First, this is a googlemaps pictures of where I was inititally looking at apartments. It's a very up-and-coming neighborhood in the crackhouse real estate arena.
Now, to the point. So yes, I've been depressingly inconsistent with my posts, but to show I haven't been totally unproductive, I'm posting the start of a short story I've been working and reworking FOREVER! I originally composed the draft of this story for my creative writing class, but wasn't satisfied with it by the end of the course. I've been restructuring it a little bit over the past week or two in the hopes of eventually turning it into a novella (that's right, now I tell all my artist friends I'm writing a novel as we smoke cigarettes and talk about Foucalt).
Around a week ago, I posted this beginning part, but due to certain parties' proximity to the story, frantically deleted it after drinking half a bottle of riesling alone in my waterlogged kitchen. There's a divet in the linoleum into which every spill migrates, making a weird little briney pool in the middle of the room. After possibly sighting tadpoles wriggling around in the stinky water, I sopped it up with a towel and promptly went to sleep.
Anyway, digression fail. Here's the start of the story. I realize there are some little inconsistences: 1). I haven't decided whether I want the opening scene to take place in the cold or not, and 2). I also haven't decided whether I want to remain consistently in Silas's perspective for the whole first part (I'll definitely slip into Molly's point of view in other sections). I'd really appreciate feedback if anyone is up to it. Otherwise, enjoy!
Oh, one more thing. I'm also putting the very first paragraph of the next section at the end.
Psyche: one more tiny thing: This is fiction!
Long Underwear Story (Working Title)
All manner of strange things had been filling his head lately: weird unprovoked thoughts, vivid impenetrable dreams, a deep and unshakable concern over the sorry state of his long underwear. He had never cared before that they were yellowed and sagging, that they hung shapeless around his crotch but constricted his pale and flabby thighs. Every morning he faced the cold in them, shirtless and shoeless, as he smoked a cigarette on his parents' lawn before work. This week, however, he'd seen his reflection in the living-room window. His red hair flamed up at crazy angles in the morning sunlight while his tiny eyes glimmered; the skin of his chest seemed translucent, as though it were thinly stretched over lumps of vertebrae and rib bones, and though he tucked one hand into the underwear's elastic waste band, the other he let dangle on the end of a long and pasty arm, intermittently flicking the ash of his cigarette on to the ground. Pelvis cocked forward, torso leaning back, skinny legs shivering in the underwear's warped embrace, lit cigarette in hand, he thought, “I look like a child molester.”
And that was when the strange thoughts started.
He flicked his cigarette into the wet grass and watched the single vein of smoke that emerged. It twisted in jagged circles as it rose, melting into the gray sky with an eerie crookedness. He shivered. He wrapped his arms around himself and squeezed the soft flesh below his shoulders, but even his skin seemed strange—slimy and torpid, a membrane. His whole body felt that...strangeness. What was it? He seemed raw and mucoid, like a slug, like some web-footed embryo, some half-formed thing. Oh God. Something sour crept up into his mouth and made the backs of his teeth gritty. Some orange mist settled in his head and congealed there, clogging his ears. He was freezing in the warm morning air and his heart began to race.
“What the fuck,” he whispered to no one. “Something is wrong with me.”
“Nothing is wrong with you,” Molly said. She rolled her eyes at him from across the
McDonald's table and he instantly regretted his decision to meet her here. “Besides, when did this happen? Like a week ago? You're still in one piece.”
“It was two days ago.”
She dismissed his concern with a flick of her hand. “Whatever. I think you're being just a little melodramatic.” Around them the sounds of commerce clicked and fluttered: plastic trays clacking together into neat tiers, napkins sliding across doughy faces, paper crumbling, it was a flighty and familiar rhythm. Outside, the rain drummed on parked cars, making a tinny rumble. A hot blast of greasy steam sprung up from somewhere behind the counter, hissing as it melted. Over everything, Silas's wheezy chatter could be heard clearly. His voice was nothing special and tended to creep into one's consciousness for its persistence, if nothing else, like the hollow beeping of a phone left off the hook.
“I'm just...I'm totally corrupt, I'm 31 and completely morally bankrupt,” he said, mashing his palms into his closed eyes and shaking his head.
Molly nodded skeptically, sucking on diet coke and gnawing the already mangled straw. Before Silas arrived, she had been watching two children play with the salt-and-pepper shakers. They continued their game behind him. A little girl slowly slid the pepper shaker across the table with her chubby hands while a little boy, presumably her brother, jiggled the salt shaker up and down as though it were dancing. Occasionally, the girl's hand would dart across the table and deftly tap the lip of the salt. “Kiss!” she shouted. Molly smiled, but Silas couldn't see them, so she turned to him.
“Don't be ridiculous,” she said. “First of all, I don't think you look like a child molester...but you were wearing those long underwear?” He nodded. “Well, honestly, I think most people who stand outside in their underwear at 7:00 A.M. run the risk of being mistaken for a pedophile.”
“Yeah, but I mean, it wasn't just that. It was like...I don't know, there was like a physical reaction. I felt sick...in both senses of the word.”
Molly sighed and began rolling her straw into a plastic coil. Her flippancy could be incredibly irritating. Silas knew she was listening, but he also knew she had a flare for disinterested mannerisms, like the grease thing, and the straw thing, and the glances at the two flailing children behind him. In fact, he noticed, she seemed more aloof than usual. The humidity outside had made her normally straight hair boil over her barrette in great, billowy swoops, dripping down to her shoulders like brackish rainwater. Her forehead twitched and wrinkled without warning. Her leg bounced a jittery rhythm beneath the table. Her whole body seemed poised for motion, as though she would bolt at any moment. Somehow, the gravity of his situation was not quite reaching her, and so Silas began to relate the series of events that followed his morning vision.
That night, a mere 48 hours ago, Silas was accosted by a vaporous and poignant breed of shame, the kind that pervades every room and sits heavy on the conscience like a cloudy film. In the past four months, he had divorced his wife with whom he had lived for 10 years in Oregon, given her their home, returned to Boston to live with his parents, lost his job, and warded off perhaps the only woman who had genuinely cared about him. Then, that very morning, he had seen the pale, flaccid, starved figure of his wasted soul. Seated on the cold tile of the bathroom floor, the litany of his failures unfurled itself before him, and the sight was unbearable. He drew his naked knees toward his chest until they skimmed the coarse fuzz of red stubble on his chin, then he reached up to the sink and procured a tube of toothpaste. He squeezed one long coil of paste into his mouth and swallowed. Then another, until half a tube was gone, then...
“Wait, wait, wait,” Molly interrupted, “you tried to kill yourself with toothpaste?”
Silas paused, then, “Yeah...I guess.”
“What the hell?! Where do you find this stuff?” She laughed, but not cruelly, and Silas remained silent. “Well, did you eat the whole tube?”
“Yeah.”
“And what happened?”
“I stayed up all night puking.”
They looked at one other for a tense instant, then Molly’s face twisted into a wry smile and she shook herself into laughter. “Well, at least your death rasp would have been minty fresh!” She laughed until her friend could not help but join in. Silas often considered his problems to be too specific for the groping hand of a friend to touch, too small and dense to be caught in some therapist's Freudian gauze. But Molly had a way of diffusing the things, hard and black as coal, so that they became a kind of soot that floated around his head and tickled his senses. From anyone else, her comments would have been cruel in their merciless specificity, but he had always felt in them a kind of devastating tenderness. She had seen him at his worst, starved, bug-eyed, propelling his fist through plaster, spilling droplets of cold coffee on his long underwear...and even then she had made him laugh.
“You're such an asshole,” he said to her, then leaned across the table and knocked her empty cup to the floor. They chuckled, then coolly retreated into themselves. Without the straw to occupy her knobby hands, Molly began to carve her initials into a smear of congealed grease. It peeled away in muddy clumps, lining her fingernails with sludge, turning her skin brown. They reminded him of miner's fingers, capable of extracting essential things: ores, minerals, sparking rocks, things in him he could not see or had tried to forget. When he looked at her hands, he felt a sort of sinking sensation, a falling back.
Over his left shoulder, the little boy was sliding a shiny nickle into the center of the table. It flashed silver in the beams of headlights through the rain. He pried the salt-and-peper shaker from his sister's fleshy fist, which she promptly stuck in her mouth, her lashy eyes now fastened , enraptured, on her brother. He was placating her, pushing back her free hand that reached for the pepper shaker, smiling reassuringly. Eventually, she settled down on the cushioned seat, her stubby legs swinging. When the boy raised the shaker high in the air, she gasped and pulled her gooey fist from her mouth, shrieking with delight as he slammed the shaker down on top of the nickle.
“Pick it up!” He told her, grinning.
She stood up on wobbly legs, her sneakers sinking into the red cushion, and snatched the shaker up. To her surprise, a stream of pepper tumbled from the shaker's bottom, rolling in a pungent wave over the edge of the table and into a pile on the floor. She looked at her brother with dewy eyes, her tiny features quivering, and dropped the shaker onto the floor with a howl. He laughed and jumped on the tabletop.
Molly's eyes followed the little girl as she sobbed and curled herself into her mother's abdomen, hiding herself in the plush folds of her downy coat.
Silas noticed Molly shake her head sadly.
“Can't you see I've been through a lot?” he said.
* * *
Coming back to Boston...Jesus, almost four months ago...Coming back to Boston had been like tunneling. Although Silas had technically soared across America in the rumbling gullet of a jumbo jet, there was still something subterranean about that journey. He felt cold and wet and sun-starved, like the slimy transparent creatures that slip along cave floors, running their suckered fingers over both grime and crystals with the same numbness. From his window he could see the shadow of the plane glide along the bristly, crusted terrain of Middle America, and he imagined he was on the other side of that dusty earth. This journey should not be full of clouds, he thought, but of hoary, warted roots curling into dead air, of stalagmites and stalactites thick with milky grime, of water dripping ceaselessly. He wrapped his hands in the sagging fabric of his shirt and shuddered: This was no surface heartache—this was tectonic.
