Selected Fictions
Micro-Fictions From the Blue Notebook
#10
There’s a certain loneliness in the suburban summer vacation of adolescence. The sun’s deployment of white sticky light, forces my retreat indoors - no “wanna come over?” today. Dark and cool, I’m hypnotized by the hum of centralized air. It’s the dust bowl hour, the claustrophobic time of day when particles dance across penetrating rays of light. A lawn mower down the street harmonizes with the rhythmic nail guns from the new subdivision across the retention field. Too young to know what productivity really means, but old enough to comprehend my fleeting childhood imagination. I won’t be building lego sets this year. Chandler signed my yearbook, “See you one day this summer!” What if that day was today? She could be down the street at Mackenzie's. How would I explain dismantled legos all over the floor? The clock keeps ticking to the beat of summer’s eternity.
#11
To be too careful risks overthinking; assembly line perfection. Mistakes are made. What was intended as impulse, careless impulse, transforms itself into anxiety and robotic calculation. Remain loose to avoid creative artery clots. It wasn’t rehearsed but instead free.
#12
Vermont was snowy. It was also foggy and somehow sinister. Dark with the winter of ancient New England. We bought cheeses and syrups. Jams and wax candles from country stores. We half-heartedly walked a maple trail, but the path wasn’t maintained and the deep snow turned us back to the car - disoriented had it not been for the smoker in the parking lot. I tried maple soda. It was sickly sweet. We watched the sun rise over icy lakes where locals had already begun ice fishing. We return to the dense woods of New York in the dark. Driving through a blizzard, we find ourselves alone on the road; drivers disappearing one by one. We’re retreating for cheap Mexican food and wine before the kitchen closes. Desperate. We’ll build a fire in the morning and read aloud Annie Baker plays.
#12
We searched and searched…
We island hopped, thinking our conversation would materialize the scene we so longed for. Two nomads lost in the expansiveness of a saturated desert, thirsty for water. Either no one else knew and only pretended they did, or lips were sealed because by finding it, it would be mined. Exposed and cooled. Perhaps we weren’t meant to find it - it was never to be ours. Only a plaything to be desired. Perhaps, by finding it we would know how to be a part of it. Collectively. Or maybe even if we find it - we wouldn't want it. The search was the thing. How can something so vast exist in a gaseous state? And why didn’t we know of anyone else getting closer?. Is everyone else searching too? Even the people who made it?
#13
Fresh squeezed sunlight on the back of my neck. I shouldn’t have worn my jacket today. Surrender to the half baked chill of the air. The midpoint between winter and spring is a trickster. It forces us to change our clocks only to threaten us with more snow?
#16
Pedaling through drizzle and fog to the George Washington Bridge, I fall into place like a phantom behind a gaggle of cyclists riding north with camping gear. I’m nervous about the rain. I break away from the procession and coast down through the Palisades along Henry Hudson Drive. Almost just me. Caught between the fusion of summer’s end and autumn's approach. A loose leaf falls, pausing my music for nature's hush. The elevation fluctuates, but it’s worth the price of admission. I emerge from the cliffs edge and reunite with the familiar route W9. I stop at the Filling Station for a pastry and a coffee. I grab my book of unread William Carlos Williams poems and read one or two. He talks about the Palisades in winter. Circumstance meets chance. Ordered chaos. Suddenly, the band of bikers appear! They must have kept to W9. I overhear that they’re camping for four days.
Setting off for dirt trails, I bike through Nyack. Beautiful old gated mansions from the gilded age line the waters edge. Solo rides demand introspection. I burst from a trail into a dusty active quarry. The contrast shocks me. City, woods, then industry. Rinse and repeat. The town of Haverstraw is poorer; lonelier. The inclines are meaner. I’m more intimate with my low gears. The sun, however, is out. Crickets are constant.
Suddenly, the Bear Mountain bridge appears through the tree’s. But I’m down here and it’s up there. I climb and cross, struggling to breathe because of passing trucks. I’m across and softly pull over for an apple, some water, and a rest - only nine miles to Cold Spring. I press on without a long stop for Beacon. The final eight miles.
I make it. My ride is a secret. I thumb through some records and have a beer while I wait for the train that will take me home. City, woods, industry. Silent celebration at a brewery. Suppressing the need to post what few pictures I took on Instagram, I decide to save this spiritual experience for myself.
Waiting at the train station with a sleepy smile. Holding bitter resentment at how monotonously easy the smooth sustained speed of the train closes the gap between me and the city. Sitting with my back towards the front facing forward motion. I watch bridges I traversed and mountains I climbed speeding by in reverse like a film being rewound all the way to Grand Central.
#22
How do I pour the same kind of spiritualism and introspection into my work as Makaya McCraven on a drum kit or Jeff Parker playing his guitar? Here’s what I know. This is what I assume to be key ingredients in the recipe - a participation in collaboration. An internal force awakened and unleashed. Joy. Feeling the Earth instead of just talking about it. Maybe it has something to do with the Chicago water? I think the link between jazz and acting is an interesting one. First, I love watching musicians play live or even the opening tune on Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’ where you hear the imperfections. You can actually hear the player trying to keep up at the speed of light and adjusting. Breathing. Leading and following. Ego’s are checked and utilized. An actor on stage is constantly calibrating and adjusting. The same catharsis when impulses are firing can be reached. Second, it can’t be done alone. Keith Jarrett’s Köln concert withstanding. The best band leaders assemble the best players or rather the players they can trust. Oh, and the bandleader might play with another. The yin and yang to ego. It’s rare to completely let go and be one with your craft - to leave your body and see yourself from above. To find eternal harmony in a single moment. And speaking of moments - they only happen once and you can never get them back. There’s a reckless abandon that is shared. And also the ability to hide the work and rehearsal from the audience. I watched this young trumpet player the other night at Ornithology and saw him simultaneously as I heard him try and reach the highest note and the end of Coltrane’s tune, Nayema. I know exactly how it should sound - i.e. the text - and while he didn’t quite nail it, I was moved by his attempt to play with the gods. To bravely rise to the occasion of an almight composer - i.e. playwright. The note was underwhelming but he sat his ego aside, accepted our loyal applause and said, “thank you.” He was performing and rehearsing simultaneously. He was getting better. I wouldn’t be surprised if he hit the note next time.
#26
The bike ride down Ocean Parkway spits you out into a unique crossroads of Brooklyn intersectionality: Brighten Beach.
I have in my backpack a warm Naragansette, two plumbs, a book of poetry and a novel. “Mango!” “Mango!” to the Afro-Caribean beat of venders. Stifled by firework fumes and Canadian Wildfires. I’ve got Titiana to my back where you can escape a summer storm and instead enjoy a bottle of Smirnoff, and cranberry juice purchased at the bodega next door. Several dips and I’m refreshed.
A Poem
Wind chime melody
Inviting hammock naps
Lullaby cattail nettle dreams
Ripples on the lake
Suggesting quiet whispers
Bird song and a distant bark
Penetrate doldrum stillness
She rests her eyes
Dreaming of who she was; who she is.
Surfacing through grief’s waters
Changes - but not for the worse
Stronger; womanhood autonomy
Transitory and Arrived.
No time for desperate solopsism
Or hubris ego
Definition vanquishing tyrannical assumptions.
Tears of iron and selfhood
American individualism
Awake! The winter has come and gone
Motherhood awaits
Ready to give life and nurture it.
Is that the laughter of our child on the Catskill wind?
A Poem
Hemingway afternoon
Sure-worded dogmatism
Rugged American individualism
Cowboy in Paris
Disillusioned ascertitude
Indoctrination into postwar masculine identity
Pilgrimage to the soul
Unsure what lies beneath the surface
Nomadic impressionism
Unimpressed gawking
She me the world
Just a boy from the Kentucky hills
Voices of our fathers abound
Wrecking us
Pocketsized lessons
Take it or leave it.
Sure worded and sure-footed.
A Poem
The boy dreams
Deep trenches into thoughts unknown
Perceptions line only catching boundless questions
Abstract reflections of hopes
Of dangers, mountain tops and fresh mowed grass
The boy dreams
Borges’ labrynthine palace
The labyrinth of time. The labyrinth of space
Of being. Of direction.
Yet, movement in his world can also be circular and rhythmic.
Spinning faster, yielding to nothing.
Vibrations that begin to crystallize
Suddenly we have a codex to decipher ancient texts
Words the boy has carved and etched into the Earth like ink on parchment paper
A pilgrimage to an endless river
The boy dreams
Will the second schoolyard kiss overwrite the first?
I’ll play major league baseball
Build a home and raise two children
Take photos of them, that would later be found in an attic camera,
Ink not too dry to discern their smiles
“It was only a change of plan,”
Every composition has that song…
The boy dreams-
Perhaps when he returns here forty years later with his family
Will he spot the same rock?
Will there be, in his eye, that sharp glimmer of a memory bigger than himself?
The shine of momentary comprehension
But, fleeting because already the memory is chased off by the next one.
The boy dreams -
Was it quiet?
Or was someone asking,
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Is the boy posing?
And perhaps not dreaming, but being?
Was this the gentle afternoon following a morning walk with his father?
Amusing, silky smooth, “Huh, thought you smoked?” confessions
Fathers know
The boy dreams -
In anologue and technicolor
Absent of acrylic glare
Simply the clouds above and their shadows case below
Sonic echos in the grooves
Prisms of sounds and images
No shuffle, he puts in the effort to flip the record
The boy dreams -
Of becoming a father and of all the insecurities and fears that come along with it
Dad, ultimate practitioner of task and correction
Of patience and resilience
Of laughter and pride
Why not let age remain ambiguous?
New dreams still manufactured
Not for profit, but for happiness
The boy dreams
The tingle of a stepped on lego
The smell of juniper and lime on a summer night
The bitter cold ricocheting off cheeks at a football game
October leabes of a haunted house on the outskirts of tow
Bourbon and campfire
Dark side of the moon
Fuzzy images coming into focus
Aperture and self-restraint
2% milk aquifer under glass table top
That same table top where you taught me arithmetic
Motorcycle fumes in a trembling garage
Baseball glove leather
LAte night peanut butter and jelly
Nintendo 64 underscoring a Sunday morning
The boy dreams
And for a moment
The dreams of the boy and the dreams of the son meld together
Double exposure on canvas
A shared mythology
More adjacent in thought and temperament than they could have ever known.
Lessons learned and teachers teaching,
Both of them,
Connective tissue absolute and forever
Lawrence a name, a tribe
A state of being
The boy is a man now
but , oh, does he dream and still dream
And those dreams are contagious dreams
He’s still a boy and that boy is him.
The boy dreams-
Deep trenches into thoughts unknown
Perceptions line catching boundless questions
Abstract reflections of hopes
Of dangers, mountain tops, and fresh mowed grass.
#34:
I remember trying pot for the first time near the creek with Cat. She was leaving for college at the end of summer, leaving me behind to finish high school alone. We made a summer checklist of everything we wanted to do before September. We weren’t dating but friends operating under a mutual understanding that we would stay just that. Anyway, after we checked off a trip to the frosty freeze over the county line, we eagerly anticipated our next and penultimate task. Smoking marajuana for the first time. From the protected confines of my privileged boyhood in the suburbs of Kentucky, smoking and getting high was a big deal. Cat’s brother could get us some - how much? A leaf? A wad? - we would commence like criminals.
I wasn’t afraid of the act itself, but I was awkward and polite. Would this change me? Would there be no turning back? I wanted so bad to impress her and prove some kind of edgy abandon.
I remember it was a sweltering humid day. I drove to Cat’s gated community (did anyone see you?!) and drove us to the creek protected by lucious thick trees and brush. I plugged my ipod into a tiny JBL speaker eager to queue a playlist I had spent several meticulous hours building. We laid on our backs and talked. BEads of sweat ran down my forehead and the swirl of mist and her subtle perfume drugged me into a intoxicating haze. When we were finally comfortable under a blanket of heat and protected by the isolation of the woods, she produced a tiny plastic bag, a bowl, and a lighter. I held my breath - it was all so delicate.
#35
Watchu know about that?
Brooklyn poems he postures with understanding.
Home; blurry with new and ancient sketches
Clinton Hill, Red Hood, Fort Green, Bushwick, BedStuy, Cobble Hill physiognomy of place shattered and rebuilt.
Wachu know about that?
Ownership pf songcraft
Insertion into a tribe that didn’t invite him.
And yet, the fate of shared togetherness demands inclusivity.
No accusation, simply a question
Watchu know about that?
Questions that need answers he can’t give.
Inspired by an American poet, a Brooklyn blooded Brash Builder
Scooped up from the library.
Walking the same streets as Whitman
Ferry crossings traded in for long sticky airless train cars.
Surprised response: I honestly don’t know but he does,
He sees injustice, violence, and pain
He criticizes complacency and advocates of otherness
He’s marched in protest and studied east coast MC’s; prolific and angry.
Copy and Paste studentship
Update the terms and agreements
Plant feet firmly, ask the hard questions, and be there.
Watchu know about that?
Not much, but wanna keep learning. Inspired. Poetics enter the bloodstream and begin pumping the heart
Faced with the question, this was never about him and yet it’s all about him?
Less a question and more reconciliation
Certain truth never investigated
Watchu know about that?
Meta-modernism looks inward and exposes individuality to the collective.
This is America - our America
You just didn’t know it.
Flexing an illusion
#36
Peach juice running down my arm, I quickly suck on my fingers tasting first sweet summer and then the bitterness of deet and ash from last nights bonfire. A Big Thief pilgrimage to the Hudson Valley trying to glimpse the cattails dancing like Adrien sings about. We pull into West Taghonic Diner only to see boys and girls playing Bushwick dress up. Smoked tomato jam on collards, fired egg and Guare between two brioche buns and cornmeal buttermilk pancakes. Hot coffee and small town farmers selling zucchini and sun flowers outside. It might rain later predicating gentle sex in the guest room. We squeezed in a pit stop at New LEaf books for something interesting in case it rains - Faulkner and MArk Twain biographies the best catch of the day. The market across the street provides us with an orange, pop corn kernels, and a Hershey bar in case ewe make smores tonight.
Blankets of clouds drift in, making the ground swelter. The mornings dew that soaked my sandals dried. We make love, shower, brew some coffee and prepare for a beautiful mountain sunset knowing in our hearts that Montana is calling. I read about trout fishing in Spain while she drafts a new resume. Transitory passage between nations over an ocean of reams and stark realities. Conjuring for ourselves new terms and agreements for our projects and art. It’s damn near impossible not to mythologize the Hudson Valley, but god is it really stunning. We play pretend in the city at eating local, but here is the real thing. A summit of tangibility. Real and inviting.
A Short Story
A wakeful jolt. Blurred yellow lines flashing with the immediacy of speed. Empty darkness suddenly giving way to shaky hands behind a wheel, the stranger was lost on a deserted highway stretching infinitely through bottomless time. Even the watch on his right wrist was now blank. He wasn’t certain how he came to be behind the wheel of a ‘75 Ford Pinto he didn’t recognize nor where he was going. All he had was the dim glow of headlights, forward motion and the absolute assurance that it would go on and on eternally. His ears were adjusting to the sustained hum of sonic friction the tires made on the asphalt. Not unlike soggy cabin pressure on a plane, he thought. Soulless repetition, lacking variation. The road was so smooth that even an occasional bump in asphalt would have been a welcomed scratch in the record. There was no fear of sleep taking over, but he was certain he’d been driving for hours. Days. Could it have been years? This is the stuff of dreams, he surmised. Dreams that you confidently begin to tell a lover in the morning and then suddenly can’t. He thought to himself that this vacuumus labyrinth was somehow familiar and yet impossible to belong to a reality he recognized. Like trying to look through a murky membrane.
And then the stone, with a heavy thud, dropped into his being. The place he was driving from was sinister and evil. The transaction between the pedestrian act of driving, his nervous focus, and the liminal landscape was a cocktail of futile escape. To add to the nausea pooling in his gut, he began to sense that he was being closely followed. Chased. Is it possible to suggest that he felt he was being chased from something unseen moving towards him on the dizzying dark horizon? The acknowledgement of a horizon on the vapid landscape made him feel so small and buoyant as if to betray his gravitational tether. Suspecting that if he turned around all he would find would be a void; the road seemingly de-animating behind him. A fog creeped in over the colorless road and the absence of other drivers only made the bloated emptiness feel insulted somehow. He rolled down the window and was surprised to find the air still and dry. He could smell green pennies and decay.
He passed desolate intersections with roads named after people he knew and places he remembered. And with the passing of each one particulates of embarrassment, lust, desire, and deep sadness permeated throughout him. Fragmented with origin’s impossible to determine. The mightiest feeling that began snuffing the other’s out was the desire to inflict suffering on others so as to patch the barren holes of loneliness he carried within. An asbestos inhaled so deep it hurt; cutting at his insides.
Only at that moment did he catch his face in the rearview-mirror. Oily blood was oozing out from every pore in his body. Syrupy torrents fell from his nose and eyes. Bloody vomit gurgled up his burning esophagus and into his lap. He picked at clogged ears as sound evaporated. Blood seeped out of cuticles, his body unable to clot. Chills overtook him as he tried to cry out, a swimmer taking their last breath before being taken under the waves when, without warning, all was calm. He looked at himself in the mirror; nothing was out of place; nor was there a drop of blood. A maniacal laughter, that he recognized as his own, barked out of him as he, overcome with dark thoughts of an insidious nature, tried desperately to touch himself. When he realized that satisfying this savage primal lust was hollow, he tried for the radio dial as a distraction. All it could muster, however, was a faint hum of electrical vibration and the occasional sound of distant unfamiliar voices. Hushes riddled with disgust and horror. The sadistic laughter absorbed itself into the leather seats, forever stained.
The stranger kept driving. The hair on his arms began to stand. Suddenly the vaccumus landscape edged abruptly toward a forest of metallic trees with trunks the widths of houses, enclosing both sides of the road like a tunnel; dense and resolute. Only then did he understand this wasn’t a forest made of trees, but of telephone poles stretched with cable wires, twisting like black licorice in the starless night - a canopy of surging snakes venomous with sinister electricity. High voltage transformers compressing like wheezing lungs. Overripe conductors hanging from branches dripping with acid discharge. Voltage currents attempting to swallow the stranger. The vines clawed their way into the car with ease, up the exhaust and slipping through chambers where dials and buttons popped off - wrapping themselves around tires thus bringing the car to a slow crawl. The car itself became a death trap. His hands burned at the touch of the wheel and they began to sizzle - he could smell the putrid odor of his own burning flesh. It was at this horrible moment he knew he was driving through the expansive edges of an unknown Hell.
How did it come to this? Where were the other damned souls? As he searched for some resemblance of resolution, the stranger inhaled a crack of electricity, but it wasn’t quite the shock he was expecting - in the place of electricity there was only the laughter of children. Laughter caught in a loop, playing over and over at increasing volume through the crackly speakers. Sound waves reverberating and echoing throughout the car. He began to cry. To others they might have heard shrieking accusation, but what the stranger heard was childhood laughter - full of dreams, first ice creams, rounding home, first allowances, treehouse sleepovers, 10th try and we beat the final boss kind of laughter. It graduated to laughter of awkward first kisses and all the laughter that would seemingly be bottled up and never shared. Laughter never to be. Stopped short, the vats never emptied. He screamed for it to stop as pangs of self-remorse entombed him. He could try driving the car off the road but the wire vines wouldn’t let him - they had commandeered all control. Did the laughter ever stop? How long had he been forced to listen? Like the road on which he drove, the laughter was forever.
Shadows began to run alongside the car but never materialized beyond fiendish shapes. It was unsettling and disorienting. He had catholic schoolboy images of what hell could be and never did he think it would be so empty. This unknown place took more resemblance to the insides of an abandoned harddrive than it did to fire and brimstone. Images struck him of a boy he recognized - lighting the altar candles, kneeling with reverence, Mr. Jerry, next door, inviting him inside to show him something after the other children had run home. That it would be their secret. Impossible concentration through the blinds at the car on the driveway. A mother, his mother, slapping him and a father locking him in his room between slurred words. Only a bible to keep him company during the long cold Ohio winter nights. Suppressing urges because he knew it would be a sin, biting his fingers until they bled. Trying desperately to feel something. Trying desperately to imagine what friends could be like and how to imagine a love he could only measure in unknown variables. He remembered his parents’ sardonic accusations when the family cat disappeared during a humid lazy summer day. He loved that cat, but he couldn’t help it.
Meditation dissolved and he found himself back at the wheel. The laughter had hushed or maybe he had just gotten used to it? The angry woods thinned and returned to a vacant stretch of road. It began to rain and, as if on cue, the wipers started their timeless dance. What began as a few drops of rain turned into a frenetic torrent. The night’s ceiling receded into nothingness; the rain falling from unseen blankets. The downpour was at its most intense when a shoe came crashing down into the windshield. Then another. Childrens shoes. And socks. And Little league hats. And Sunday school dresses. And glasses. And bookbags. And bows. And tiny overalls. And ballet tutu’s. The windshield was completely overcome as he was blinded to the road ahead. He was swerving; desperate but unable to crash - he understood he would need to endure this nightmare. He felt guilty and his heart submerged forever into an ocean of despair. For the first time he spoke, “I’m sorry! I couldn’t help it! I loved them! I wanted to show them!”
At that moment, headlights appeared straight ahead in the distance, but he felt no relief. While his thoughts were far from clear he knew deep down that he couldn’t let those lights get close enough to see who might be behind the wheel of the other car. Consequences of a demonic nature. The lights defied all logic because they should have been closing the distance but instead maintained it. He was certainly moving fast but everything seemed like a treadmill. He hated himself for what he had done; perhaps recognizing his wickedness for the first time. Despised his sinister urges. Began counting them. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. With a scream, the headlights shot forward like a rubber band snap and all he could see was a blinding light and pain, real pain..
The stranger's eyes shot open, bloodshot at the horrors he’d witnessed and relived. He cried for mercy he knew would never come.
He couldn’t move - blood - his blood from an un-assessed wound - gluing him to an icy car seat he recognized as his own. Unable to call out or speak, he could only listen to voices around him simmering through the harsh glow of silent sirens. Steam engulfed his numb body.
“Identified as Patrick Hoiser”
“Head on collision - this bastard swerved into the other lane.”
“High? Inebriated?”
“The toxicology report will take some time”
“The other driver, James Dempsey, is expected to survive with minor injuries. He’s being taken to Regess medical for suspected head trauma.”
“That won’t shock you after you look in this son of bitches trunk. Harris is in the weeds puking.”
“Dear God.”
“Fucking scum of the Earth”
“These pieces of shit should burn in hell or hang from their balls in the center of town” “Forensics have identified who they suspect to be the 2 missing Blair children and another adolescent we’ve yet to identify.”
“Naked, tied up and the blood’s been drained from lacerations around their neck”
“Like they were hung upside down?”
“Fucking sick fuck”
“Do you think there are more?”
“My guess.. We found our bible note killer”
The stranger knew what he had done. Knew with some kind of relief that he would be exposed. With cynical amusement, he comprehended that these Earthly sins seemed inconsequential compared to what awaited him in hell - where the screams of his victims and their laughter, full of hopes and dreams, were never to be heard by anyone else but him on an endless stretch of barren road.