teadrop
"I moved out here because I couldn't breathe in the city anymore. It was all dirt and soot all the time. Not the real dirt and soot that we have here in the western lands, mind you. Not muddy paths or cattle dung or gravel or car fumes, the kind you can wash off at the end of the day. I'm talking about the soot that creeps into you from the screens. go to any city and you'll see it clinging to everybody. Their faces are dirty with it. The walls are covered in it, wherever you look it grabs you and creeps in behind your eyes and sticks to your thoughts, changes them, dirties you up inside. it's in the air and it fills your lungs, fills your speech, and It stays and grows like a parasite. It almost got me, too. It's probably gonna get all of us eventually, even out here. That's the danger of calling it progress, you know. I'm happy here. Move western, I tell everybody when I write to them. But I know they never will. Most have stopped breathing for themselves long ago."
he reached for for my drink as if it was nothing and after a sip of whiskey, he smiled at me with disgustingly smug confidence. "i will tell you this: Im going to do what i have to do. im not backing off. every single one of them who doesnt comply with my demands in the timeframe i have given will be dragged out of the filth ridden hole they call an intelligence agency and they will stand trial, publicly, facing a list of charges so long it'll make atlas shrugged look like a fucking haiku." I had forgotten that this man used to be a writer. "I am not a vindictive man. I dont hold a grudge. I want justice and that is all. there are two ways it can go and the choice is neither mine nor yours. I assume you feel like you need to choose a side. and you do. im not your enemy. i am not here to ruin you. im not here to expose you. but there is only one truth here and you decide on which side of it you want to stand when the clock runs out. all i want is your cooperation. and your loyalty. He ordered me another whiskey and disappeared with mine.
it's you and me and a chessboard stretching oceans. it used to be different, this. we used to tear into each other wildly on open fields, trampled grass and your sweat and my sweat and our blood mixing in the footprints. We used to meet in the middle and I used to say to you "I'll kill you today." and you'd not even blink and you'd grin and swing an axe at my head. No one ever won anything. No one ever missed a shot. We used to lose, both, always, standing bleeding and alone in the wreckage of our own choosing. We'd destroy each other's armies and then we'd go rebuild from scratch until next time. this is not what it is like anymore. I press buttons to the ticking of a clock while i sweat into starched cotton. there's a rule book now and old eyes watching us adhere. i haven't seen you since this started and, the rules say, i never will again because today, on this day, i'm about to win. I have three more buttons to press as I whisper "I'll kill you today".
(...)
"It's the thing she does with her neck. The fucking thing, you know? She does this...this neck tilt thing and she winks at me when she does it. Winks at me! Can you believe it? I mean, who winks anymore, right? Anyway, that's why I can't let her go. The whole thing with the neck and the fact that I'm crazy about her. That's why. She's a terrible person, really. Just awful. Just, just, just, soul crushing sometimes, the way she talks to me. I know that. And she makes me feel small and...I guess undignified would be the word, wouldn't it? But I don't care. I don't care if she tells me how much of a failure I am every day of my life, if that means I get to spend it with her."
"I get it."
"You do, huh. What do you think you get?"
"What you're saying. That we can't choose who we love, that love isn't all about happiness, that it's about being with the right person and that right doesn't necessarily mean perfect or even good. You're saying how you feel about them is more important than how they make you feel."
"You've got it all wrong already, son."
"But-"
"What I'm saying is that I married a sadistic, needy whore and I can't even imagine life without her anymore because she has eaten away at my self-confidence like a ravenous zombie. Love has nothing to do with it. I'm a sorry excuse for a man, just look at me! She's right when she says that...
I'm saying, you need to be careful. How they make you feel is the only thing that's important. You're young. You don't look half bad. Be with women who make you feel invincible. Smart, honest, beautiful women who can cook. Treat them well. Sooner or later you will love one of these women and she will love you back and then you'll understand what a fucking terrible idea it was to ask me for advice."
He was a wood carver from Oregon and he wore thick, scratchy flannel shirts and light jeans, frayed at the bottom and a little too saggy at the top. He was an artist, with scruff on his cheeks, smoking in his sleep, leaving cigarette butts on the mattress. He was an old young boy with a happy trail and tattoos on his left biceps. He was a tiny soul in a beautiful body and he liked to pretend he wasn't scared. He liked to scream at me in our kitchen about how I was going to be the death of him. He liked to reply with "Well, as a member of the artist community.." to questions no one had ever asked him. He liked to pull my hair while we were fucking. He liked to steal the pens from my purse to write down important notes he'd never read again. He liked to carve the shape of my body out of maple and oak. He liked his mother and he liked my mother and he liked their different recipes for potato salad. He didn't like to read and he didn't like music with more than three instruments. He didn't like to work or be anything or become anything. He didn't like his father. He didn't like money, but only because he never had any. He didn't like it when someone would ask him if wood carving was a dead art. He didn't like it when I left him alone for more than six hours and he didn't like that I was aware of this. He didn't like how much he liked me. He hated that he loved me. He was a deadbeat, a drifter, a lost child and he hated that I was not. For three years, we fell asleep every night holding hands and breaths. I loved hating him too.
There was time. Time to sit still on cold hallway floors and watch, ghostly, expressionless, removed, as they took them one by one from their bedrooms into the darkness. There was time to revolt, to build barricades, to hide and get armed and organized. There was time to fight, to save, to defend. They took them one by one and we convinced ourselves there was time, still, to be victorious. We were eleven, twelve, thirteen years old with pale freckled faces and dark pupils, wide and scared, bare dirty feet and shaky hands, and we were convinced we were plotting for a revolution, waiting for our time to come. We did not understand yet, that our time was running in the opposite direction.
One remark was all it took. For her to fly out the door, breathless, tear-stained cheeks and fingers pressed to a heart beat out of rhythm, with feet, quickly stumbling over even ground, to her car, away from this, him, her, those words, this life, everything.
One remark. For him to stand still, abandoned, with open hands and knotted up lungs, with pursed lips shaping question marks and eyes moving hastily over nothing and back again.
In a split second this had become the emptiest room he'd ever been in. And yet it all felt so painfully, absurdly, totally in its right place. For the first time in his life, he experienced what it was like when all your nothing and all your everything made sense.
Now see, what happened was...you need to understand that here are certain times- this will happen to you so pay attention- there are certain times when a handful of syllables stringed together, spoken softly, gently, words harmless like the fluttering of sharpened butterfly wings, will bring with it a realization of your personal insignificance to someone else's life. Someone will speak a few innocent words and they will shatter you.You will have loved this person with an intensity that feels like a right, and you will gasp as the words drop into the black hole between you two, and then- you will flee. You WILL run. And the person you love will not come after you.
It will happen to you and when it does, you will understand why she did what she did next...
"non-suitable"
"Wh-what? That's not cool! What is that even supposed to mean?"
"I don't know! You told me to say the first one that would come to my mind, without thinking and I did. I don't know what it means."
"When asked to describe me with one adjective, the first one you can think of is "non-suitable"!? Not nice or smart or funny or pretty?"
"This is gonna be a thing now, isn't it? We're gonna fight now?"
"Non-suitable, Derek! Non-fucking-suitable.
"Well, you are very loud and mean and a fucking dramatic maniac. I can't ever bring you anywhere, really, because you are a fucking bitch to everyone and blow every little thing way out of fucking proportion. Maybe that's what I meant."
"You are just an asshole, aren't you? Don't even talk to me."
"Hey, my fucking pleasure."
"We're done, by the way. Like seriously."
"Sure."
With wide eyes, and before she even knew she had moved, she was pressing her index finger to the spine of the seventeenth to left book, in the third row from the top on shelf number five, on the right side of the wall next to the west entrance, exactly forty-one steps from the window. Slowly, her finger moved downward over each of the three numbers, embossed in gold into the dark brown leather.
9
8
3
Brows furrowed and eyes closed, she took one deep breath. 983 983 983. It had to be. It-it just had to be the right one.
three thoughts.
My sister once passed out at a Muse concert. Not during the show, mind you, but right after, in line at the coat check. She held out because she didn't want to miss any part of the performance. Sweet sixteen year olds try so hard to be bad-ass. You have to admire them a little.
I have a story for this but it's about you, and its so personal, and I don't think I want to share our memories like this. But the night of the meteor shower? Yeah. By three in the morning that night, I knew I wanted to marry you some day. American boy, what have you done to me?
He heard the click. Safety off. The pop of the silencer would be next, and then-and then! Like ocean waves, like pressing a seashell to your ear, a rush of red-hot to the head and then down to his chest, warm and flowing faster than seems possible, pooling on his lower abdomen as he'd sink down against the wall. The steady drip, drip, drip onto the pavement, a glimpse of glaring starlight between heavy eyelids, that should be the last of it. For the third time in one nanosecond he tried to think of a way out.
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