my good friend Juin Arnuad, who sent me Volcanoes set fire to the Oak Trees, has sent me another short existentialism story. he said that it was a short story that is suppose to come with a series of heavy ink-done drawings. i recommended my friend mike guilmette, who is now doing some of my and his short story drawings. i would really like if you would all critique and send me any and all advise or criticism towards these stories. Juin has also told me, to “tear his shit apart”, so please, anything, vicious and diluted words are welcomed.
I have found with my writings and my moving that they have accompanied each other. As i have moved west, my stories have as well. They have left their city settings in hope of finding westward expansion. they are fake, i am shit, and this world keeps me spinning.
One hit for the Night is something that’s new to me; writing as the night, wishing not to. it seems too young, too fake, like a mannequin stomping around a grotesque bar. but i wrote it, because i was drunk, like i am now, two bottle deep with my friend andy- freshly drunk from the good ol’ PA, visiting the mountain trends.
Cigarettes
A stout man with a red hat exited the back gate and stumbled a great distance, never seeming to reach anywhere. He turned that small town in New Mexico inside out.
He reached the outskirts of the town and kept up his stagger to the desert expanse.
Days past and the clumsy feet, of the stout man in the red hat, seemed to take on a prideful stride. As the yellow monster raised itself in the sky, the feet never hesitated, casting a series of blows across the barren wasteland that laid in front of them.
After finding a spring and the seldom stretch of shade that sparsely covered a space to lay in, he found a rest.
The smell of the silent cold night awoke the stout man, who had contorted himself to a fetal position, where he lay hugging his shoulders – shivering with his breath.
He stretched and placed his hands underneath his balding head, where tufts of hair and exposed scalp reminded him of his stagger, reaching for his red hat that had been turned into a makeshift pillow, he instead found only the cracked earth beneath his sun-beaten hands.
He lept up from the childish ball of sleep and wildly turned about, as if mad, staring off into the distance, a harsh and lonely abyss. Night had swallowed the landscape and everything in a stone’s throw; only barely making out the rock that had been his mid-afternoon savior, he stumbled a few feet in every direction furiously kicking at the desert floor. He fell to his knees and threw his hands about in a desperate attempt to find his red hat.
He returned empty to the rock.
Slouched against the wind scorched rock surface, he again planted his clumsy feet in front of himself and tucked his knees to his chest, huddling as a shell of a man, he lit a cigarette and watched the burning glow of nicotine.
The stout man no longer wanted to walk, he felt no impulse to move away from the small town in New Mexico, from the winding dirt streets his hopeless feet had traced, from the unpainted house and the room he rented out, where there was a large picture of a sailboat crashed on rocks and an impending storm in the background, and from the small cot that he lay on, alone- on horrific nights like these – but he felt no urge to return. He missed but spited that life that had become so estranged. He cupped his hands and lit another cigarette, the red cherry began to pour smoke and the stout man smiled.
He had nothing to do now but wait in the blistering desert wind.
-Juin Arnaud
4:48 a.m.
Monday, July 13th 2009
the Patient
Whether sitting on the steps of the city or the edge of the mountains, the patient stayed the same. Never to forget the days past, he remained silent with his dis-contempt and sat petrified with the fraying of his loneliness. Legs paralyzed, they only bent back to allow sitting. The patient relied on his findings throughout the day to make his happiness. Little thoughts, quarrelsome ones that built his staggering existence. Which way the wind blew and at what time- and compared to yesterday and the day before. The week became his solitude and the weather built a career out of it. Sitting and observing the sun, he never sought for shade, wishing to be burned by it daily, for even, perhaps- to be scolded so badly by it he would become unrecognizable, even to himself. And the days grew long and with them the patient’s age and weathered skin. His hands became a quicksand of leather when you tried to hold them, even he himself, found it hard to merely hold his own hands. They would envelope one another, cupping and sipping each finger up into the center of the palm. Furious balls of anger from long years of living alone collected and hung low down by his sides, when he walked and propped up next to him when sitting on his chair or even held a cigarette or two when the scaring sun went to slumber.
And one morning, when the patient arose, still stalking about with over sleep, the sun did not. And he waited on the porch for hours, sitting with the balls of fury weighing down by his sides, waiting for the brilliant brass ball to release some tension, some loneliness- but it never came. The tiresome day past and with it the patient went as well. Steadily rocking with finger nails tearing into the center of his palm, he slowly slipped out of the chair onto the thick wood of the porch floor. Laying on top of stretched cracks and fractures in the wood, the body of the patient lay clothed in darkness.
One hit for the night
He watched her from down the hall, sitting in her chair taking cheap hits of wine. Looking down at his half empty glass of rum and coke, he wished he had the feet-work and the speech to whisk down the studded hallway to ask her for a few hits. She sat as queen, in the corner of the room- she was watching everyone else around her. They stumbled from lips to ears, hoping to find someone to share their night with, and she knew it and he knew it. Tired from their drinks they begged them off one another and continued to keep their feet kicking down on the hardwood. Staggering about with delusional whereabouts, they asked where they could piss, “Down the hall towards the living room and across from the kitchen.” Down and towards him. He sat on his couch and said little to the conversation of faces that circled him. Usually finding solace in the mid-bathroom talking breaks, he grew weary and stared down the hall towards the green velvet chair that held his mighty queen. She looked down but past him. He sipped his glass and made the break to the plastic white bottom. The drink, gone; he sucked on the ice cubes and cracked them down with his teeth all the while never letting the velvet throne leave his sight. His stomach turned with each hand past on her shoulder and each smile given. He tried to stand, only finding wobbly, elastic legs stretch beneath his large frame. Holding onto shoulders that seemed stuck in the floor, he made his way slowly to the kitchen, away from the bathroom scene and the frantic nasal conversations that accompanied it, and away from the hungry couch that sucked you dry like a bat at night, and away from the girl he named queen and the green velvet throne she sat on, away from his eternal gaze of misunderstanding and misguided affection. To the island in the kitchen, sticky with red wine and cheap sodas and vodkas- a clutter fuck of cups and crumbs laid across it and he slammed his red plastic cup down. He got ice from the freezer he had visited several times already, twisted the plastic tray and cracked a few out on the counter. He brushed the crumbs off and put three in his cup. He got his rum and filled up the rest with it. He stood back and took a hit, smiling with his little accomplishment- a defeat over love and one battle won in the sweltering summer night.