An apparently good idea

     "Give me that paint brush," he says, "I need it."

     "I'm using it," his brother says back, not looking up from his tableau.

     "I have to finish coloring in her hair, and I need the fine brush."

     "I'm using it."

     "You're using it to color in the sky. Use a bigger brush. You don't need the smallest brush we have to color in the sky. And anyways, your whole painting is sky, and you're using the big paper. I'm telling mom."

     "You're such a cry-baby. First of all, it's not the sky; it's a neo-constructivist critique of the imaginary of perspective. I'm not just slathering paint all over the goddam place like some wannabe Rothko. Secondly your absurdist portrait of that matronly ideal is such a post-classical joke it's laughing at itself. Just being in the same rec room as you is inhibiting my creative energies," the boy with the small brush says calmly.

     "Your totalitarian sensibilities are trampling on my expressionist freedom. You wouldn't recognize an enlightened study of hyper-modern realia if it was defined for you on urbandictionary and carved into your forehead with shards of reflective glass."

     "Whatever. That didn't even make sense. Just get that trash out of my field of vision before your compositional retardation damages my sensory organs."

     "Mooooommmmm!"

     "Shut your filthy traps; I don't want to hear it," Mom shrieks from her bedroom upstairs.

     "Great, look what you did," he says glibly.

     His brother hisses at him in a vehement whisper, "You're the little bitch who is coloring in the sky with the tiny fucking little brush, when you might just as well dunk the whole sheet of paper into a can of Sherwin-Williams."

     "Your horse-faced abomination is a crime against humanity. Why don't you put it on your blog and let the rubes comment on it? Maybe your stupid fat mom can tell you it's beautiful," his brother retorts in a hushed bark.

     "We have the same mom, shit-for-brains. All I want is the little brush for a few minutes. I don't want to escalate this disagreement into a conflict, or resort to bringing this matter up before governing bodies of limited effectual authority."

     "Me neither, so just cool your jets. The last thing either of us needs is another round of disciplinary sanctions from the imperialist overlords. Furthermore, resorting to conflict is barbaric, and it would be geo-political suicide for you to rely on your limited offensive capabilities."

     "This display is pathetic. You know as well as I that the last time negotiations broke down between us, you were pitilessly savaged and were compelled to acquiesce to humiliating terms of surrender, including the loss of significant material wealth, not to mention the famous 5:4 computer time compromise."

     "'Savaged' is just the word I would have chosen. You attacked me completely unprovoked and without any warning, in brash violation of the standing cease-fire agreement between us, and in defiance of international condemnation. You demonstrated yourself to be a brutish thug with less regard for the rules of war and basic human rights than a pol-pot dictator.

     "The memory of the oppressed is long and filled with bitterness. But let it be known that your aggression has not been forgotten, and that I hold you in no higher regard nor consider you as any less likely to lash out again than a rabid raccoon," he intoned solemnly.

     "What was that? Was that even English?" Maybe I can find an Idiot-English bilingual interpreter to help me understand you."

     "Maybe I can find you a remedial English tutor to help you learn your mother tongue."

     "Shut the fuck up, you fucking retards. Put your shoes on and get in the truck," Mom shouts down the stairwell.

     "Fuck: haircuts."

A Boring Tale With A Predictable Ending

     A small road in the mountains traces the course of the shallow meandering river. The gravel state-highway bends in and out alongside the current following it back upstream between two pine-covered hillsides. Downstream the water rejoins a larger estuary just after it passes through a dying mill town that hasn't employed any mill workers since the 19th century. Dilapidated grey and light brown factories dot the banks of the larger river downstream, and pole barns collapse quietly into the clearing. Every man-made edifice is made of wood and is quietly being reclaimed by the woods.

     The tortuous road connects the small town of Abisqua to the interstate on the other side of the wide coniferous ridge. It takes about forty minutes by car to reach one end from the other, but the current record was twenty-three flat going downhill from the highway back to the town. It has been a year and a half since that record was set, and the title-holder has since died, tragically, in a violent collision with the nursing home. By some accident of chance, none of the residents got hurt in the accident.

     The crash demolished the cafeteria of the home, and the fire department condemned the entire structure. As a temporary measure, the town relocated the two dozen suddenly homeless seniors to the only building big and warm enough to house them all, which was the supermarket, which dated to the nineteen eighties and was now over a hundred years old. The old folks are sleeping on cots in the aisles, and have milk crates for night stands, where they keep their soaking dentures and meds.

     It was awkward at first for the townsfolk to have to ask an arthritic grandmother to get out of bed so they could get to the Hamburger Helper, but as often happens in these circumstances, people adapt. The owner of the store was a little bit resentful, since there was little he could do about the old folks stealing coffee yogurts in the middle of the night, but he adapted too. He stopped stocking batteries, and he put the liquor behind a locked display case. He had a TV set and some plastic chairs set up near the deli counter. And he even installed hand rails on the shelves after one old lady slipped in the middle of the night in a puddle of yogurt on her way to the bathroom and broke her hip.

     Some of the shoppers have developed relationships with the various elder people whom they now see regularly, and some families have reconnected with their estranged grandparents. While they shop, parents have taken to leaving their children with the group of seniors who congregate by the deli counter, where the old people tell the younger generation about the wars they fought and about the wolves in the woods around the town.

     For the past month or two since the crash, out of respect for the deceased, no one has attempted to break his record of twenty-three minutes. There has been an unspoken moratorium on racing generally, and most of us have found better things to do with our time, like drugs.

     Heroin mostly, but whatever really. We are so bored we could claw our eyes out with the needles that we reuse and reuse, but that would make shooting heroin hard and would damage the needles.

School for me consists of a meditative trance state. I am there only in the name that is dutifully entered into the attendance sheet, and the body that I transport from classroom to classroom. All of my concentrated energy is given over to waiting for the day to end, so I can focus on waiting for the weekend, and on the acquiring and comsumption of heroin or whatever drug is in town at the moment. And my friends are just like me, but so is most of the student body.

     Right now, for instance, I am at the wheel of my uncle's Buick on the way home from a drug deal. It is a Tuesday night around not very late on a frigid day in December. We're returning from the nearest town, which is like ours but poorer and bigger. I turned off the highway and I'm rounding the first bend of the road into town. My foot lets off the gas, and the car drifts sloppily through the contour. The snow hasn't fallen very thickly on the road yet. I urge the pedal down again firmly for the ensuing straight and then less cautiously. The wheels spin easily in the loose powder.

Jason and May

Jason sauntered into his flat-mate May’s bedroom. She was lying on her back, with her computer nestled up against her breasts, her arms retracted to reach the keyboard. Jason made his arms small too, and growled like a T-Rex, “Rawrrrr”.

“Shut up, jerk. I’m chatting with my buddies,” May said. He made a face and she threw a pillow at it, “You are like a walking cliché, you realize this, right?”

“First of all, I’m not. You are. Second, let’s go watch TV; it’s the law,” Jason said, finishing in a monotone.

“Come on, Jason, don’t pull that crap again, I just want to be alone for ten minutes,” May said. Her computer was full of chat windows, some blinking, some long dormant—the echoes of recent conversations. Jason was reaching for the drawstring on the blinds. He took hold near the top of it and slowly began pulling the blinds, one row at a time, up.

“Stop it, I’m not even dressed, Jason.” Light crept into the grey darkness. Shapes of furniture and piled clothes could be discerned. The room had no parallel walls. May’s bed was against the far sides of the room facing a blown-up picture of a Jumbo-tron showing May at a football game, cheering at the camera, with her camera-phone out in front of her. “Cut it out!” she screamed at Jason.

Jason stopped pulling and just as slowly began letting the blinds come down, his fist around the string rising. The light disappeared from the floor where it had been stacking up, and May grew cold with fright. “Alright. OK. Let’s go watch TV,” she said apologetically. She got up from her covers and walked to the dresser where she found some pajama pants and a sweater to cover her nudity.

“I’ll be in the other room,” said he.

“I’ll be right in,” she replied.

When she walked into the living room, Jason was logging in to the satellite. He asked May where she was sitting and aimed the web-cam so that it would capture her and him in the same screen. “Do you want anything to drink?”, he asked, as she came into view on the TV screen.

She said no. Jason entered the picture on the TV, sat down in his recliner, and cracked an energy drink. “What’s on TV?”

“I don’t know”

“Me neither,” he said, going up the channels one at a time: 41, 42, 43, 44 . . . Talk show, movie, weather, judge show, crime drama, headlines, history channel, news, local news, movie, cartoon, food, business news, lifestyle . . . 105, 106, 107.

“Is that movie on today?” Jason said.

“I don’t know. What movie?” May said.

“What day is today?”

“Today’s Thursday, buddy.”

“No that was yesterday,” he said to himself about “the movie”. He sipped his drink. 108, 109, 110, 111 . . . A basketball game came into view. Replay. 113, 114, 115.

The doorbell rang. “Did you order something, May?”

“Nope,” she replied.

Jason looked at her for a second, judging the veracity of her claim by the way she stared at the images of snow-laden conifers from a national geographic helicopter. Jason turned off the TV and went to the front door of the apartment behind the couch May was sitting on.

“Who’s there?” Jason inquired through the closed door.

There was silence.

“Hello? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .” Jason said, shouting through the hollow steel door.

No answer.

“HELLOOOo?” he shrieked. He could hear his voice echoing down the hallway of the building, like laughter in a prison.

There was no answer. Jason stood by the door, his head turned to the side to give one ear more of a chance of hearing footsteps or voices retreating. No sound at all.

After a minute Jason returned to his seat. “I have to get a peephole for that door,” he said, clicking the TV back on.

“Who was it?” May asked, in the least ironic tone she could muster.

Jason looked at her, and she looked back at the TV. He turned back toward the screen. 178, 179, 180 . . . They were watching a minute-long weekly news summary, when Jason’s eye caught the web-cam looking askew.

“Did you move the camera?”

“Me?”

“You?” he said in feigned innocence. “No, not you, May. Who else am I talking to? Am I losing my mind, or something. Like you don’t know who’s at the door? Like you don’t know who I’m talking to? Did you move the camera?”

“I didn’t,” she pronounced.

“Well, then who did, the guy at the door? Am I stupid to you?” He switched the tv input so that it showed what the camera on top of the TV was seeing. It no longer showed May, and only the bottom of Jay’s chair.

“Why did you move the camera?”

“That’s a leading question, Jason.”

“May, why won’t you answer my questions? Is that a leading question?”

“I didn’t move the camera, Jason,” she replied.

Jason got up from his seat, pushing down on the armrests for support as he rose. He stood for a moment and cracked the knuckles on his small, clumsy hands. He brought them to his face and pressed his palms against his eyes, the fingers pushing into his sweating forehead, and brought them down with great pressure, raking his features with the stubby fingertips. He moaned mightily. Then he went over to the camera. He repositioned it, guided by the picture on the TV so that it would show them both again. “Do you want anything to drink?” he asked, returning to his chair. May stared at her herself on the screen. Jason stared at May awaiting an answer. He blinked and then turned back to the screen. 181, 182, 183, 1, 2, 3.

Ice Water

The boy named Alfonso met his uncle for lunch at a Chinese restaurant in a village in France, where ice water was the only thing on the menu. The more ice, the more expensive the dish. Both the boy and his uncle ordered the most expensive dish: thirteen pieces of ice in a glass with a little tap water. After dinner the two of them swam in the sewers of the town with the locals who were jealous. The locals had hardly had any ice at all in their suppers, but they all swam in the same sewers at night. When the moon was high and bright, Alfonso and his uncle went home with their sneakers still soaking with sewer water.

Later, wearing warm dry pajamas in the kitchen, they each had another glass of water with two pieces of ice, and they both retired soon and fell asleep. Both of them passed dreamless nights, waking in the early pre-dawn darkness to void some cold urine and go back to bed. Sometimes it was more pleasurable to void in bed and enjoy the cool mattress until morning, but it meant changing the sheets.

In the morning there was six inches of snow on the ground and all the children were out throwing snowballs at themselves, and destroying each other's snowmen.

It all turned to slush by late afternoon. The streets were brown, and the dirty residue was forming melting ridges between the lanes. Traffic slogged by in it and the kids slogged home, dragging their scraped up saucers and toboggans behind them. Icicles were falling from the eaves and from the gutters of the houses and the buildings. At nighttime, the wind was blowing hardly at all, and the only sound in the village was the sticky soup of the melting snow being run over by the cars that were circulating.

At dinner Alfonso and his uncle ate split pea soup and they slurped loudly at their bowls and they could not hear a thing for all the noise of the traffic outside. All conversation was impossible and the two finished their meals without exchanging so much as a glance and later changed into their pajamas.

It was dark in the kitchen where they swallowed two pieces of ice each, and Alfonso's uncle gave him a coy wink as if to say, "Don't tell your mum, lad, or I'll gut you." His uncle couldn't remember that his own sister, Alfonso's mother, was deceased three years ago, which is why Alfonso was living with his uncle. Alfonso ran up to bed and turned off the lights and lay down on his bed under the covers and stared at the ceiling trying to relax and feel the two pieces of ice lodged in his throat slowly melt.

Alfonso's uncle stayed in the kitchen and suckled a few more pieces of ice from his hands, occasionally licking the dripping melt water from his fingers.

When his glass was empty, he opened the freezer and took two more pieces of ice from the tray. He dropped one in his glass. He stopped suddenly and listened. He could hear nothing. The traffic had stopped completely. There was no more of the separating velcro sound that that had permeated the afternoon and their supper. He looked through the window, which gave on the street, and saw circulating headlights, but heard nothing except the automobiles' engines droning along quietly. "Strange," he said, examining the lamplit street still covered in precipitate.

He dropped the other cube into his tumbler where it landed silently. Alfonso's uncle stared in amazement at the glass in his hand. He shook the glass, but heard no clinking of the ice against the glass. More forcefully, he rattled the ice cubes and he could feel them hitting against the crystal walls, but he heard nothing of it. He opened the window to the warming cold outside. People were getting out of their cars. They were pulling over so they could listen, and they heard nothing but their engines humming and eventually the engine fans kicking on to cool the idling motors.

Women started screaming, and men were shouting hoarsely. Everyone was trying to make some sort of noise, clapping their hands or banging against the hood of the car. And they could hear it all except the dripping water. And the little rivulets of melt water slipping into the sewers were silent.