FICTION

"In The Closet "

I am not going to breathe no matter how bad my lungs are sucking at me. My dad is still out there, and I will not give him the satisfaction of finding me. I can hold my breath as long as it takes for him to go the hell back to his hole in the basement. Or his smelly chair already by the front door. God I hate that chair. My last teacher could smell it the day she dropped off homework, I could tell by her face.

'Fucking pussy.'

My dad is kicking something. It is my shoebox full of stories. I knew it. He took it from under my bed and now I hear paper ripping and muddy workboots stomping. Everything I wrote since third grade, but still I will not breathe.

Now I know what it means, seeing stars. Little blinking swarms of glowing pinpricks. They look friendly. My brain wants to give in and go with the swarms into blackness, my lungs are frozen from exhaustion--they don't have the strength to keep suctioning for air.

Finally, the fucker is stomping out and down the stairs. Ow--I keep hitting something hard against my head; weird, since I am not moving.

I hid in the weeds out back until the moving truck left. My stuff only took me ten minutes to unpack. I opened the Blatz case and put my clothes in the milk crates, my stories under the bed, and my knives in my pocket; don't know where they'll be safe in this dump yet.

Oxygen is getting me high. Not so different than the pill my buddy's brother gave us back home. Except this is no fun because what the fuck is poking me in the ass? I am sitting Indian style on the closet floor. I am facing the door but can't tell because no light is coming under the bottom now; my dad turned off the light when he left. I can't tell how big it is in here. The floor is wood and I can feel dust and dirt with my hands. The air in this closet is another universe. A dead one. Nothing moves in here.

But something is making sounds behind me. Scraping. Little, tiny scrapings. I want to turn around. My hands hit the floor to support my weight, and a million soft crunches vibrate up through my hands.

What the fuck?

There is no time to think because smelly, bony fingers grab my neck and I kick out at the door but it doesn't open and I slam my hand back into the thing grabbing my neck and sickly xylophone chimes fill the closet before hard parts crumple behind me and my neck is free. I grab out for the door handle, find it, and twist, but now it is in my hand and when I drop it my hand retains its hardness and the image of a kneecap flashes in my mind. I pull my hand close to me and flex my fingers, but they are hard and getting harder and when I try to make a fist there is a clacking and awkard stiffness.

I have to get out of here I really can't breathe now even though I am trying and so I move to stand up but the hardness is spreading so fast through my body that I am Tinker Toys on ice and cannot get any traction and I crumple to the floor. Wormy tracks crisp their way over my arms and feet, and I push up to a sitting position and now I am solid and stiff and segmented. My thoughts are drying up with the evaporating flesh, but a dull outrage permeats my marrow and I long to have flesh and blood come through that closet door.

'What do you got to write about,' my dad would say. 'Ain't no skeletons in your closet.' Open yours, dad. I'm starving for it.

The Numa Numa Dance
I don't care if everyone in the world is loving it, too --- I can't get enough of this! It's my new Hamster Dance (which brought me through the pits of depression many-a-time). Click the link; let's go.

The Happy SlumlordPROLOGUE

Once upon a time, there lived a little girl who grew up under big trees, next to rusted cars, and on top of cracked pavement. Through the pavement, weeds grew, and trees and sometimes flowers. "I, too, shall grow up through the pavement of my blue collar environs, and be something special!" she thought. Though she did love the feel of coarse, aging sidewalk bumps against her barefeet as she ran to the house for lunch of grilled cheese and tomato soup with elbows.

She was a bright girl, and over the years had several stabs at becoming something special. "I'm on the honor roll; I will become an academic!" But she couldn't stay on course for one reason or another. "I will help children; I will be a teacher!" But that seemed too small a roll, an easy way out, and the girl thought she should be more ambitious. "I will write novels! I will be an actress! I will be so profound that someone is bound to notice!"

Didn't happen.

The girl had too many ideas in her head, too many different personalities that just kept cancelling each other out, leaving her back at the beginning, and nothing very special at all.

Then one day, she looked around and realized she was still walking on crumbly pavement and passing rusted cars and that the lonely old people made her sad. So she moved to a little box that would not remind her where she came from. "Maybe now," she thought, "I can get on with the business of becoming something special."

But the crumpled house, a very tan Realtor told her, would only sell for $20,000 less than the girl owed the bank for the privilege of having lived in it, and this was called "being upside down" in a bad market. In her mind, the girl's secret back-up plan for life inched ever closer: to give up being special and instead move to her small trailer and die a stressed and pitied old woman. But first, one last adventure: to rent the hovel and become a landlord. The irony! She wanted to laugh, but wept; now she would be responsible for keeping up and repairing the house for strangers when she'd never lifted a finger to do so for herself.

Despair set it. Diets were blown, and hot fudge sundaes were consumed. Visions of foreclosure, failure, and catatonic states danced before the girl's eyes. The knowing nods that would follow. Less than nothing special, all along.

Suddenly, her vehicle started spinning madly, wildly, on the icey surface of 8 Mile Road, looping like the Tilt-O-Whirl at 45 miles per hour, and no amount of wheel turning could correct the course. "Funny, that I would die here," she thought, certain that a building would smash into her at any moment. With half-hearted effort and no hope, she pumped the brakes with a militant beat. The vehicle slid into a curb, pointed its nose toward oncoming traffic, and, miraculously, stopped. She pulled the car around, noted the constellation of approaching headlights, and stopped at a red light.

Then she thought, "I can at least be kind." The traffic light turned green.

"I can at least be kind on my way down. In that way, I can know some joy, no matter the dismal spiral." She accelerated slowly toward the box that did not remind her of her origins. "I can be kind, if not special, and enjoy that I am kind until it's time for me to jump the shark. And if perhaps, by random chance, good things happen on the way down, I will be all the happier for never expecting them."

So it was that the girl embarked upon her new lot in life, not one of any particular importance, and one that was certain to accelerate her demise, but one that must be tried: The Happy Slumlord.