What is this?

"What is this?"

It was an explosion of sexual desire in springtime. It was a telling metaphor that entwined passion and dedication and untold loathing. It was the pride of a nation, the tyrannical grasp of a despot, and the shimmering iris of God's irrelevant gaze.

"What is this, David?" The school counselor shook the shattered canvas in front of me, with the heavy wooden frame hanging on by a thousand dulled, tiny little staples. It made a glub, glub sound as it danced in the air, hanging by nothing but a series of four hairy knuckles. And being completely enveloped by the moment, I blurted out my answer in monotone.

"Looks like a work of art to me."

The forty-year-old failure sitting across from me was suddenly three inches from my face. He was breathing onions into my eyes. My painting was now the hammer of a blunderbuss, his tanned arm cocked back behind him, just waiting for my next move. So I coughed, knowing that the ACLU and the law were both on my side. There was an audible pop along one of his brain's major arteries as he slumped back into his chair. Anger management must work after all.

"You may think so," the counselor conceded. "I think it's a warning sign. A warning of untold violence. I think, Mister Davis, that I might write that down in this little report to DHS." He slid a pink form across the oak desk.

"Department of Homeland Security?" I glanced up and down the form in disbelief, holding it away from my face as if it might explode a la Mission Impossible. "What do they have to do with anything?"

The counselor had calmed down and was now wearing a smug grin under his peppered beard. I could tell he was proud of his little trump card: Form A138, Non-participatory Antisocial Zealous Infraction, Office of Schools and Learning Facilities, Department of Homeland Security. It was some sort of scarlet letter on my so-called determinant record.

"They have everything to do with everything. In today's post-nine-eleven, post-Columbine, post-Clinton, post-Blair world, the Department of Homeland Security has tasked us, the guidance counselors of the nation, to report any suspicious individuals to the all-seeing oh-slef." Logic was dying, and its screams were echoing through bullhorn feedback in my skull.

"But it was just a--"

"Let me finish, son. Now I don't want to do this. I studied for two hard years at the Baptist College of Florida to get this job, and I put in all that work to help people, not black-bag them non-stop to Guantanamo Bay. But Davey, this sort of anti-strophic behavior has to stop." He was calm now. He was bargaining, with his hands folded neatly in prayer fashion on the desk. Slouching. And I could still smell onions lingering in my sinuses.

I discretely pulled out my cell phone as he plowed on and on through the story of his childhood, trying to draw a bold line between his past and my present. He noted our similar hairstyles, the fact that our hometowns started with "Sp-," and our affinity for the color red. I didn't listen except to make jokes about him inside my busy head. I just calmly pawed over the digits on my phone. Like many high school students my age I can text message people without looking.

I was listening for the words "Do you have anything to say for yourself before I fill out this form, Donny," and when he finally managed to get them out on the tail end of a deep breath, I smugly drew my phone three inches to his face.

Whatever grainy photograph my cousin had attached to the text message, it wasn't pretty. I couldn't see it from my vantage point. All I could see was the shock on my guidance counselor's face as he slumped further and further into his pleather chair. When his head was vertical to the seat, I withdrew the phone, slid it back into my pocket, whipped a few peach-colored tissues out of the dispenser on his desk and leaned over to see what I had done.

"Here, sir." I dropped the tissues and waited as they wafted, ever so gently, onto the broken forty-year-old's crying face. And when they landed and stuck to his half-opened, sputtering lips, I reached for the broken canvas and folded it into my backpack.

"You really shouldn't put so much effort into your job, sir. It's known to drive women away." He was bawling now, fiddling with his wedding ring and letting out the sporadic painful moan. "But on the bright side, now you can go out and find a good Christian woman." That was the last thing I said to him as I walked calmly out the door, taking care to shut it behind me.

I called my cousin to congratulate him on a job well done. I told him I had never seen such flawless attention to detail before. The bodies were... disgustingly contorted. Sockets seemed to be pulled out of their joints, and their faces were forever scarred with gaping maws that reflected pain and pleasure.

I asked him how he found her so fast, to which he replied, "A gentleman never tells, and a lady never asks."

I smiled and thanked him. Then I took a last look at the picture before I closed the phone.

The counselor's wife with the principal's cock in her ass, shot from a knee-high perspective in a dingy hotel room. A work of art I might proudly hang next to my painting of the shower drain from Psycho, once I repair the canvas. It pays to have a nerd in the family. Especially one who's really, really good at Photoshop.