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.
