Day somethingeruther. A lot

         Waiting for things to become natural and perpetuate themselves.  Today isn't so bad.  I know it's all constantly improving.

“That guy in the coffee place, were you just talking to him to make me jealous?”  Carlo talked to Belinda’s sleeping body.   He congratulated himself with a nod for using the word "guy" when he had so many other options.  He bit his tongue when he realized the guy was sitting across from them, reading Jim Kramer’s Freakonomics.  His computer sat open on the tray table in front of him, and Carlo bitterly assumed it was parked on his Facebook page.  He smiled smugly over at Carlo, his head looking like it might break backwards in a devilish cackle at any moment.He adjusted the pillow behind his head and folded his arms, and fell into a restless sleep.  His dream contained a lot more death and murder than he was anticipating.  In it, an old friend of his named Dougie was accompanying him with a hacksaw, they were walking down a long stretch of dirt road.  The dream was one of those that was especially real, he felt the warm air, he could see heat rising off of the yellow desert like stink lines in all directions.  He carried a bag which probably had a head in it, but as much as he tried to get his hands to open and release it nothing happened.

They arrived together in front of a precipice, and slid down the slowly declining dirt wall in front of a metal structure.  It looked like some sort of oil refinery, the legs that were holding it up jutted from the ground like spider limbs.  Dougie wiped blood off of the hacksaw before they even went inside.

They descended flight after flight of winding stairs, towering machines oscillating and filling the empty space with saturating noise.  He felt his face get angrier and angrier the deeper he got, his lips becoming a carved out jackolantern smile like Jack Nicholson playing an evil part.  Dougie pushed open the steel grate door at the bottom of the stairs and invited him in like Renfield, and he pushed through a thin layer of cobwebs.

Shaking his long hair free, he instictively called out, “No one can hear you!  I can’t even hear you.”  Belinda was strung up at the far end of the room, atleast a football field away, hanging by her feet from rusty metal shackles.

“This is how you deal with your problems, Carlo.  This is always how you deal with your problems.”  She ragged on him with an unflinching voice.  “Oh, I see you brought a friend.  Looks like he can do all of the work for you.” 

She looked relatively undamaged, her complexion still the ruddy pink it always was.  Aluminum foil sat on top of a wooden block, and on it there was a row of murder tools.  There was the dentist drill, the hammer, a rusty hook, a blow torch, any time he imagined something new it was there.  His eyes fluttered on the plane and he got a permament V-shaped eyebrow for a minute.

He grabbed the drill and stuck it to Belinda’s temple.  She stared up at him nonplussed, and as he held the trigger down it went with a gurgling noise directly into her head.  He felt a tinge of guilt but when he pulled the drill back out, bracing himself against the wall with his foot, the hole disappeared at the point of immersion.  Dougie got to work with the hacksaw, and although it easily cut through to the other side of her neck the head remained intact.

The stewardess passed in the aisle as Carlo gave off a low humming chuckle in his sleep.   She shook him by the shoulders and he roused, staring up at her like a Frankenstein monster.  He rose, almost automatically, and stepped across the aisle to where Mr. Douchebag was sitting, pushing poor Connie out of his warpath.

“Excuse me sir.”  Carlo said quietly.  The guy had his headphones in his ears and was asleep, his laptop still open in front of him.  A quiet sort of nonoffensive rock music blared.  “Sir.”  He reached down to pull the earphones out of the guys ears, a tough guy move if he had ever thought of one.

Belinda called from across the aisle.  “What are you doing?!”  She went from 0 to 50 in no time.  Meanwhile, Connie was trying to figure out where the air marshall was.

“I’m trying to sleep.”  The man groaned, his eyes opening to a slant.  Carlo reigned his arms in and stood with his hands at his side.  “What…?”

“How come a guy like you has to hit on my girl?”  Carlo said, shaking his head.  His self pity mechanism had kicked in.  “There’s… there’s all kinds of them around here.  Even just on this plane.”

“She didn’t say anything about…”

Carlo came in with a haymaker, his flabby arm bouncing off of the mans cheek and a sudden jerk of the plane laying him out flat on his back in the aisle.  His arm got caught in the man’s computer power cord and it fell with him.  Awake suddenly, the man rose and rubbed his face.

“What are you doing with your life?  It’s no wonder Belinda wants out.”  The man stated sharply.

“He’s right.”  Belinda chimed in.

“Sir, we’re going to have to ask you to come with us.”  A polite air marshall asked.  He was short stubby and tan, with a farmers tan and sunglasses.  Older ladies toward the back of the plane only witnessed this part of the incident, and assumed the worst because of Carlo’s darker complexion.

He talked to Belinda from across the glass.

“The man… Duane… has agreed not to press charges.”

“Charges for what?”  Carlo asked, incredulous.

“Carlo, it was full on assault.”

There was a moment of silence.

“…Are you still going to come live with me?”  Carlo asked.  Belinda looked away, tussled her black hair like she did every time they watched a horror movie.  “Well that’s just fucking great.  A new house, a new life, all by myself…”  Carlo made eye contact and was brought back into the moment, the way he could only stay mad at her when they weren’t together.  He resented her for her ability to produce empathy seemingly out of thin air.

“I think it’s best that we are apart for awhile.”  She said, turning to leave like she had just thrown a grenade.

“How long is awhile?”  A security guard gestured at the marshall, who opened the plexi glass security cage with a key hanging from a long ring on his pocket.

“You’re free to go, get out of here.”

Carlo sat in the sunroom of his new estate, surrounded by moving boxes taller than he was.  He sat on a stone bench that was part of the wall, earlier having retrieved his coffee maker and coffee cup out of the smaller box which he had purposely marked with a yellow “X” to ensure the ease of its retrieval.

It was a better cup than his last one, this he knew.  It said “Washington County Steel Workers Union” on the side with big grey prison bars, and it was the perfect width and length for his optimum amount of coffee.  It’s perfection made him think of it as the evil sports team from movies, the team with all of the choice prospects, the hard nosed semi-professional coach, the highly competitive clannish nature of earning playing time.  His old cup, one he had bought years earlier when things with Beverly were still going good, had been smashed somehow in transit.  The rest of the contents of the bag were in perfect condition, the larger superior backup cup seemed to be saying:  “Your other cup had certain limitations.  It’s time you moved on to a big boy cup.”    

He kicked his feet out and his lower half teetered uncertainly on the edge of the bench, and as he tipped to one side he eyeballed the full cup of joe, sloshing around inside like an overflowing bathtub.  He found it impossibly hard to use both arms independently, his right arm spasmodically flailing to preserve his balance.  It was like watching a first time swimmer. A sudden image of him smashing his head on the cement bench behind him and laying in a pool of his own blood for the movers to find him the next day popped into his head.  He looked down at the cup, which seemed to be demanding he acknowledge it’s importance, and dropped it to the ground.  The coffee spilled and the cup turned upright seemingly of his own accord..

“Worse things than my whole house smelling like coffee.”  He said to himself with a sheepish giggle.  He jumped at the sight of his own face in the linoleum, he looked like a burly bear of a man.  The coffee quickly followed the slightly slanting curvature of the kitchen and over the risers that led to his living room, a circular room with two high beams on either side and a bubble of glass window overhead.  He retrieved the coffee cup and marooned it in the sink.