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.

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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.