I can't believe I'll get to start writing about something different. Of course, proofreading is going to be a major pain. I bet I'll learn a lot from it. Let's get to work.
PS: When you just focus and write, you can get 2,000 words done pretty quick. And it doesn't always feel like you're bullshitting. You can just slow down and relax.
My best one yet, I think.
PS: When you just focus and write, you can get 2,000 words done pretty quick. And it doesn't always feel like you're bullshitting. You can just slow down and relax.
The old man pointed at him from inside, Charles noticed as he stared up from the gas pump. The attendant looked out at him with a furrowed unibrow. Coming around to the back of the car, he checked the trunk with his eyes, it was closed, there was no visual evidence convicted him. Was his guilt so tangible?
Charles pushed through the front door after replacing the pump on its station. His hands were freezing cold although it was warm outside, the whoosh of ocean air blowing past his face in a crippling full lunged blast. He thought of when he moved his stuff into his new apartment; the first time he had realized he was all on his own. The cold seemed colder han, the darkness was more absolute.
The seagulls followed him everywhere, now perched on the gas station billboard advertising $4.00 car washes. The old man was having a curiously long conversation with the attendant inside, now they were laughing as the old man held a newspaper sideways so they both could look on. Charles went in and paid for 3$0.00 on pump 17 and revved the engine again.
He swore something was rising off of the rearview mirror, out in the mirrored distance behind him, but the reassuring realization that he was all alone soon swept over him. He started to notice details that weren’t there before; the tiny cracks in his windshield, the antennae that bent over backwards in the wind, the Gilbert and Sullivan idol bobblehead on the dashboard. A starting realization came over him that identity isn’t something you construct for yourself, it’s happenstance and the way life settles over you. You can misrepresent yourself, but that’s a frivolous selfish activity, since the majority of people don’t care anyway. Everyone only thinks of themselves.
A red sedan on the side of the road had run out of gas, or overheated, or the battery had died. He contemplated pulling over to help the young woman out, but two men sat in the back seat and no one up front in the passenger side.
“Gas station is a couple miles back that way,” He called out with a pointing thumb, slowing down enough to aggravate the sole driver behind him. The blue jeep went around him, shooting him a scowl and raised hands.
Charles pulled up to a craggy area overlooking the water, the waves rushing over the rocks like they were eager to swallow up whatever he had to offer to it. He parked sidelong under three trees that made a giant M, his Honda Civic’s white hue clashing beautifully with the green brown leaves. He popped the trunk and pulled out the bags, balancing himself with one arm on the trunk. Lugging them along with difficulty to keep them from ripping open on the rocks, he let out a sigh of relief, keeping the furtive subconscious thought that this was all too easy as far back in his mind as possible.
He threw the first bag into the water, it resting on top of the sand with a thud. The water swept over it, rustling the bag and pulling it taught over its contents, making first a hand visible, then the curve of an elbow or leg. Charles through the second and third bags a little further out, carefully tying each tighter as he cast them away. The beach was visible for miles on each side, the rocks disappearing further down and swallowed into the eroded beach head.
He checked his watch, eight fifteen. He didn’t have a presentation ready, either way, as much as Mr. Pulp had loved anything he did until this point. They’d send a couple more paychecks either way, his worries were nothing compared to PTSD, he rationalized. I should probably take my next job more seriously, or maybe I did take it seriously, I can’t remember the details.
Leaving the scene of the crime, Charles thought about those old Bugs Bunny cartoons where Elmer Fudd would think he had escaped, and Bugs would be standing by the nearest door in drag. The kind of logic of a nightmare type of cartoon where you would almost feel bad for the guy if the absurdity wasn’t so fast moving, the wit so quick. He was mentally prepared for the bags to magically be back in his trunk, or show up at the office, or maybe get delivered by the garbage men back into the dumpsters at the back of his apartment. He had a foolish feeling like forensic evidence would tie him to the bags, maybe Big Brother kept track of who bought what, extending all the way to garbage bags. He’d seen those CSI episodes where a hair incriminates a guy who had an otherwise foolproof plan.
He clung to the idea that Dave was a figment of his imagination, someone he had invented to hurt himself. I can plead the insanity defense, either way, he thought as he adjusted the seatbelt to it wouldn’t chaffe his neck. He drove past his new offices on the way back, spotting antlike people from a distance flying through the offices at top speed. He felt like he had planted a bomb there and they were running to diffuse it.
Charles stopped by Sal’s for a couple more hotdogs, Sal making note of the fact that he “didn’t look too good”
“You look like shit, Charles. The bags under your eyes look like they’re going to drag your eyes in with them pretty soon.”
Charles was aware of extra weight pulling his eyelids down, but was pretty sure that was just a side effect of lack of sleep. What he became more concerned about when he started to think about it was the twitch he had acquired on the left side of his body, an involuntary full body shiver that quaked him each time he resolved to resist it.
“It’s been a long night Sal, I should probably go home.” Sal wasn’t sympathetic, there was no hint of a caring person in his eyes, he was just telling it like it is. He was happy in his little hotdog shack, probably because he got to watch TV and tell it like it is.
“The fucking guy from the lamp store says every one of his lamps is starting to smell like my dogs. He is threatening to get a civil suit against me.”
Charles hadn’t even noticed the lamp store, even though it was spacially involved with Sal’s place.
“What kind of nut starts a lamp store next to a hot dog place, anyway? I think it’s got something to do with the ventilation, but I’m not going to get high on hot dog fumes by closing off the ducts. It’s bad enough everything I own reeks of pured beef.”
An old guy in the seat down the hall by the window looked up from his American History book for a second, bugged by the noise and not interested in the conversation.
“This is my fucking place, I’ll be as loud as I want to be.” Sal slammed a hamfisted fist on the counter.
Charles took a bag of dogs to go ($5.50 plus tax), and whisked himself away back to his apartment. The light hurt his eyes, it would keep getting brighter until his head exploded he was sure. He thought of himself as a prematurely birthed larva, his queen sized bed as a cocoon. Everyone was in a good mood today, it shouldn’t have been that hard for him to get back.
He had to circle around the block and park in the alley, all the angle parking was full. He wasn’t used to being home at this time of day, but there must have been some sort of businesses in this area that he had been unaware of. It all looked residential to him, maybe people maintained home offices. But then what did they do at night? He didn’t worry about it, his brain was indisposed. He could feel it stiffening like leaving bread in the oven too long, next thing it’d start oozing out of his ears.
His apartment door opened too easily, that’s gotta be a security issue he thought. He looked down the hallway with suspicion, trying to identify someone who may have been screwing with it. The measured the thickness of the door by putting his hand around it, and decided it look easily be kicked in. He should have noticed these things before.
The eyes on Dave’s Spinal Sword glowed red under the couch like a spooky halloween mask. He removed it from under the couch, holding it up and staring into its eyes with little ability to resist. The redness soon enveloped him again, and he just laughed, I should have known better this time.
The next thing he knew, it felt like he was asleep but there was no way to tell for sure. He reached down to pinch himself, and the skin stretched and then didn’t fit back together perfectly. If I could use my other hand I could reconstruct this, he thought, and suddenly he had a third hand, jutting out from the elbow on his left arm.
Charles closed his eyes and attempted to sleep, but it failed because he was already asleep. A red circle with a line through it flashed through his head on repeated attempts, along with the noise you get on Family Feud for a wrong answer. His eyes wouldn’ perceive what was around him, his feet fixed into the ground like tree roots. The colors flew by in full spectral manifestation, like when the Millenium Falcon would go into warp mode.
He was roused awake by three hard slaps. It was the man from across the hall, the old man. “Even when you dream you make too much noise. What business does a young guy like you have not working at this time of the day, anyway?”
“If you don’t mind me asking,” Charles said, wiping his eyes. “What was I talking about?”
“You kept yelling about some pink pyramid, purple stairs, something like that, some fruity business.” He recoiled into the stairwell when he saw what Charles was carrying, the staffs eyes no longer glowing red, but in the daylight it looked like a tribal war prize.
“Is that a… that’s a…” The old man gasped, tried to turn to run, and spit up a sac of green pus onto the carpet by Charles’s door.
My best one yet, I think.
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