The Bus

Through darkness he could hear the school bus pulling away from soft, wet sand and gravel. The air was hot and held itself like a hand over his face. He could feel straps digging into his frail frame, gluing him in place as the rickety yellow machine built momentum over the dirt road.

And it was loud. Voices like sirens grew louder with every step he took down the aisle. The drone of the diesel motor shook his uneasy feet along the floor.

His weak arms tested the void ahead as he fumbled for a seat. More yelling. More sirens.

Then his outstretched hand found refuge in another, and it pulled him close.

“Danny?” an angelic voice shouted through the chaos.

“Me! I’m Danny!”

“It’s your sister.”

“Margeaux!”

“I thought we were going to lose you there for a second,” she said jokingly, cradling his small head against her shoulder as the bus bounced over tree roots and potholes.

“Is it like this every day?”

She laughed and patted his hand.

“I promise you’ll feel better once we get there.”

He took no solace in the unyielding darkness of the early morning hours. With his eyes clinched shut, he pictured the blurry tapestry of oak, pine and moss as it had whizzed by him so many times under an overcast sun. His sister weaved her hands through his tangle of blonde hair, and he imagined the thick, damp Louisiana air blowing it around as it had on so many trips to town with his mom in her beige, wood-paneled station wagon.

He smiled and his grip loosened. His sister held firm.

“No, I’m here with you,” she said, and squeezed his hand.

“Okay.”

“Think about our first road trip. To Auntie’s house. You were only four years old.”

It felt like so long ago. He focused through the noise and the shaking and imagined an open road cutting through gently rolling hills and pastures of farmland. The road was black and smooth—just like in town—and it stretched on for miles and miles and hours and hours. There were big, brown, silly cows lazily grazing over acres of green grass.

“Remember racing that train?” His sister asked with a hint of sadness in her voice.

“I said ‘race it, race it!’” he replied with a big smile.

“That’s right,” she choked.

There was a pause.

“I love you, Margeaux.”

“I love you too, Danny. It won’t be long now. Just stay with me. Stay with us.”

He thought of his mother, and his sister, and his whole family, and his dog, Barkley, and kept going. He remembered his first day of school, and meeting a very pretty girl on the playground. He thought of his friends and throwing his cap high into the air at graduation. He thought of throwing a white veil over the soft brown hair of that pretty girl and kissing her like it was the first time. He thought of her face, beet red and glistening, as they held their newborn daughter.

He released these thoughts and smiled one last time before he drifted to sleep.

...

The old woman said nothing to the paramedic. He gently removed the oxygen mask from the old man’s face. Tubes and cords swayed back and forth around them as the drone of the diesel motor finally came to a stop.

The Selfish Accelerated Reader

It was noontime and I was 12 years old, and all I really cared about was living a few more months.

See, I had dreamed about my 13th birthday since before I turned 9. Not for the presents, of course— though I had heard through the colloquial grapevine that they're quite good when you turn 13. A neighbor of mine from back in Virginia received an iPhone for his 13th birthday. Engraved under the ubiquitous Apple logo were the words "To Our Young Man With Love."

Forget the phone, I remember thinking. I wanted those words. I wanted to be a teenager. I wanted to join the ranks of the non-childish and command more respect from my peers and my superiors and my parents after I crossed that all-important threshold. People would start to notice how mature I was for my age once I turned 13, or so I figured.

Instead it was noontime and I was 12 years old and in a few hours I would be definitively prevented from turning 13, due to death.

I looked down at my last meal. Great. There was not a single morsel of refined sugar or high-fructose corn syrup to be found in my unassuming red lunch pack. Nothing to take the edge off.

My loving mother would have certainly packed things differently if she'd known about her son's impending demise. Every death row inmate has a right to a Dublin Dr. Pepper, even if their scheduled execution happens to fall on a no-sodas-allowed weekday. And Gushers, too. And a fistfull of the Halloween candy my mom oh-so-wisely rations during the rest of the year.

That would be such a fitting culinary finale: Indulgent, childish and cheap. My achy, busting gut would lead me outside and to my final resting place in the dirt pit next to the swings on the playground. And when the body blows finally stopped, I would die with a half-pound of sugar numbing my frail, broken body.

How sad, I lamented as I jabbed my small, white straw through the foil cap at the top of my Big Kid's Juicy Juice.

No, no, wait. Mom is more than kind, I thought— she's smart. And she loves me. If I had told her about everything at the beginning of the week, she would have definitely hidden a few throwing stars between the slices of ham in my sandwich. I could even picture my quilted napkin stained with an encouraging note.

"I packed you something extra to get you through your fight with Tommy. XOXO, Mom."

But Mom didn't know, so she didn't pack me any weapons, keep me home from school or anything.

I paced my slow, methodical bites with every other tick of the giant black-and-white clock hanging above the lunchroom. I was sitting off by myself because I told my friends that I needed to be alone with my thoughts. They had conceded and dispersed with urgency as to imply that I needed as much time as possible to get my affairs in order. To plan an escape. To save my own ass.

1) There is no escape.
2) This is happening to me for a reason.

I vacillated between these two thoughts for an eternity before the 12:35 bell snapped me out of my melancholic stupor. Guilty and literally alone, I left the lunchroom feeling like I had wasted my only opportunity to solve this problem myself.

~~~

Close your eyes. Imagine for a moment that you've been standing in a 4-way intersection, blindfolded, for hours. Cars race by you indiscriminately. You can hear engines everywhere. You can feel them warping the air as they push toward their own respective destinations with no regard as to why there is a blindfolded child standing in the intersection. But you can't see them. And then suddenly, you feel something begin to press on your shoulder. You accept your fate and flinch and hope that the next blow is the conclusive coup de grace.

That's how I flinched when James tapped me on the shoulder after English class. The time was now seconds after 1:35. Less than two hours until my own personal Iwo Jima. My body was electrically tense.

"Whoa there," James rebounded. "Didn't mean to scare you."

I tried to casually turn my head and acknowledge my well-meaning friend, but instead my head bobbled and jerked like a crazy person. I was giving him the Sideways Stare by the time I finally made eye contact.

"He-ey," I said flatly, trudging along as James stepped alongside me.

"Dude, come on," he began immediately. James was about to try and cheer me up. "You know this isn't like, the end. All the guys I've talked to think you're being downright melodramatic about this fight with Tommy."

"James," I began, "while I appreciate what you're doing, there is no way for me to convey to you the isolation and hopelessness I'm feeling right now. If I could, you would understand why downplaying the situation certainly will not cheer me up."

"Hmmph." He motioned toward the goth kids clustered at the end of the corridor, playing some trading card game. "You think they know your pain?"

I grinned. God damn, he's good. There goes my veil of melancholy. It's a lot easier to deal with people when they think you're a sad pile. That, definitely, the goth kids would understand.

"You're retarded," I countered with age-appropriate instinct. We pushed through the heavy fire doors at the end of the hall. The change in lighting and scenery seemed like a good opportunity to also shift the conversation a little bit. "What made Tommy so violent, anyways?"

He looked at me like, duh, we all know what you did. He didn't have to say anything for me to get the point.

"No, no no," I continued. "Like, Tommy is a pure sociopath. He's the guy everyone warned me about when I moved here. What makes him so— "

"Fucking evil? A natural psychopath?" James energetically shrugged with a smile.

"Exactly."

James' smile turned to a glare and he didn't say anything but walked by my side as I approached my locker.

"Look, you need get one thing straight," he then started once I popped the locker open. "Your frustration with this situation that you caused is absolutely separate from Tommy's nature as a human being."

"That's absolutely not true," I retaliated, confused as to why my own friend would want to argue about such a seemingly cut-and-dry matter right now.

I mean, I'm about to die, I thought. If anything, I wanted him to lie to me, to tell me that Tommy's an animal-torturing nutjob living with an emotionally-abusive, alcoholic, ex-cop grandparent. I wanted to hear how said grandparent methodically recounted gruesome, violent crimes to his grandson every night before bed. Tell me that's why I'm about to die, I wished.

"You are being punished for committing a very popular crime of passion that has been met with similar consequences for centuries. Just think of Tommy as a very effective executor of said consequences."

"You're missing the point of my question entirely," I sigh with unfriendly exasperation as I slam my locker shut. "You wouldn't break every bone in my body if I'd done the same thing to you."

"If you did the same thing to me," James snapped back, "I would torture you. I would manipulate and ruin you in ways that lumbering, remedial, lonely jocks like Tommy simply cannot comprehend."

"Well, I guess that makes me the luckiest guy in the world."

"But you are," James continued coldly. Then, breathlessly and with animated hands shaking near my face, "Your so-called 'torment' will be over in a matter of hours. Every god damn student at this school will consider your punishment to be adequate and the lasting consequence of your reckless and irresponsible actions will be a slight tarnish on your reputation and you don't even care about your reputation or else we would be having a completely different conversation right now."

Bewildered, I asked him what that conversation we should be having.

"If and how you can really make things right with Tommy, instead of taking the easy way out."

There was no one standing around us— the bell had sounded in the midst of James' tirade. Frustrated by my confusion and with no grandiose points left to make, James hurled his heavy messenger bag over his shoulder and began to walk away.

"Well, can I?" I shouted as I inched backward toward my next class.

"I don't think it's in your nature," he shouted back.

~~~

Tommy stood over me like a giant, chiseled idol erected by fearful savages of an era passed. It was now or never. I'd spent the last hour reaching through layers of meta-cognition to find the words that would express my guilt and sorrow. And on the other hand, I knew I had to say what I meant and not what he wanted to hear to get out of the situation.

It was now or never.

"Look," I began with a hundred thousand eyes directed down on me. "I've had a lot of time to think about what I've done, and I understand that I must not only accept the retribution you're about to deliver, but that I must actually beg for it with open, upturned hands. I have wrecked whatever notion of love and trust and peace that you had in your life and replaced it with the same lonely, insecure feeling that haunts me on a daily basis and propels me toward my dumbest decisions. But I don't want to be an infectious agent of evil and mistrust in the world. I want to do good. And I'm not trying to convince you to change your mind about beating me up. I'm only trying to make things better. I'm trying to do my part to really, really affect some positive change in your life, so that whatever happens today makes tomorrow better for all of us."

The tears on my face were all that I could feel.

Tommy's patchy, adolescent mustache twitched as his determined sneer turned into a sort of neutral, unfeeling, blank expression. I had no idea what I'd done. Everyone within an earshot of my desperate soliloquy was silent, while those standing upon higher, more distant perches in the distances buzzed with all the confusion of a bloodthirsty, uninformed mob.

"You mean that?" He finally asked after an eternity of unblinking, exasperated fear. I nodded.

He beat me relentlessly, cursing and grunting the entire time.

After the fight was over and the murmur of the crowds faded into every different direction, I rolled over onto my back and just laid there. Everyone was gone. Everyone except James.

"Tuck and roll, man, tuck and roll," he said when he was facing me. He extended his hand and pulled me up.

"Ha ha," I coughed.

"So, how do you feel right now, on a scale from one to ten?" he asked.

"Thirteen," I groaned, and flinched as he patted me on the back.

---
I wrote that during my unemployment downtime, along with lots of unrelated bits and pieces I'll be finishing over the next few months. Stay tuned: I'm not done yet.

All my favorite authors had the flu

I've been riddled with flu for the past three days now. Lungs: Riddled with boiling black goo. Throat: Riddled with darts of pain. Upcoming paycheck: Riddled with absences.

So riddle me this: Where in the world did the following half-written narrative come from?

At some point in the past 72 hours, my poor brain reached up from beneath a sea of NyQuil, DayQuil, and whatever other self-medicating remedies were in my system at the time and tried to write a ridiculous short story. I have no recollection as to why, how, or when I started writing this. It was lingering in an unsaved tab in Notepad++ this morning when I woke up. It has no apparent message or meaning. In fact, it sounds like another cold open to a TV show I might watch, or maybe a Palahniuk novel I didn't read.

God, my medicated subconscious writes like the lofty bastard child of all transgressional fiction writers. You don't know self-loathing until you know how you write when you're delirious. I don't think it's bad. I just think it's the worst sort of cliche.

Usually, I would file this sort of thing under "finish later" and never think about it again. But since I have no idea where to take it from here, I present to you the half-written, unedited, misspelled scribble of an overly-medicated, sick individual. (To think I was considering going in to work yesterday!)


Light was easing through the cracks in my bedroom, gently rolling over the hardwood floor as dawn broke. The crisp, cool air of this Houston morning was like an unbiased conductor of sensory energy: Bird songs, warm coffee aroma, and a tickle of cool breeze all glided over my bed and landed, fruitlessly, on my empty pillow.

Because that's not where I was. I was face-deep in a sofa cushion that had not been washed for over five years, pinned down by a wicked hangover.

The smells of the sofa were stratified. If I pushed my head down lightly, I was privy to the smell of stale beer, Levis, and some girl's body wash from the night before. But if I gripped both ends of the cushion and really sank my schnoz into the stained brown cloth, something magical happened. I could see late 2003 like it was just yesterday.

Sniiiffff--- mmm, they just captured Saddam Hussein! And wait! Sniifffff-- yes! I smell John Kerry's presidential campaign taking off! Sniiff-- eww, wait, that smells like the first reported case of BSE in the United States. Sniff-- and I'm still a virgin?

Between the hangover and the sounds of construction outside, I probably kept my face burried in the couch for about two hours longer than I should have. But I wanted more sleep. Just a few more hours. A few more seconds. I finally gave up when the residence maid lazily knocked on the door to the basement and barged right in.

Her loud, frightened sigh prompted me to actually look up and survey the damage done to the basement during last night's round of careless debauchary. No pornography stuck to the wall with mustard on this perticular morning, but it looked like someone had carved about fifty crude dicks into the ceiling tiles with their long nails. I bite mine, so I'm in the clear. I guess I could be responsible for the pile of vomit next to the sofa, but I don't remember eating anything with peanuts in the past couple days. I'm most likely the one who scribbled "Queer for Beer" on the beer pong table with eyeshadow.

I pat my eyes for a second, half expecting to draw back eyeshadow and half expecting to draw back blood, too. Luckily, it's just eyeshadow this time.

Subtext and you

It was just another lazy Sunday afternoon spent in the midst of golf tournaments, washing machines and half-dazed conversations with other hungover twentysomethings until I received a knock at the door. I shuffled past the mound of laundry blocking the entryway to my apartment and peeked through door's eyepiece to see a frail, well-dressed old man complete with red bow tie and a giant leather bound book at his side.

"Mormons." I thought to myself as I hesitantly opened the door and put on my best deceptive smile.

"Allow me to introduce myself," the man said, slipping past me and into my apartment. Before I could think of a witty way to tell him to get the fuck out of my place he was already setting a perch at the kitchen counter, situated over his book and now sporting a very old-school pair of reading glasses. I locked the door and cautiously made my way to the opposite end of the countertop.

"You were wondering," he continued, "about the first time you ever put purpose into your words." He was running a frail finger over the tiny lines of his book, flipping entire reams worth of paper at a time as he scanned the volume for whatever he was looking for. "You were wondering about subtext. You were wondering when you first used subtext to get what you want. Well, I'm Doctor Allen Wentworth, your personal historian. I think I can answer that question."

I didn't really have to say anything after that. I mean, he'd already proven his credentials to me by reading my mind. You try telling your personal historian to scram. Besides, he was going to tell me something cool.

Or kill me and take everything I own. Whatever.

"It's classic Kyle to wonder about things like that, especially now," he said with a smirk as his eyes shot up toward me for a moment. "Especially now that you're nothing but a walking, talking allegory unto yourself." I gave him the glance equivalent of a "fuck you" as he relentlessly poured over the pages. He was already halfway through the book.

"But seriously, it's not really subtext with you anymore. It's more..." he trailed off as he leaned in closer to the book, then backed up and continued again. "It's more of an inability to do anything without incorporating your feelings, somehow. It's not sub enough to be subtext. You're just sort of, text." I was about to argue when he shot that cold, old gaze back up and me and said "I also have a Ph.D in English lit. I know what I'm talking about."

"Why are you just, some guy?" I asked.

He didn't look up to answer. "What, you figured an older version of yourself would come visit? That's ridiculous."

Then there was an awkward pause that lasted at least 30 seconds, which is like an eternity when your personal historian is extracting meaning from your life story. I tried to remember exactly what had brought all this on. When did I wish for the answer to such a strange question? And why is he answering this one when I have so many better questions to ask?

I mean, I wonder about a lot of stuff. I could just as easily wondered about my favorite kind of creole food, or the most mad I've ever been, or whether or not I'm wasting my time. When suddenly...

"Ah," the historian let loose in a sort of guttural squelch. "Here we go."

I replied sarcastically. "So which girl was it?"

"Girl?" He amusedly replied and let out an old, hollow chuckle. "What is it with you and girls? It's possible for men like you to be motivated by things besides women."

"I thought they loved the whole brooding, figuring out song lyrics sort of thing."

"Only the crazy ones," he grinned. "But yeah, it was back in middle school. It was... your away message on instant messenger."

"I guess that sort of figures. What did it say?" He pointed to the page and I gave it a quick glance-over. "Wow, that's like the Holocaust of metaphors."

"But hey, at least it original." The old historian stood up and pulled the book back under his arm. "And at least you've still got that," and he began toward the door.

"Wait," I implored. "I have another question."

"Oh, well," he stopped in the doorway. "I can only answer the questions you can't figure out for yourself."

I tried to think of a question before giving up and smiling. "Oh, ha, you're clever."

"Well," he said looking down at the book. "I do read a lot."

Wide-eyed, part 1

We have a saying among the angels and demons-- God created everything you take for granted, and everything else was us. I mean, it's not like mountains and planets and greenscapes and cognizance are necessarily unappreciated. The point is that you probably don't remember what the morning air smelled like when it rushed your face as you left your apartment this morning but you probably do remember what the inside of your girlfriend's mouth felt like last night.

She's a fine piece of work, that succubus. I tapped that at a party about three hundred years ago.

Anyways, I need to set up some backstory before I can explain why we're talking in the first place. The bad news is that Earth was created word-for-word as it says in the Old Testament. The good news is that science explains word-for-word how we went about creating everything. And where was I when God was creating the heavens and the earth? Hell, I was there on Day One and fired by Day Two.

God didn't just snap his fingers and create light, you see. Well, he did, but it was the kind of snapping that your boss throws at you with a glare when you're dicking around the water cooler at work. No, God had a vast army of angels that hurriedly got to work plotting out wave equations, figuring out the energy in light quantum, tracing rays, and rendering all that shit. The basis for all science was laid out in a day and, well, I'd say we did pretty well considering the time constraints.

Then God did a really selfish thing-- he issued us pink slips. Not all of us, you see, but a select bunch of the best and brightest engineers from the Day One project. The termination letter itself said something about a dislocation of resources and that our services were no longer needed. We were to report to God's office for de-winging and to be reprocessed into dirt and dark matter.

Yeah, fuck that.

So after a pretty lengthy argument with an omnipotent deity we were all cast out of Heaven and into that other otherworldly place. We grabbed all the furniture we could carry, recruited all the pissed-off angels we could convince, and took the dive down to.... well, you know where. A common misconception is that we're nothing but evil, us demons. But some of us were simply fired.

My Latinized name is Apertus, though you may be more familiar with my work on the speed of light. General and special relativity? Yeah, those were side projects of mine, too, but you don't see any goofy pictures of me with my hair up and tongue out adorning the walls of college dorm rooms. I never really wanted recognition, though. I just wanted fucking job security.

So anyways, the thing about demons is that we're all sort of doomed to doing bad things simply to stay alive. God doesn't exactly air-drop palates of angel-sustaining mana into heck so, instead, we nibble on human souls. Most demons phase into the physical realm every now and then to grab a bite of soul-- just a nibble, though. Just enough to stay alive. Characteristic demon bitemarks include politics and heartbreak.

I always found the whole process rather archaic, honestly. I mean, going up to earth and charming women in bars just so I could steal their love and eat it on cheddar bread with deli mustard is sort of, I dunno, inefficient. A waste of my time. And being called a bastard every morning when you wake up next to these innocent girls isn't exactly the century's self-esteem booster.

So I came up with a better way. Cameras.

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.

Better than coffee

It started off as a simple distraction, which is how most of these stories tend to start. Kyle thought that a good half-hour of lighthearted prose would get him in the mood to peel open his next take-home exam and apply the right amount of obfuscation and correct answers in order pull B-minus in said class. Exam time at Rice University is like that-- you have to punish yourself in order to get anything started. Some people jog themselves to death on the Outer Loop, some would gorge themselves with gas station snack cakes, while others turn to untraditional punishment. And writing prose was indeed punishment for Kyle. He hated writing fiction and as he compulsively poured back over the words he was writing, he understood why.

It sucked.

For years, our hero's mother had pleaded that he not to put things off until the last minute. And for years, our hero would jokingly cover his ears and sing Our Nation's Anthem in response. Some people never learn. Since that seemed to be the theme of the evening-- not learning, and it's consequences on grades and life and the friends who had to put up with his crappy fiction writing-- Kyle decided he would write a fantastic few paragraphs on the perils of being a lazy stoner with no work ethic.

He was about a quarter-way finished when, on the other side of Houston, a Christmas party was about to undo Kyle in the worst way. See, this guy Mort Crenshaw was just drunk enough to be having some major luck with this chick from Billing Inquiries. She had bad, crumpled hair but good teeth and a nice rack and Mort worked in IT so who the fuck was he to judge what creatures he'd sleep with tonight. Or marry. I mean, intra-office relationships usually get pretty serious. They have to. Your professional career is at stake otherwise.

Anyways.

He excused himself to go take a leak but drunkenly found himself in a room on the opposite end of the building full of beeping, blinking machines. In case you've never been drunk before, machines that blink and boop are infuriating unless they're pumping "Satisfaction" at full bass. So Mort Crenshaw began to take a leak on said machines.

Or, as it goes, the main DHCP server for all Comcast subscribers. High voltage, high current, and all very expensive. In case you weren't aware or will be purchasing service in the area soon, Comcast has a monopoly in Houston when it comes to cable Internet. You know where this is going.

The lights on the machines only flashed red for a second, then they all went out.

Just to clarify, Mort was electrocuted and singed his penis off and died. Kyle would have wanted him to go out that way, too, because that's what idiots who knock out the Internet deserve. But don't go hating on Mort too bad. Turns out this girl he was hitting on at the party always had a huge crush on him. He was so close to getting with her, too. And they would have had beautiful kids.

To paraphrase my buddy Kurt Vonnegut, it goes as such.

When Kyle realized his Internet was out he immediately tried everything in his extensive knowledge of electrical engineering topics to get it working again. He power cycled (i.e. unplugged) the router, then power cycled (i.e. unplugged) the modem, followed by a futile attempt to power cycle (i.e. unplug) the computer itself. No luck. Then he tried to pull the oven out of his kitchen and throw it out the window, which also failed but did help him vent a little frustration.

Kyle didn't particularly need the Internet in order to take his test, you know. He just needed the satisfaction of knowing that he could always check his e-mail or search YouTube for videos of fat guys playing Zelda riffs on ukuleles or purchase a book about pottery on Amazon. More importantly he needed the Internet so he could publish his story when it was finished and pray to Jesus that someone would leave him a comment. Kyle really gets off on that shit.

With few options left and even less pride, Kyle decided to call Comcast to see if he could rectify things. He hadn't had much luck calling Comcast in the past. Using a language made entirely of curse words, brand names, and "'let me speak with your supervisor," doesn't really fix anything ever, but Kyle had no concept of manners or decency in these situations. That's probably because he never had to hold a menial, service industry job back in high school and deal with angry people all day long.

Just my opinion.

Kyle never really got a chance to yell at anyone that night. At least any live people. Something amazing happened while Kyle was busy simultaneously navigating the Comcast tech support phone system and debasing it with the verbiage of a dying German during WWII. Some poor EMT pulled our friend Mort's stinking, piss-burned, crispy body off the server equipment and, with each hand double-gloved with latex, pressed the "reset" switch that Mort had been so selfishly lying upon.

Zing. Blink orange, blink green, solid green. Everything was working again.

Kyle decided this was a sign. A sign that he needed to spend the rest of his evening dicking around on the Internet. Since he had already started both writing himself into the story and depending on pictures to make it funnier, he trashed it and moved on to Google Reader.

Because after all, someone else out there had a story to read.

I'm a plagiarizer and I didn't even know it... erizer.

Four years ago I started writing what was to be the hilariously damning, creative story that defined growing up in Panama City Beach. It centered around a protagonist that you'd find growing up anywhere in PCB. It was a little angsty but it flowed and everyone that saw what I had written loved it. My magnum opus, so to speak.

Maybe one day I'll post what I had written so far on here but I had previously posted snippets here on CN to much fanfare. A few days ago I opened the file, which I touch from time to time, to add a few more pages of content. It reminded me how much I not only like writing but reading as well. So I picked up BEE's Less Than Zero today and started chugging away at it.

By page two I was thinking to myself "Jeez, this sounds just like what I wrote back in high school." The tone of the main character and the theme of hating your hometown were already resounding in the first few paragraphs. Then, on page three, I was floored.

Bret Easton Ellis used the same EXACT scene in his story, written ten years ago, that I wrote in my story. The character sits back on their bed and looks at the wall, lamenting the poster of Elvis Costello on the wall. The poster, the internal dialog, and just... it was the same thing.

It's not like I feel this is some spooky cosmic coincidence or anything, but it is weird that BEE would include a scene just like mine in a story with the same overtones as mine. When I was writing it back in high school, I was knee-deep in Chuck Palahniuk novels like every other smart and slightly depressed teenager of our time. What I wanted to do was write something with the same dejected transgressional fiction as Chuck with a youthful perspective that damned my hometown.

Sound familiar?

I only knew halfway who BEE was back in high school. Just the American Psycho guy. Little did I know that my choice of reading material and my upbringing would turn me into his little literary progeny.

With titles so long you'd think Panic! at this Disco came up with them

Louie asked me to post more of my story bits from over the years, so here you go. This one's for him, because we're both from tourist towns and we can both relate to this. I'm actually more proud of this story than any other and I'll keep posting what I have if the demand exists.

I guess you could call me a bartender of sorts. I'm the enabler. I make people fat tourists fatter.

I'm a snow-cone vendor in front of Wal-Mart. Dollar-fifty for a medium, two-fifty for a large. We don't have a small. Watermelon is the most popular flavor. On a typical six-hour day I sell about $250 worth of ice and syrup. I wear an apron that has a picture of the Earth in a frozen martini glass and SnoGlobe written across the bottom in electric blue.

When most people think of a Wal-Mart, they think of an electronics department and toys and brand-less clothes and, if it's a Wal-Mart Supercenter, groceries also come to mind. But the Wal-Mart in Panama City Beach has a deal with vendors that peddle wears outside the store. I work for SnoGlobe, a national corporation that operates thirty snow cone stands outside department stores across the country. Roughly eighty percent of their revenue comes from Panama City Beach, Daytona Beach, Galveston, and Beverly Hills.

Snow cones are big business.

There is one other vendor outside of the Panama City Beach Wal-Mart Supercenter: an American flag vendor by the name of Eddie Crow. Eddie sells five-foot display flags, license plates, miniature flags, wall posters, and just about anything that can legally feature the likeness of America's glory. Above his modest stand is a neon red and blue sign that flashes:

BE A PATRIOT

So on that overcast Saturday in June I stood behind my freezer-on-wheels and counted all the Confederate flags I could spot in the parking lot. I was up to seventy-seven when I noticed that Eddie was hobbling his obese self over towards me. It's not that I hated talking to Eddie but I'm pretty sure the guy was trying to re-live his youth through me. And that's just creepy.

"How's is goin', hoss?"

Oh, and he called me hoss all the time. I really liked that. I told him that I had sold around forty-five larges in the past three hours.

"No, I mean ha' are you doin'?"

I guessed that I was doing fine.

"Weh, that's good t'ear. Yah have a good head on yah shoulders, Steve. So many fine youn'people these days lookin' for happiness in all the wrong places. With all the drugs and gangs and that sheeeeit."

I was going to tell him about my theories that drugs are the only fun thing to do in this town and that gangs only exist in cities with sidewalks, but I just agreed with him. Then I asked him how business was going. He took a bite of the corndog gripped between his fat fingers, thought for a second, then pointed the greasy stick at me.

"Oh well, you know. It's got its ups and downs. I only took in $475 yesterday. Last week I think I took in..." Little pieces of sausage and fried batter flew in my direction as he spoke, hurtling towards my apron and landing on Sri Lanka and Montreal and Belize. I imagined Canadians screaming in French terror as giant pieces of Eddie's spittle landed on their fair city. My continence didn't change while I let him drone on about profit margins. I made the occasional ah and oh and shook my head to give the illusion that I actually cared.

"... but I've gotta shooooow you somethin'! Hold on jus’a secon’." He turned around with the grace of a Mack truck on a two-lane bridge and stumbled back to his booth and grabbed some papers. I wondered if he had printed out some touching e-mail forwarded to him by a church friend, or if he had some pornographic photos for me, or maybe it was a picture of a really nice car. It didn't matter. It could have been the secret to eternal happiness and I wouldn't have cared: not because I wasn't interested but because it was Eddie.

"Check this out," he wheezed when he returned to my snow cone stand. There were two graphs: one of the Homeland Security Thread Advisory code over the past six months, and the other represented his revenue over the same amount of time. They were nearly identical.

"Isn't that crazy? Every time the Advisory goes up, my profits go up! And same with goin' down, too. So I got me one of these." He pulled a little stopwatch-looking device out of his pocket. A ticker ran across the front:

THREAT LEVEL: ORANGE

"I tell yah hoss, I'll be on top of business with this thing. Updates every minute and only costs me fifteen bucks a month!"

Suddenly: "What's it take to get some damn service around here?"

It was an obese, greasy man with a handlebar mustache and several tattoos and his hair wrapped in a Confederate flag bandanna. The fat fuck hadn't been standing there for longer than seven seconds but I turned around, greeted him with a smile, and swirled watermelon and strawberry in five large cups for his five fat fuck kids. Eddie hobbled back to his patriotic post and sold fifteen flags to a tour bus full of seniors.

When the sun finally fell beneath the condominiums on the horizon, I packed all of the flavored syrups and cups and spoons back into my aluminum cart, locked it up, and walked back to my busted-ass car.

Midway through the parking lot, a black Oldsmobile caught the corner of my eye. I turned around only to catch a glimpse of some Hummer's headlights. By the time I was re-focused the mysterious car had disappeared into the night.

Confessions of a 19-year-old taxi driver

Sitting in a blue box under Louie's bed in room 191 A at Will Rice College, 633o Main St., Houston, TX is a bag containing my entire family's Christmas gifts. All together now, children:

Fuck.

So I was catapulted out of deep sleep at around 9AM. Frantically, I plunged things my sleepy brain deemed important into a black satchel, threw my dirty clothes hamper over my shoulder, flung my backpack over the other shoulder, and proceeded to drive twelve hours back home. Lea rode shotgun. We talked about a variety of things, most of them too delicate and personal to stand the test of publication on the Internet. I will, however, give you a little tidbit.

Lea: Tell me something about Louie.
Kyle: I've never caught him jerking off. Not for the 12 months I've lived with him.

I got home at around 11:30 and said hello to my dear sweet brother and his dear sweet friend. Now I'm toiling on the Internet, thinking about how I'm going to tell my mom THERE WON'T BE A CHRISTMAS THIS YEAR. You know, among other things I have to think about.

My little guest room was completely how I left it, barring a few Christmas cards that were spread out like a dinner platter on my desk. The confirmation code for my flight back to Houston after Thanksgiving is still sitting on the floor in the middle of the room. Mom made oatmeal cookies and her trademark Santa Fe Soup in anticipation of my arrival. I have several doctor's appointments over the break that have all been written down on a piece of paper in the kitchen.

I am, as expected, not really compelled to do anything for the next two weeks except go out to dinner with anyone who will join me and watch all the trash I can on HBO. And sleep. God, let me make a dent in the sleep deficiency I amassed over the past few months.

Between "I'm From Rolling Stone," which debuts on MTV sometime in WHO THE FUCK CARES and Rolling Stone's list of the 50 best albums and songs of the year, I'm ready to wake up Hunter Thompson and tell him how his former employer is completely fucking the image of the magazine in ways that weren't fathom-able 30 years ago.

Here's a snippet from a story I started writing two or three years ago and never developed past page 15.

"Well, ohh-kay. You know that AP classes involve a lot of homework, don't you?" She's still not looking at me.

"Yes."

"And that AP classes involve--" and I cut her off by clearing my throat.

"Look, uh, Miss Armstrong." I scratch the back of my head in an attempt to look coy. "How long have you been counseling?" Oh, she's looking at me now. I can't tell whether she's surprised at my tenacity or just honestly trying to think of an answer. I give her two seconds before I keep on talking.

"Well, it doesn't really matter, because the minute I walked in here I realized you were a racist. You called me Alberto by accident. Alberto is a Hispanic name and I am primarily American Indian and Israeli and part German for christsakes. You didn't look at me when you were talking. You didn't even think I was apt enough to fill out the goddamn fucking course request form."

Her eyes are huge and something--maybe anger or maybe fear--is making her eyebrows slowly ascend. She's also making some sort of guttural noise, akin to trying to flush a toilet with a leaky, vibrating flush valve.

"I mean, Ms. Stein never looked at me either but hey, I doubt she could see that far in front of her with her shitty vision and all. Look, you probably have a ton of appointments today with students a lot dumber than me, and let me just assure you that I know I'm on track to graduate and I know what Advanced Placement means and I know that when this is all over, you're going to get up and clean out your adult diaper in the women's restroom because no seventeen-year-old has ever talked to you like this before, especially one that looks Hispanic."

Tick.

So I think I just blew some gasket in her brain. I stand up, tell her that she should try harder next time, and leave the room. From there, I gun it as fast as I can to the end of the hall. I peek my head around the corner to see Miss Armstrong, legs clinched, and making small steps to the women's restroom across the hall from her office.


Rock and roll.