Indie & Hale

"I know what it means to be dead."

I looked at my companion with not a little skepticism and she clarified. "Well, I've never been dead before, obviously, but I completely understand the implications and personally I don't see a problem."

"I know," I replied simply.
"But when I told him that, he shot me anyway. What do you think it means?"
"That depends on where you went when you died."

Hale Larck had just finished telling me about her dream during the night before. In it, she had been debating religion with Jesus Christ over coffee. Apparently, in spite of his presence, she had nobly stuck with her conviction/belief that his existence was unlikely. Raising his hand she had seen that Christ was toting a .356 Magnum. When she called his bluff and told him that her intended afterlife was made up of absolute oblivion, and that she gazed upon the prospect with wistfulness rather than dread, he shot her very dead.

"Of course it does, if I knew that I wouldn't need you to figure it out for me," she scoffed.
"In that case its pretty clear. Your subconscious says its me."
"Who's you?"
"Jesus Christ."
"I don't think it's saying that."
"Now that's what the experts would call denial."

She heaved an unnecessary sigh and indulged me, "Fine Indie, why do think you're Jesus?"

"It's you who--" she stopped me with a withering 'hurry-before-I-get-really-bored' look and I got on with my makeshift interpretation. "Okay, so you're having coffee with "Jesus". We'll, that's all we ever do. We're doing it right now, even! (I hope it's not too hard for you.) And your talking theology: one of our favorite subjects. Plus, he shoots you!"

She cocked an eyebrow at me, "And you do that all the time, huh?"

I pretended to look exasperated. "It's a metaphor, dear girl. I'm constantly putting a hole in the fabric of your reality, know what I mean? The similarities are too many to be denied."

We paused for a moment. Then, "You're not trying very hard," she says to me. And I thought my problem had been trying too hard. I shrugged. "If you want to doubt your one true savior, that's your problem. Besides, I don't buy into dreams as prophetic. You won't go down like that, I bet."

"That's not what I'm worried about..." Hale said with characteristic random mystery. Of course she didn't elaborate.

Shortly thereafter we decided it was time to go. We parted ways until that night when we'd both return to the house we shared rent on, along with three of our other friends.

It was four in the afternoon smack dab in the middle of a misty New York summer. While Hale went to start her bartending shift at a place called 'January's End', I left to return from my intentionally late lunch (consisting of coffee and still more coffee) to my own place of employment.

I used to wear the title of Librarian's Assistant, which basically meant I was a librarian without the proper, if ridiculously excessive, credentials. That was where I'd grown up in an itsy-bitsy town in Louisiana so that it felt less like a dirty government job and more like a community one. When I moved to this silly city though, I found out that government jobs are taken far too seriously. Still possessing an obsession with the scent of old books, I moved to the profit version of the same trade and now work in an independently owned used bookstore by the name of 'Tattered Remnants'. Sometimes we get customers in there just for the meaning behind the title. When we tell them they usually linger awhile, all charmed-like.

I, by the by, am Melinda Parks. My first name reminds me of the color gray for some reason so I try to go by 'Indie instead. I'm drawn to its possibilities: independent; indistinct; indifferent; indelible; in...decisive. My favorite is ????, yet in this I am deceived, for the instant devastation of change is...?!

[I wish for once "I owe my life to you" wouldn't sound so much like a reprimand.]

Mitch & Bethany

"If you could do anything right now, what would you do?"
"I would make love."
"Ha!"
"What, hey!?"
"That's just pretty sweet, dude. Not 'have sex' or 'fuck some' or 'bone like rabbits', but 'make love'."
"'Bone like rabbits'?"
"It's a euphemism, I hear."
"From who?!"
"From you!"
"..." ... "Oh."
"Ha!"
"Whatever! So what would you do--if anything?"
"Well I would make love," I responded with a facetious-feeling grin.
"Oh yeah?! Who with?"
"With myself--I'm the best I've had yet! Hey what about you, big guy? Since you apparently had some specific body in mind, hmm? Indie?"
"No... Never mind, forget it."

I blinked at my friend in surprise at his indicative and sudden bashfulness. I decided to risk goading him on a bit anyway. "You were totally gonna say with me!"

He turned beet red at this unexpected turn of his skirting flirtatious efforts, but then reminded me why I liked him. "So what?" he asked simply.

"Where would you have sex with me, dude!? We're at a freakin' coffee shack!"
"I said, 'make love'," (he insisted,) still red.
I looked at him until he looked back up again to meet my eyes. I had quit pretending to laugh, for the moment.
"Where?"
"In my bed," with less hesitation.
"How long have you been thinking about this?"

"Since I woke up this morning. I was just laying there and it dawned on me that I wanted you with me." The son of a bitch looked at me the whole time he said it. My freakin' stomach tightened, which I didn't expect, but I took it (well).

"Are you gonna tell me about it, then?"
"Would you like me to?"
"Yeah," I said.
"Alright," he said.

You would have been sleeping still, and I begin quietly because I don't want/I'm not ready to wake you up (yet). I run the pads of my fingers softly down the line of your jaw, then follow the rail with my tongue as slow as I can, tasting you. You wake up instantly, like I knew you would, and I can tell because you are no longer breathing. But you don't move, and you keep your eyes closed. The scent of you skin reminds me of myself and your silent encouragement convinces me to ignore the slamming in my chest. I lick my lips and press them against your throat, feeling the sudden motion/movement of your pulse.

I open my mouth very slightly and bring a small flavor of you between my lips, moving at the same time into a better position. Still laying on my side, I close the distance between us so that I am pressing against the side of you as you lay on your back, almost shaking it seems to me. With one hand I lift the thin sheet that still covers your chest and I move my mouth slowly away from your neck, lowering my lips near the top of your breasts and kissing you there, just below your collarbone. With my free arm I encircle your fast rising and falling rib cage, letting myself brush across your nipples and watching your whole body react to that tiny touch. I look up at your face and see that your eyes are squeezed tight now, but at some point you had resumed shallow breathing. I duck down before you can recover and close the whole warmth of my mouth over your right nipple. I almost lose it when your body spasms against me, jerking your hips upward and making you gasp sharply. Your eyes snap open then and after only a moment your hands find my face and you pull my mouth to yours, kissing me for the first time as I finally move to place myself gently over you. Pressing down slowly, I feel that my hands are shuddering now.

Sheet still between us, you start to squirm as though impatient beneath me, even while your arms have found their way around the back of my neck, keeping me where I am. Right before I think you'd just as well kill me then move one more time like that, at last you loose one of your soft hands, moving/placing it between us to stroke me. I moan wretchedly into our still-joined mouths and you press yourself upward again, somehow freeing one of your legs from the sheet and wrapping it around my waist. So sweetly inviting now, I feel your lips gently/finally press a smile into mine.

[While we only pretend, to pretend.]

Carrie

"No more of this! Be here!" I think, forcefully demanding my thoughts to stay put, behave, and be content for a moment. "Focus for a second! Focus on the parallelogram that the shadowed window makes. Look around, goddamnit!" The open-air room of the cafe spills out into the day as though desperately seeking the cloud-hidden sun. Lovely, youthful people fill up the tables that pepper the space surrounding me, and they seem to laugh continuously like staggered breathing, beaming like children and with the happy extravagance that only the miserable eyes of self-pity could ever bear witness to. Realizing this bias of my pointed sight, I try to focus on the table furthest from me while keeping my own arbitrary circumstances at bay. Valiantly, I fix my gaze and graceful imaginings, and pretend myself capable of the singular translation hiding and embodied by this particular light-lacquered table across the room, its bar stools sporting three engrossedly bored individuals.

An outsider, I want to know what they are filling their conversation up with, what words they have deemed worthy of this clueless & sunny-sunny day. Being out of earshot, I study the appearance of the persons away yonder there to tune into mannerisms, gesticulations and expressions, feigning recognition of the most intimate and minute of signaling details that they send solely to me, their ever willing and appreciative audience.

They sit half-moon style, semi-encircling the square table. From my view, two faces showed in profile (one male, one female) and the lovely round face of a woman sparkled between these, facing me straight on. I decided that her name must be Lydia. Lydia's companions ruled the conversation as they waved their hands harmoniously and in rhyme, while Lydia herself sat quite still, grinning marvelously, beatific, and slowly pivoted her glance from one animated monologue to the next, probably not listening. Or at the very least, dear Lydia was virtually unable to bridge a connection between the segregated, self-perpetuating discussions.

The man spoke of flowers, I knew, and of their wild variety; his passionate, muted voice gave the impression of brightly orange-lit scents. In contrast, I felt that the woman must sound agitated. Her chosen subject matter, cream coffee, seemed not to warrant quite the same level of admiration from our lovely and traitorous Lydia, whose lingering gaze upon the man still cared nothing for wildflowers, as everyone knew.

Watching the three half-participants paying homage to the art of speech, I was well aware that I ruthlessly lied to myself on this matter of topic: all people ever talk about is other people. I hardly believed that out Lydia could be the exception to this disease of conceit that we all seem to have. Her beauty would make the ailment ever more fatal, I thought morbidly, at last rising from my table for to escape the viciously pleasant scene. The cash I tossed onto its surface made me think of cheap, dewy-eyed Venetian whores from the year 1495, collecting alms from poor and lonely letches.

I remained ruminating upon the circularity of days when a friend of mine interrupted me from my reverie-walk away from the cafe.

I couldn't remember his name. It dawned on me that we weren't friends at all when I recognized him now as the bearded barista who worked the taps of my favorite pretentious cafe-bar down in the town that was yours and mine. This lovely twentysomething guy had far too often concocted magical mixtures for me, bearing life-thumping caffeine. The sudden shock of a familiar face within the strangeness of unexpected surroundings had had me momentarily baffled. But the trick of a cheap mystery revealed, I remembered that I'd never known the handsome fellow's name at all (fellow creatures of habit, though we were)--despite the silly bit of an infatuation that would rise within me when we were separated by a lone counter, and my acute awareness of his proximity made it hard to get on with my neutral order of a tame latte.

The point of all this: my nameless coffee-server-potential-lover appeared before me in a bizarre twist of my sense of normalcy. Recognizing each other over a thousand miles from the only other context in which we'd had a simultaneous, if bit, part, meant that we stopped and laughed incredulously together as if it was the only natural thing to do, given the circumstances and among well-placed foreign strangers. I realized then that I'd never watched this mysterious man laugh in all of my existence, and strangely, the sight wasn't as attractive as I'd convinced myself that it would be. Heh. His eyes squeezed shut when he laughed, such that only folks that loved him would claim it was in a cute way.

"This is so CRAZY!" Man was saying to me now. What are you doing all the way over here? Sorry I can't offer to make you a coffee or anything!" He joked lamely.

"Hey, you can always offer to buy me one before we change subject," I said to him, flirting completely by accident and wishing I could take it back or stop (talking) soon. I pushed on quickly instead, before he could respond with anything but a stunted explosion of a snort-cackle crazy thing/sound. "I'm here for school. I leave in a week after bumming around out here for 16 days. What are you up to? Learning the ancient art of an Italian brew, are ya?"

"Haha!" (Laughing way too much of course--like the coupla amazing manics we were.) "Not exactly," 'twas his initial reply. "I'm actually about to begin taking classes here as well...over at the biggest University I've ever seen in my whole life." He finished with faux-poetic/notable flair and a sideways grin like a mouth-wink.

Before I could get around to thinking up something clever he shot out spurt-like, "Hey!" I don't even know your name! I've always just thought of you as 'Latte-Chick' in my head, ha!" Cute. And I've always just thought of him as 'Take me! Take me NOW!' Or sometimes 'Bob'. He looked like he could be someone's cranky uncle--especially on those early mornings when my need for a shot of espresso was at its wildest...

Mitch & Bethany

Rounding the corner of Cedar and Elm, a young man walks near the middle of the day. The houses pile up behind him as he passes by and each one is occupied in a random degree; whole lives play out their existence around him, but he doesn't fully appreciate this. And right now he doesn't think about it all.

"Dude, what's going on!?" A girl marches out of a storefront with oversized books showing through the window. On a plank affixed above the single doorway, 'The Scribe' is carved and painted in black shadow.

"Hiya Miss Bethany. How goes it?" says the man trekking toward the itty-bitty woman. (Indie is exactly his height, in fact...not this blessed waif-girl.) On his lips tease a flickering spark of smile as though he anticipated the punchline to a joke he'd heard before that promised satisfaction.

"It's going good, Mitch. I've just had an epiphany as a matter of fact, waiting around all day for you--as usual."

"Oh yeah? How so?" the man responds. He wondered if she had any idea that she was grinning? Squinting her eyes as if considering whether or not he was worthy of this new discovery of hers--did she know that she undermined her coarse scrutiny every time, grinning this way?/like this/that?

The woman with the open smile shifts her weight from one foot to the next, back and forth while she studies the man before her. She has brown-bobbed hair and large/ish dark teal eyes. She'll chew on the right side of her lip until it's fully digested before hurrying along her careful regard of him. And hypocritically so/at that. "I think you should invest in 'The Scribe'," she tells him at last.

"I am invested in 'The Scribe'," he laughed at the serious expression accompanying her bizarre proposal. "I spend all of my free afternoons here, remember?"

"Exactly--so why not buy me out of a portion and pay yourself back a bit?" the woman finishes rushing then stands with every appearance of self-satisfaction.

The youngish man scoffs and takes his own turn squinting his light blue eyes in exaggerated distrust. He couldn't imagine what she was talking about--he had thought that she wouldn't have parted with that place of hers even if she had to start paying to keep the damn thing open!

"What's this madness you're playing at Beth? Since when are you willing to give away any real share of 'The Scribe'?"

The woman shifts her weight again. "Go and tell your lady-friend 'hello'. She won't want to leave today, so come out to lunch with me and chat a bit, yeah?"

Carrie

[How the fuck do you express a tree?!] "Listen to the laughter!" I tell myself, but of course the thought drowns out both intention and sound. I think of you instead. Then I stop thinking altogether and compulsively eat raisins.

Just as a paranoid notion quivers before my mind--something about the likelihood of death by raisin engorgement--a blue pasty drink of some sort manifests itself before me in the guise of 'savior', and on the pretense of having been set there as though by a waiter. Obviously this could not be possible, given the fleeting wraith-like quality that is requisite for the elusive wait-creatures who only seem to share this 2pm diner with me as they forever flutter about, as though searching for a cigarette.

God, I need a cigarette. And when are you coming back? I wonder. So then I wonder if you wonder the same thing sometimes.

I can feel the raisins tug on my wandering attention and I glance at them guiltily, sitting there to the left of the damn chalk-violet drink which I have begun to suspect is the smoothie I ordered hours and hours ago. Finally, with what I hope to be a grandiose and symbol-ridden movement colored by glorious victory or some such awful thing, I pick up the fucking murderous container of former fruit and shove it into the black messenger bag at my feet. But then I watch a woman walk by dressed all in purple garb from crazy top hat to plastic shoes, and I have to take the poor raisins back out one last time, needing a little comfort in this godforsaken town/city.

When you left I cried for thirteen minutes and forty-seven seconds. A minute for every year since puberty; each minute signifying the countlessly counted few hairs skipped casually across the back of your knuckles. You're worth the mysteriously absent floor in every hundred-some level building in San Francisco, my love! My tears, then, almost match the hour, now--middle of the hellish afternoon--and I find myself wishing there was some meaning to this. Go figure...it turns out that I cannot imagine you without me. And I don't take this to be a good sign in the slightest.

MysteryGuy?

His strumming stops. Six feet above his head a leaf lets go of its branch and settles on his shoe. Its colors are gray and soft yellow, he notes, and just like that the moment felt contrived.

He closes his eyes again and continues to strum. He imagines himself in a deserted peasant graveyard in France, pretending to play with a brimful saddened heart. He thinks he hears the tink of appreciation or guilt, and though grateful, he doesn't acknowledge his patron as she walks by glanceless and graceful.

Janey

The sheet looks like tile. The back of my arms are twin bundles of barbed wire and I push one forward to let my knuckles drag across the cloth. 'When he wakes up,' I think, 'he won't remember at all.' With an inward heave I lift the granite sculpture over my head, the one shaped like a clenched fist, and bring it down to crush the smile on your lips.