t an option.

Still, he probably thought I was crazy when I approached him. And I don’t blame him, really, since I looked at his crotch before I looked at his face. But he was a nice-looking kid, all alone outside the video game store—which most likely meant his junk didn’t often see anything but his own hand. So I nudged him on the shoulder, then asked, “Hey, you wanna make twenty bucks?”

OCTOBER 13

TITLE: "Horse"
NOTES: Another story sketch - this one
could go somewhere, if I get some direction
and the balls to hand it in. Still very rough. No, really.

-----

The night was colder than he’d expected; John could feel his dick shrinking even as he sprinted through the field towards the fence. His stomach was tight with anticipation, coiling speed into the tops of his thighs to expel the lactic acid already beginning to build there. He was going to pay for it tomorrow; he should have stretched. But the thought of seeing Rocky sent liquid fire snaking down to his groin, fingers of heat stroking what lay between his legs and pushing him faster through the shadows. He fell but once, when the toe of his workboots caught in a gopher hole, sending him sprawling out in the high grass like a felled elk. The wind escaped him in a single grunt to echo the sudden ache in his elbows and knees, but he was up and away again within moments. Shadows clung to the grass like a heavy morning fog, dampening his socks and sending the shivers of a chill up the back of his legs, beneath the flannel-lined denim of his jeans.

Then, he was there, eye-level with the highest strand of thin wire. It seemed to crackle and glow blue with the threat of electrical shock, but John’s attention was elsewhere: Rocky was looking at him from across the field. Even in the dark, John could see the recognition in those wide, watery eyes, and smiled, clicking his tongue against the back of his teeth. “Rocky.” His voice wavered slightly, too weak to bear the strain of all the love it was expected to convey. There were no words. John felt his heart flutter as Rocky approached, and pistoned his arm out from the barrier between them, closing his eyes and holding his breath in anticipation of the pending contact.

The calloused flesh of his fingers met solid body and the short, sleek hairs of skin; Rocky shivered once, sending waves out across his body that made John’s heart fluttered in adoration. Oh, how he loved the horse. Everything about him was perfect, from the gentle arc and slope of his profile to the delicate hollows at the base of his hocks—it was aesthetic perfection on every level, and John still couldn’t believe he was touching it. Drunk on the rich, tangy smell of horse, he thrust his arm out farther, as far as the fence would let him, running his fingers over the contours of his obsession, memorizing every dip and rise, every pockmark and dimple. The undulating ridges of ribs, the wide, smooth expanse of a flank.

Presently, Rocky turned towards John and snorted, bathing the latter’s hand with warm, oat-scented breath that caused his testicles to pucker and tighten (pronoun disagreement). His breath held captive in his throat, John stroked the velvet muzzle, allowing his fingers to dip into the hollows of the nostrils and find the moisture collected there. He shuddered blissfully, then brought his hand back through the fence to his cold world on the other side. Quickly, before the living warmth could escape the glistening tips of his fingers, he unzipped his fly and dropped his hand beyond and down past the denim swaddling him from waist to ankle. The other dipped into a back pocket, leaving him fumbling in his pants with both hands until he found the pink packets of SweetN’ Low where they’d been flattened for hours against the gentle curve of his hip. He’d saved them since his afternoon shift at the diner, bemoaning the lack of real sugar as he did thirty hours a week, every day except Tuesdays and Thursdays. Using his teeth to rip open the miniature package, he emptied the contents into his palm and held it out to the horse, flat, as he’d been taught the first time he’d ever had contact with the animals, back before the sight of their svelte figures and intelligent eyes gave him an instant boner (word choice). Back before his mother had hung herself in their garage; back before his father had withered into anonymity; back when he still believed in God.

Now he believed in horses.

As Rocky’s tongue, large and slippery like a frog but so much warmer, drew across his palm, catching so slightly on the callouses, John worked more intently on the interior of his tented fly. His pace became as frantic as his pulse, causing beads of sweat to form a martyr’s crown upon his brow, and the speed with which he began to stroke the place between the horse’s eyes soon matched that with which he stroked the place between his own legs.

OCTOBER 12

NOTES: On the 16th, my first short story is
due to be workshopped in my fiction-writing class.
I've got no ideas; these are some of my rough sketches.

-----

UNTITLEDa
I was eleven years old when the first storm hit. Young but not too young—perfect, they always said. But I always did look older than my age, probably because I was so tall. Even so, I couldn’t grow a decent moustache until I was old enough to drink legally. Ma often said that it was a pity I wasn’t more well spoken; she’d always envisioned having a politician in the family, and with Petey laid up because of his leg and Richard still dumb as a bunny, I was the only hope. I guess you could say that I was both the savior and the destroyer of our family, even though it was all Ma’s fault to begin with.

She was never very good at following directions, especially when they when they were given over the radio. A frequent worshiper at the church of Believe None of What You Hear and Half of What You See, she would always scoff at warnings of escaped criminals or rampaging viruses, saying that they were just trying to get us to stock up on toilet paper and bug spray. According to her logic, if the apocalypse hit, having a stockpile of canned meats wouldn’t do much good. She was probably a realist, but at the time we just called her crazy.

But when Kirk Haverand told us all to get to our storm cellars and remember our flashlights, I knew that Ma’s government conspiracy theories were going to finally get us killed. She told me to be quiet when I begged her to unlock the door to the basement, assuring me that the roar I was hearing was just a freight train rumbling in the distance. I shouldn’t be scared by the noise, she told me sternly, her hands buried to the wrists in bread dough, and that an eleven-year-old who’s lived on top of the tracks for half his life should know what an approaching train sounds like by now. So she kneaded, the slapping of her palms upon the counter signaling the finality of our conversation. It was over; I had lost. If the twister had barreled down the road right then, screaming at her through the window over the sink, I doubt she would have acknowledged it. But she’d always been stubborn like that. Probably why I can’t stand to brush my teeth at other people’s houses, where the light isn’t how I like it.


UNTITLEDb
It was all the iron bars could do to hold him, so strong was the force of his convictions. They were always more powerful when they were innocent—which was why the innocent were the most fun to break.

From his seat behind the relative sanction of the long table, the doctor viewed his newest patient through narrowed eyes. Another young man in the prime of life, brought down by the lethal thread of an automatic weapon stopping his legs at the knees. Barely cauterized, he sat at the far end of the room with angry scabs formed over the stumps.


UNTITLEDc
They’d brought him in for questioning because of all the moths they’d found in front of his house. Piles of them, dead, soggy from the rain and beginning to stink. On every other porch in the neighborhood, the blue lights of bug zappers flickered and hummed with the pleasant tingle of miniature carnage.


UNTITLEDd
The flies were almost loud enough to drown out the rusty repetition on “Crazy Train” coming from the broken jukebox in the corner. Everything smelled like drying sweat and beerfarts; I swear you could see it in the air, just floating there like a cloud of mustard gas. But it was always like that when it got hot, so I was pretty much immune by then. Not completely, though, because when I went to shake Terry Geats and tell him his wife was bitching at him on the phone again, I almost keeled over from the stench. It was worse than usual, even for him. Of course, it wasn’t like I knew he was dead or anything, so you can’t blame me for throwing an arm over my nose and using the other to poke him gingerly on the shoulder. I didn’t want to touch him, alright? If I’d had a ten-foot stick, I would’ve used that, no lie. His face was in his shepherd’s pie, and it had started to congeal in his beard, which was pretty damn gross. Especially since the flies had started to notice and were having a fit over it. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t wake up with all that buzzing, but I figured he was just drunk to high heaven like usual. It happened all the time, so Pete and I would usually just heft him up, haul him out to the back next to the dumpsters, then call his wife to come collect him.


PORNO
I got recognized on the street today. Some guy, some old guy with an impressive paunch and those Jeffrey Dahmer glasses—you know, the tortishell cokebottles—told me that he’d been in love with me ever since Locked, Cocked, and Loaded, and that he’d pay me twenty bucks if I let him touch my dick. It was probably the weirdest thing ever; I’m pretty sure I shat myself a little inside. But I just shrugged, walked with him into that alley behind the Chinese buffet, and whipped it out. From his face, you’d think he’d never seen a circumcized dong before, because he sort of sucked in his breath as he touched me. Real lightly, too, like anything more than a whisper would break it off. Didn’t get me hard or anything, since he was so creepyass and I was pretty sure that, at any minute, this little tour was going to get interrupted by some unlucky asian busboy taking out the trash; but the perv seemed to get a real kick out of it, because he smiled at me when his callouses made me shiver. Like I was some sort of fucking statue in a museum somewhere. A statue wearing five-pocket jeans that he could shove two wrinkled tens into. I felt them there for the rest of the day, Jefferson’s mug burning into my ass.

And it’s not like I needed twenty bucks or anything. After I put my junk back and high-tailed it out of there, I went to do my scene with Brandon Steele; it paid two-grand. Yeah, I spent the day giving rimjobs and getting my colon scrubbed.

OCTOBER 9

TITLE: none
CLASS: Intro to Fiction.
ASSIGNMENT: Write the first page of a short story.

-----

The hobo was yelling again.

From his spot in the cherry-colored shadows, Johan wrung his hands. They were spindly hands, like spiderwebs with brown beneath the bitten-down nails. Hands that had been made for ivory keys and Eighteenth-Century drawing rooms, not Twenty-First Century brownstones with peculiar smells escaping through every fissure out to the waking world. Johan did his best to keep the aroma contained behind slipshod chinking of doorjambs and windowsills—just like he’d spent a week on his hands and knees with a chisel and a hammer, etching an army of bloodgutters into the floor. There was passion in every dark drip sinking past the wood grain, every sticky emulsion catching on the bottoms of his socks.

His apples.

Johan cringed where he stood, recoiling behind the gingham curtains. It was the same thing every day: the hobo would cry for handouts and Johan would hide, flattening himself against the wall until the concavity of his body formed a breathing alcove ‘No, you can’t have any; they’re mine; none can be spared; I need them.’

“Come on,” the hobo yelled, waving his arms like the madman he was, “you don’t need them all.”

Johan peeked out from his hiding place and past the dirty windowpane to the street and the demon standing in the middle of it. “Yes, I do,” he replied. His attempts to keep his voice from jumping up a decibel failed, and an apple-colored flush crept up his neck to burn his cheeks and ears.

The hobo couldn’t hear the decline(word choice?), but he could feel it, and was injured accordingly. Indignation registering on his grimy face, he sneered and tossed Johan a carefully-chosen finger before saying, “Fine, you freak. But don’t think I can’t see all them apples in there. Like the ones right behind you.”

Following the accusatory path of the hobo’s pointed finger, Johan turned to the curio cabinet behind him: hundreds of mummified faces peered back at him from behind curved doors that used to have glass. Those were decades-old apples, his favorites, and the hobo had seen them. Feeling like his feet were mired in bear traps, Johan dropped to his hands and knees beneath the windowsill, and crawled out of the fray and into the relative safety of the bathroom, rolling apples gently out of his way as he did so.

OCTOBER 2

TITLE: none
CLASS: Intro to Fiction.
ASSIGNMENT: In the style of Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants,"
write a short, dialogue-based story using only four lines of exposition.
Three-page maximum.

-----

“So, who’s that?”

“That’s the quarterback.”

“And what does he do?”

“Tries to run the ball into the endzone for a touchdown.”

“How many points does that get again?”

“Seven—only six if the placekicker doesn’t make field goal for the extra point.”

“And which one’s he?”

From her perch at the end of the sofa, cocooned in her afghan, the old woman sighed and cast a despairing gaze to the young man at her right. “You don’t know anything about football, do you?”

It was obvious that he didn’t.

“If I’d known that school was going to turn you into a fag, I wouldn’t have paid to send you there,” she said.

“I’m not a fag, Gram,” the boy replied.

“Don’t get a tone with me. No one’s forcing you to sit here.”

“Yeah, just Mum,” he said.

“Your mother’s an idiot.”

“But she likes football.”

“Well, that just proves that your father was a no-good chud,” the old woman countered. “You must’ve gotten the fag genes from him.”

“Alright, Gram. Why don’t we just try watching something else then? I think there’s a Cary Grant movie on Channel Three.”

“What, because I’m old I have to like Cary Grant? And just try rolling your eyes at me again.”

“Everyone likes Cary Grant,” the boy stated.

“Only geriatrics.”

“And fags?”

“Fags most of all.”

For a moment, silence hung in the air, punctuated only by the slap of flesh against flesh from the television and the occasional wheeze from the old woman. Then the boy pointed at the screen and said, “What’s that?”

“What?”

“That thing they just threw.”

“Oh, that? It’s the yellow flag. Means someone’s fouled.”

“What? When?”

“Just now—didn’t you see? Number thirteen clipped number thirty-two from behind, right there.”

“Oh, I thought that was the whole point.”

“No, no, you can’t hit a defender from—” She cursed and rose slightly from her seat as the screen faded to the candy-colored stripes of a station signal that quickly yielded to a man at a podium. “What the hell is this?”

“Looks like some live feed from Washington,” the young man replied.

“So who’s this joker?” the old woman asked.

“He’s the Speaker of the House.”

“What does he do?”

SEPTEMBER 30

TITLE: On Good and Evil
CLASS: Composition and Rhetoric - Literary Monsters
ASSIGNMENT: Write a comparative essay discussing the ideals of "good versus evil"
as described in Beowulf and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Five page minimum.

-----

We think that we should be able to see them from afar. Their eyes should shine red and, when their skin is broken, they should bleed black. They’re the monsters under your bed, the pedophile in your duplex, the face of your enemies—they’re evil. Defined by Merriam-Webster as anything “morally reprehensible or wicked,” we’ve all grappled with the subtle nuances contained within the confines of those four letters. And while our idle musings usually don’t find themselves on paper, they’re not so different than those woven into the oft-read lines of the books whose message has no age. Yes, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is outdated in terms of its vernacular and social standards—Beowulf, as well, is quite antiquated, having been written more than a millennium ago—but the underlying themes still ring true: Good is the antithesis of Evil, and never the twain shall meet.

Perhaps these stories are more outmoded than we thought. Perhaps the conventions of Good and Evil are as dead as the men who wrestled with them centuries ago. From the Bible to headlines relegating terrorist organizations to the fifth level of hell, there is no shelter from the barrage of the dichotomy. On the surface, the concept is simplistic, yet beneath the childhood understanding, there are subtleties so intertwined it’s almost impossible to separate them: Good becomes Evil; black becomes while; all fades to grey. Is there even a line to draw? And if so, where to draw it? Ironically, the worn pages of those aforementioned bookshelf staples are a good place to start. For while the characters’ speech may seem alien to us, the space between their words is not: our philosophical infidelities match theirs in intensity, if not in eloquence.

One of the world’s oldest surviving pieces of literature, Beowulf is a natural place to commence—after all, aside from the human inclination to ‘begin at the beginning,’ the title character’s passage though life, moving from quest to gallant quest, isn’t completely unlike our own search for answers. Though not so different, comparing one’s desire to know to a heroic journey is presumptuous, especially in the face of such grand deeds. And it’s in his nobility that Beowulf’s innate Goodness lies—with that celebrated antihero whose wickedness is only trumped by his taste for human flesh. Grendel, the mutated beast that he is, becomes a classic villain (and, therefore, classically Evil) due to his actions alone: there’s nothing good about killing people in a messy manner, devouring the majority of their bodies, and leaving the rest to fester until the morning when they’ll inevitably greet comrades with the blank gazes that only the fresh dead can master.

“What a deformed monster sin has made you!” Joseph Alleine spoke to the ideals of his Scandinavian predecessors with such a statement, playing easily into the concept that sins, those classic vehicles of Evil, can make a man a monster. At that point, less than human and anything but divine, Grendel—poor, “God-cursed Grendel” (11), that “grim demon” (9)—had ceased to be anything other than his deeds. And his deeds, such as “blundering back with the deserted corpses” (11), were certainly detestable. Simply put, there is a play on opposites there that leaves little room for contestation: Beowulf is Good, Grendel is Evil, and that’s where the story ends. It’s uncomfortable, after all, to spend even a few moments ruminating silently on the possibility that underneath the blood-splattered body counts, there might just be a shard of a soul. A human soul.

But humanity as a whole is indoctrinated with the notion that everything is cut-and-dry. In such a world there is little room for deviation, and the very act of questioning these well-fortified institutions is, in itself, a desecration of ‘Truth’s’ shining façade. Even Beowulf’s title character boxes his enemy into a narrow fault, making sure that “no earthly offspring of Grendel’s need ever boast of that bout before dawn, no matter how long the last of his evil family survives” (137). It’s for such a reason that Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde treads such a fine line between the cognitive and the revolutionary. On the surface, you have a quaint horror story with only enough depth to satisfy the purely scientific mind—a man with two personalities: the admirable and the abominable. Mr. Hyde is everything our modern society considers evil, inasmuch as he tramples children, murders old men, and abuses prescription drugs. Moreover, to the Victorian world in which he was written to inhabit, Hyde was more than just a villain, he was a degenerate: dressing poorly, slamming doors, and generally living an impious life.

In fact, one could go so far as to say that, in his own right, Mr. Hyde is the Victorian equivalent of death, having literally “trampled his victims underfoot.” But more profoundly, he is the personification of disorder, which, to the pre-Edwardian mind, was a fate worse than death. He represented all that the people of that era killed within themselves and, in the end, literally destroyed the man whose passion had been so repressed. Thus, it would be remiss to label Hyde ‘evil’ and call it a day—as is done by his peers: “The last I think; for, O poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend” (12). Jekyll, for all his cross-bearing, deserves no gentler a verdict. It’s his wicked desire to play with fire that ultimately burns him to ash and turns the saliva to dust in our mouths. Without decades of oppressed intentions weighing upon his sense of self, Jekyll could never have filled the vessel of his alter-ego, allowing what may have been fifty years of normal, human urges to animate the dark side of his personality with whom he never allowed himself to associate.

But ignoring the evil inside ourselves is something to which we’re all accustomed; there is no room in the social order for people who flout the laws of convention, unspoken though they may be. Murder may be illegal, but sociopathy is not, leading to the stuffing of passions and subsequent explosions thereof. It can be said that there is at least a little evil in us all, just as there is some good—case in point, the late Dr. Henry Jekyll. He is no less human than you or I, no matter the form. But can the same be said for Beowulf’s tragic desperado?

There is certainly more to Grendel than meets the eye, more than just the fiendish, bloodthirsty rogue who haunted the marshes and elected himself the sole executioner of an entire clan. He is not so unlike his modern-day brethren, many of whom are also deemed monsters by their contemporaries. Though noted serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer preferred to keep his victims’ heads in the icebox, he and Grendel share more than just an inclination to snack on the flesh of virile men: the Milwaukee Cannibal just wanted his prey to stay a while and keep him company, and the Danish hellion simply desired that his human peers keep their merriment—something he was unable to share—down to a dull roar. In both cases, it’s apparent that loneliness is the iniquitous womb that birthed the wickedness; and there is nothing more human than that.

In that same vein, however, the heroes from both tales aren’t the unerring saints they are touted to be. Henry Jekyll, in all his infinite wisdom and pious purpose, referred to the warring facets of his split personality as “polar twins.” Offspring born of the same dam and identical at the core, if nowhere else. Despite having hid behind pretense for the majority of the story, by its conclusion, he addresses his audience with the frankness so suddenly afforded to him—the kind of frankness reachable only in death. That simple fact alone, the cowardice displayed, is enough to keep a man from crossing the Styx. In fact, had the publishing dates of the two books been transposed, it’s unlikely Jekyll would have made it past page one. Pre-Dark Ages Scandinavia was worlds apart from the tight-laced, seemingly-virtuous stage of Victorian England. Only in the latter was self-deprecation viewed as a viable form of self expression, leading to an ease of living the toll of which was taken from the pocket of individuality. Beowulf’s environment, however, was anything but such a comforting clamshell, instead valuing great, heroic deeds that, aside from being grand civic duties, served as pedestals upon which men could stand out from the pack. Glory was coveted even more than gold and, as such, cowardice had no place and was spared no pity. Running from the unknown was an embarrassment to king and country—not to mention the gods. Beowulf was anything but a coward, yet his legacy was built upon the bones of the slain. He killed to avenge death, but the blood of murders is no less red than that of a hero. Though Grendel wasn’t a true human in form, there was humanity in at least some portion of his tortured soul. Just as, buried beneath the glossy layers of their Goodness, both Jekyll and Beowulf have demons of their own: Beowulf his lust for glory and vengeance, and Jekyll his insatiable thirst for knowledge of the unknown.

So it would seem that there is little to be said for the Good versus Evil debate, at least when literature is involved. Even the driest springs retain memories of what once existed beneath the dust: that which might exist again. Whether it be the virtuous or the unholy, there is the predisposition in every man and beast to fall onto either side of the spectrum. And even at the end of the day, when all is said and done and all dice have been cast, there is still cause for investigation, still the certainty that, no matter the sub-sect of humanity (or bestiary, as the case may be), nothing can ever be cut-and-dry, good and bad. Heroes could not be heroes without villains and vice-versa, just as a hero cannot truly understand his enemy without having some part of that ‘evilness’ existing within him already. A revelation to both sides, and perhaps for the better. But not one that comes without a price: the ingrained assurances that keep the natural, literary order of things in check.


WORKS CITED

Heaney, Seamus. Beowulf. New York, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000.

Stevenson, Robert L. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dover, 1991.

SEPTEMBER 25

TITLE: none
CLASS: Intro to Fiction.
ASSIGNMENT: Write a true account of an event in your life.
Two-page maximum.

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It smelled like sweaty horses the day he left. Even after I came home, I could still smell them on me and feel the flies that landed on their hocks. I wished for a tail. Wished for a tail even after she told me that he’d been gone since eight o’clock. “For good?” I asked. “Yes,” she said, calling him your father for the benefit of her own tears. As if the dam would be broken the moment she spoke his name.

I didn’t cry. He’d been packing his bags for three years, and the horses were still leaving fresh hoof prints in my mind. Their smell was on the front burner; he’d been shunted to the back. It had been a complete consumption, the buzzards plucking at his eyes before they’d even closed, and by the time he’d finally made it over the threshold, there was no point in galvanizing the relief.

After having seen him for the last time on the previous afternoon, surrounded by all that white and silence, it was nice to have the horses. They carried away the memory of his glassy eyes and the lingering ammonia that still stung the inside of my nostrils. He was glad to see them, I knew it, glad to have pallbearers that would make me smile and forget that his address was changing: plot number 141, next to the dogwood and away from the world.

The horses were gone when we went to see him off—a bon voyage from the sunlit world to the shadowlands—but the wind still carried their smell as his footprints followed their trail.