Secret Stories, Page 4

kinds of movies, and who was also good at what she did.

  Most days he didn’t like his job, though, because he felt like it had nothing to do with why he wanted to be what he worked so hard to become. He wanted to make something useful and imaginative that would be as fascinating as his initial interest. Although, his job was very complicated, he was also very bored. More than just lack of interest, he was extremely disappointed.

  His wife’s job was also extremely complicated, and she was also disappointed for the same reasons.

  They talked about what it would be like to work on something together that they would feel passionate about. They both had to follow formulas to make products that sometimes were useful but usually weren’t, products that lacked all interest to nearly anyone who was not selling them.

  They remembered and discussed the themes of their favorite science-fiction films, the warning of future dangers, the progress of new creations. They felt like they wanted to be mad scientists together but to work for the betterment of things. They didn’t know how to start doing this or what they would do, so they just talked about it sometimes.

  His wife went to work earlier than he did. One day, after she had gone, forgetting that his life was much more than the job he had at that time, not allowing the speculation of his future possibility, he killed himself.

  Parentage

  Her Grandmother was dead. Her Mother, also. This wasn’t a surprise to her—she was about to turn eighty. But it wasn’t until she got to be the ages that they had been in her memories that she could understand them.

  Chip Dip

  Joe walked around the mostly natural foods grocery store as he spent most of his energy investigating women. He would look at their carts to see what they were going to eat and to see if the good looking women ate the best proportion of good food. As he did this, he mentally licked the ones he was attracted to that also ate the best, but he did this with a slight bit of skepticism as to whether or not his ideas about good food would really make that much difference if his romances went further than his mind and the looks back he sometimes got. He felt a lot of guilt because of all this.

  The guilt Joe felt was because he knew that being educated about nutrition and being able to afford much of what was good food was a privilege, also because it was a fundamental conviction for him to not overvalue privileged ways of living, especially at the expense of others. He knew the underprivileged too need loving understanding. He also now understood that his actions, past and future, needed deep consideration.

  Joe’s guilt then led him to a large chain grocery store full of processed food on special sales. On the aisle with chips on one side and large plastic soda pop bottles on the other, near the buy one get one cookie end-cap, he first saw the woman that he would call Joann. He called her this after himself because he knew that he and the people in this store were the same. She was poor and wonderful, exciting every part of him. In her cart was terrible food, much of it he hadn’t eaten since he was a child buying school lunches. He stopped a moment, then licked her in his mind. It was better than the women at the other store.

  Now Joe knew he understood the common people, and he knew he would try to help them in any way that he could. He thought he and Joann would represent the underprivileged together.

  It had been at least five minutes since Joe licked Joann in his mind, since then seeing nothing but a colorful blur from the distant cookie end-cap he had been staring at while thinking. He hadn’t noticed that the woman had already left.

  The Excitement Of Silences

  In his life, letter writing has been his main exchange of thoughts and emotions. In fact, he has no memories of ideas or feelings until after the time he started writing letters. The letters are where he recognizes that he can communicate and know intimacy. He does try to figure out how to speak to people and to hear them, but still the quiet moments alone are the ones where he is most together; there is a freedom with this way of communication for him that extends beyond his abilities with his physical presence, beyond the relationships he has been able to have with anybody.

  He once got a letter from someone who told him that they knew of a person who had so much trouble expressing any part of much of anything at all that meant enough—so much trouble being close to others—that the person would go to the movies and sit a few seats from someone when there were plenty of other places to sit that were not as close to anybody.

  Days Over When They Begin, The First Quiet Breaths Of Morning New

  Just before a young father’s death, in a moment simple sight evaporates into vision, a man sees his small child’s entire future life and the reality of his absence; seeing also the significance of his life’s relationships and seemingly simple choices, seemingly joyful successes and perceived hardships: experiencing in that moment all his child’s intense future struggle and pain.

  At experiencing this vision, after his death he explodes imperceptibly up past the sky and stars, finding the ability to come back to life again and again as various animals to watch over and protect his child—knowing that this is all he ever had the ability to knowingly do—to be a transcending movement of love—himself a child at his living death.

  Normal Dangers

  When I finally died at seventy-one, full of scar tissue and abnormal lumps, bumps and lesions that I had been collecting since my twenties, the coroner was surprised to find that the cause of my death was not sourced from within my sickly body. It is possible that when the coroner learned this that there was the thought for a moment that the killing was done simply because someone saw how ugly I was—but possible too that this dissector, this people person, saw a little beauty in my misery, in my physical horror, also perhaps glory in the fact that the grizzled meat that was being carved had to be hunted to die.

  But who murdered me? This was a popular question for people to ask. But I already knew. And, I knew why. There was no mystery to it for me.

  The street where I had lived had on it a school, restaurants, offices, bars, and several other buildings, which I could never figure out what they where home to. But the street, somehow through the years of adding and subtracting became home to only one residential residence, a one-story triplex where I lived in the center with the other occupants on either side of me.

  A woman I liked who lived on one side of the triplex allowed me to come over and have coffee and entertain the idea that she might love me. She was eighty and had already lived two full lives—with her first husband who passed away at the younger side of middle-age with whom she was married to for twenty-three years—and her second husband who had died a few years back with whom she was with nearly thirty years. When I met her, she was an independent and single woman, and I did my best to gain her attentions despite what I am sure was my disgusting appearance. She was arrested for my death, and she herself died in jail. It was believed that she was so against any ideas of loving me that she felt that she had to destroy me.

  On the other side of the triplex was where the killer lived. He even told me he would kill me the day I died. This is how I know it was he who did it and not someone else. He thought that he had his own personal parking space on the street where I would usually park when I could. But he only mentioned it once or twice and in a very friendly kind of way—until that day—so I kind of always thought he was joking. Anyway, he poisoned my protein powder, so when I had my shake that day, I died.

  The police could not see any good in me—as if I must have done a lot of awful things to be the way that I was. In fact, the bar that most of the police frequented was across from the triplex and the cadets and rookies used to harass me when they were drunk. Once these cops had worked for a few years, though, and seen a few things, they stopped. But still, to learn about who I was, they asked my neighbors.

  A Self Sacrifice

  She began her day realizing every part of her body without it being touched now gave her sexual sensations, many more painful than enjoyable—at the simple awareness of the flesh.
In her mind, she also felt that every thought, and through this everything that she experienced on a day to day basis was now somehow capable of holding the power of an intense fetish of which was also at least as horrifying as it was satisfyingly electric.

  While getting out of bed to go for her regular walk, but to nowhere in particular, she began to search her thoughts for what she had always believed to be the most common and most pleasurable desires that seemed natural, even somewhat, but she only found that she could not find them. Disturbed and overwhelmed, sensations one atop another, she could not identify any of them.

  The distraction of these feelings was to the extent that she had to distract herself from them, so upon her outer thigh, a delicate design she carved, a razor dance across narrow streams of blood, gently overflowing. Clothes where put on after she cleaned and bandaged it; then, she left for her usual walk.

  Ocean’s Tide

  In his bed, in the moments before he falls asleep, layered within four blankets wrapped around him, his head and pillow slowly becoming one soft thing, he looks up at the tops of the blankets; the one against his skin is pulled closest to his face—and, from there, the rest of them