He really shoots.
Just shoots into the dead air between him and whomever needed it.
And turned to me, confused.
As confused as I was that my heart was beating so fast toward him.
I would never have to worry about him backing down.
From a fight…but also from anything else.
by Susana H. Case Of course, she didn’t trust your gestapo blurt of words.She came from a cultureabused by authority. You wanted her at the precinct,…
To the Cop Who Phoned My Mother to Tell Her I Was in Danger
Take the lump in your throat and find out if it can be repurposed as a gulp of confidence. It’ll fade like the recording did…
“The truth?
I was wrong and the proof is out there…”
Reaching over the side of the boat, my stomach rested completely on the ledge. I felt I could keep reaching over, land full body into the water, and somehow back through the underside of the boat to where I was, but soaked.
“Good morning,
I hope this email finds you well. You must understand I feel the obligation to report anything out of the ordinary. There’s a young girl who expends a great deal of energy trying to go unnoticed. She moved into the building, maybe it’s been a year and a half, and probably would have gone just so—unnoticed, that is—if it hadn’t been my job to take notice of her. But then on Thursday I noticed she got out of an F150 around 4p and this time a young guy was with her. Not the type I think she’s usually with, but he got out with her.
Now, what happened next is just my biased interpretation of what I remember and I am sure you’ll have more than a few people call you about this, but I do not have time to double-back so I have to send this to you while I can still remember detail. So please do as my wise aunt says and “take the meat and throw away the bones.”
My memory is cloudy as it all happened so fast and emotion caught me by surprise being at home. Also this girl is how my daughter (one day) will be after I can teach her how to notice things. Anyway the girl and the young guy approached a car on foot from about 40 yards away. The girl knocked on the window, crouching down to the driver within at eye-level. The engine started running then. The guy moves the girl away and stands in her place. Eye-level. He motions for the window to come down.
No movement and the engine was still running. The guy handed her something, she started to puncture the tires one at a time and the guy stood at eye-level to the driver the entire time. Engine off after the third tire. The only tire untouched being the driver front tire. The girl hands the tool back to him and the person we’ve all been waiting for steps out of the car.
“Open it!”
The young man must have been as tired and angry as he looked because he couldn’t deal with the dialogue. And do you know… even now, as I write this… and every time I think it over I am more and more sure that young man is exactly the man I think he is.
In that trunk—they made the driver open it up—was a dog in painful condition. She had to carry the dog out of the trunk and brought to health from there, but it took all night. Luckily the vet is a mile and a half away, but it shouldn’t be this way.
Anyway the young guy looked like he wanted to carry that girl. The same way she needed to carry the dog. I just couldn’t believe any of it. The world is so strange. I’m exhausted now that I’ve written it all. If you need corroboration, Sam saw it too so I cc’d them. Be safe and keep the neighborhood safe.
– Torrence Oberlin Jr.”
We clock out at the same time also
So when the slivers of sun tiptoe through the office blinds
I recoil
And then recoil at the thought that this cave has blinded me
Until I don’t want to see myself anymore and my cubicle even less
Sicker than a sticker on streets like splat
Whatever the word was
Just jiggle the keys and I’ll juggle the rest
Between me and the fridge
Just a short walk
That hurts a bit now that I think about it
Would be great to have a mini fridge
In my room.
It’s still early enough
And I need to get the juices flowing
My fingers and hands stay remarkable still, though I’m an anxious mess each morning
The execution is so key to the end result
The first, loud click is heard throughout my apartment.
Then the next
Before I know it, I’m looking at a short two sentences sure to start a verbal war on Twitter.
I start, “This may be an unpopular opinion and I may be suspended for it…”
Today, I’m at the freehand on Ohio (19 E), feeling fortunate that I can leave
then to
somewhere to sleep the same night
then to
my need to rush the gauntlet where people (are meant to) battle to meet (but ultimately fall short of) my lofty expectations
then to:
negative ruminations behind
and a mind to be sure when this happens next time…
I’ll end the war in a loft
some place more than just “somewhere to sleep the same night”
Some times
you escape
me elude me
‘Til you’re
far gone
If I wasn’t before
Well then now I am.
You can’t make me,
But I am getting out of the car
And this is the end of the road
It’s been six years and I haven’t seen that face since then.
Read the note written in caps.
Hand quivers a bit.
Wait.
Turn the body slowly slowly [but not the gaze] back toward them.
Just stay there, almost looking them in the eye.
Then let them make the decision.
“Whatever. It’s not even fun taunting you anymore.”
Phew! Almost needed to be brave.
What do I have a spare tire for? I don’t even know how to drive.
I told my friend I didn’t have friends and he agreed. I wanted to meet new people, but then I couldn’t find any good reason I’d leave my place to meet people.
Though she be bare, each curve is free from chinks;
For times her life leaned on a draining source
I swore we’d last that one night over drinks
The words themselves pushing me forward with force.
I’d hoped so deep the technician was right
Restoration: new battery and case;
We’d go back to where we were that night
My mind occupied, blue light in my face.
The bulk was done and now came time to choose;
You deserve new color and brand new air;
Bells and whistles, I splurged for full kit, too!
Saving you showed me plainly I was bare.
The things I own, I told myself, held worth.
Without care, how’d I expect you to go forth?
Alecs was lucky to be able to hop into this Uber. It was under $8 on a route they’d been taking for months. At the beginning of February the price averaged as low as $6. These days, the lowest has been $13. Now, the other passenger pipes, “Why don’t you try driving for Lyft? I hear they pay well.” It donned on him: ride share apps are so communal in their design that the people (passenger and drivers) will always be on the same side–despite some of those thinly-veiled attempts to pit drivers and passengers against each other, disguised as emails explaining price differences.
Although he had a question for the other passenger, he thought it better to let the thought die in his head than ruin this ‘carpool’ that landed them together 2 days out of every week at 5:40 each morning.
“Why would you want someone to drive for the company with which you chose not to do business? For whatever reason, this Uber ride made more sense for you. In my case the decision was financial. Whatever your reasoning, you got into this car using one app and suggested the driver do the exact opposite. Perhaps this is part of your grand scheme. The more drivers leave Uber, the less drivers the company will need to pay for idling. The cheaper your Uber rides will be in four months. For about eight weeks straight. Right before the prices soar again. You know, due to lack of sufficient drivers.“
The most difficult part of Alecs’ days were sharing spaces with strangers and trying to prevent a screwed up face. Now all is covered like silent show and long gone are the days of shared rides. What was once nonsense-talk to carry on conversation, now feels like a monologue belched out on an island shared with no one. What some of us wouldn’t do to catch water-cooler talk! To speak to someone in the car and get as wrapped up in details as you both allow until the end of your trip together. How deeply we used to be wrapped up in the details!
I fear, on the day of my wedding, we will drop our glass and won’t care where the shards fly. We’ll receive the news. It will be time for us to leave to the wilderness. I’ll be shocked at how irrational I feel, but I’ll be upset–so upset I will refuse to flee in time. I won’t forgive myself if I miss a dance with my father. We sometimes speak on the phone. I feel the fizzing ringer and the phone lights itself. I do some smalltalk with him until nearly twelve minutes when, once again, I see we are both are so keenly aware we have failed where we could’ve connected. It would kill him just as much to miss the father-daughter dance.
We might just take those moments to sway while boulders ripple the ground in vibrations around us. Something metallic sounds like it could hit us next time. Each time we hope its the next time and not this time. Our audience will be partially made up of those crying and looking for cover. The rest will be made up of those too enthralled by the issues of others, they will risk their safety to see us. “They waited until the very last moment to admit there was a gap between.” We will spin both in our favor. They are here to see us.
So my romantic half… Who is to say he doesn’t also see himself waiting for the fall of boulders to stop him from marrying me. Until I know him, I can count on what I have. And I am still imagining what isn’t quite here. So I feel no guilt wanting all the romantic pleasantness even if we are running out of serious time. It feels like as I lay here, looking out at the orchid leaves in the midnight lights, it doesn’t make sense this desire should be off limits. Can’t we all want different things? When I am considering what I personally want, to hell with progressiveness! And never come back!
I know one of the songs I will dance to (even if it has to be with my father): “You are the Ocean” by Phantogram. Even if the song is in my head or I hum it while I cry.
“He loved me. Because he loved me, he waited to hold me. He waited. He waited. And when he finally, finally, finally finally did hold me, there was warmth and acceptance and understanding and purity.” – I cannot remember if I wrote this line or read it.
Chew on your foot
Sleep on your pillow
Walk with your step
Paws on your chin
So you’ll drop your attention down to me
You have me now
When at one time
Watashi wa inu o mochimasen deshita
So many other projects and skyward goals laid themselves out to him, but he could not bear to surpass them. He hadn’t wanted to surpass. But the life of a saboteur chose him. He was built to consider only himself–support only himself. Humanize no one.
Instead, I looked to finding ways of believing the dream was a farce. At this moment, I closed my two wet eyes, forcing my energy into a charged fence around him.
The woman smelled of limes and some other spice my untrained nose was unable to pinpoint.
“He’s going to ruin your life.”
“Who?”
“You know exactly who I’m talking about.”
Her last letters rounded like a dog’s tail in its slumber. I may not have known the smells because I hadn’t had enough meals, but I knew her. A grandmother of mine, but not mine. Of skin, but not quite the undertone. She was unmistakably Dominicana. This statement (outside of feeling and knowing and knowing I knew who she was speaking through) slapped me in the mouth as a paradox on its own. But without smells and sounds and ways of hands and other loud whispers, no one can be quite any one tribe. But I knew.
Thursday morning, I had a pimply whitebump in my mouth. I resisted getting out of bed, telling myself it’d still be there when I got up. No rush. I brushed my teeth after some red wine. As I pulled the bristles back toward the front of my mouth between ragged breaths, I noticed the brownblack bottle of peroxide nearly wobbling on the sink’s edge. It all comes back to guilt, sloth, and lust. Hassle-free addictions. Often not even requiring extra stops to pick them up. And so hard to drop. Afterward, eventually looking up and asking, “But haven’t I always been this way?”
Can you imagine my surprise when the Twitter app force-quit on me each time I went to draft a tweet? It is still the best possible PR for me, honestly. The last account I had was a shitposter’s dream. I wouldn’t dare attach my name to it. Or “couldn’t bear”–you choose. Whatever fits your idea of who you believe is writing this. Assume you know anything about the writer of what you’re reading and you’ll see yourself soon enough in the patterns. Going into patterns like that. Until you become an example of an anxiety-riddled bundle of chaotic, untrained ‘potential.’ So the audience is what determines the meaning…writer’s fallacy… Too bored to unpack it.
Ah! Then I happen upon a tweet I feel too ashamed to share, but I felt the keenest connection to— What I enjoy could offend someone. So then what happens? I hide my opinion in the lower crown molding of the small wall I get in the gallery of my life’s work? Because the other perspective is that it might not be art at all?
And I cried and woke up crying again. The tear on my nose one moment and then my pillowcase the next minute.
What is the weakness with him?
Going in patterns like that.
Now I am supposed to grip your hand back
Otherwise you’ll try checking my pulse
Be alive. Stay present.
I was supposed to lean against you
but splashed Slurpee in your frozen lap and now you’re bluish
How long was I squeezing your hand?
Like a doula, you let me realize when the nerves were gone
And simply didn’t call me again.
