Andersen Prunty's Blog, page 12

Vampire

Yesterday, I discovered that a vampire lives next door. His name is Bernard Watkins. He wears a host of garish sweaters and a thick, neatly trimmed mustache. I wouldn’t have taken him for a vampire upon meeting him.

I’ve broken up most of the furniture in the house and am upstairs grinding stakes on the lathe. I don’t know how many people in the town he’s already turned into vampires. After grinding all the stakes, I figure I’ll lie in wait, forming the perfect game plan.

Mother calls up the stairs for me to come down and meet the new neighbor. Instinctively, I know she has unwittingly invited the vampire into the house. I pick up a stake and head downstairs.

Dick Beer

There’s a hippie who lives in a van on the other side of the street.

I’m aware of him but assume he pays no attention to me.

I drink.

I stay up late.

I scratch my balls when I don’t think anyone is looking.

I’m surprised the next day when scrolling through my media feeds and seeing one of the top things to pop up is me, scratching my balls—skin-on-skin, beneath the underwear, digging deep—and opening the refrigerator to get a beer.

And then it’s me in the upper right corner of the screen and the hippie in the van across the street filling the screen with his bearded face and saying, “Enjoy your dick beer, dude,” in what has to be the douchiest voice ever.

I immediately pull all the blinds and stop answering the phone.

I’ll be in public and people will shout, “Enjoy your dick beer!” or “Hey, it’s dick beer guy!”

I stop going out in public.

Now it’s the grocery delivery person going, “Hey … man, I don’t want to bother you but I gotta know … are you dick beer guy?”

If I stop ordering things, I don’t know how I’m going to stay alive.

I hate the hippie across the street. Is he happy watching me squirm? Is he watching at all? Maybe he’s laughing it up at all the attention he’s getting … at the expense of me.

I rationalize.

Who doesn’t want to be famous?

Who doesn’t want to be rich?

I start answering the phone. I go out in public. I hear it all the time.

I’m dick beer guy. I’m rich. I’m famous. I live so very far away from that hippie in the van across the street.

I do whatever I want all the time, but occasionally I’m reminded that I am and always will be dick beer guy and can’t believe how much better my life has gotten.

The Wise Man

The wisest man in the world comes to my door. He has a very long white beard and wears a series of richly textured and flowing robes. He, more or less, lets himself in. I know he’s the wisest man in the world and I plan on having him answer some questions.

He strolls to the middle of the living room and reaches down, trying to push my heavy wooden coffee table up against the couch. He labors for nearly a minute.

He looks at me. “Some help?” he asks.

“Oh, of course,” I say and help struggle with the coffee table.

By the time we finish, both of us have worked up a pretty good sweat.

The wisest man in the world stands in the middle of my luxurious white carpet. He looks at me and raises a finger of proclamation.

“These are the days,” he says, “when everything has value.”

Then he squats down a little, grunts, and defecates on my carpet.

“Ah,” he says, “that’s done with.”

Instead of staying in the room to ask him my series of important questions, I quickly go to the hallway closet and retrieve an abundance of cleaning supplies.

I return to the living room. The wise man is gone. He has accidentally stepped into his mess and tracked it all the way to the door.

Architecture

The architect climbs to the roof of his tallest building and looks out over the city. He’s built all the buildings here. Some of them are small—two or three floors. Others are towering skyscrapers. Like this one. He has to build just one more. It’ll be his greatest construction and then he’ll retire and allow some other architect to move in and build structures that shame his. But he wants to do something different with this one. All the other ones, while his design, were built by construction companies. He will build the next one himself.

Not knowing where else to begin, he goes to the brick store and buys every brick they have. He has them brought to a vacant lot next to the sea. He places the first brick on his back. And then another one. It quickly becomes painful—his arms do not want to move in that direction—but, after a while, it gets easier. The brick store continues to bring him more bricks as they get them in. He continues stacking them on his back. Yes, this is what he wants to build. The tallest building in the city with himself as the foundation. He wants it to be a movable structure but, already, his legs are starting to buckle with the weight and he doesn’t know if this will be a possibility.

Eventually, the building becomes taller than his arms will reach. Each day he stretches a little farther. And his arms stretch with him. The bricks sink into his back and become part of him. This goes on for years. He becomes bent and twisted, his arms a hundred stories long. He doesn’t know what to do with them when he isn’t using them so he keeps them in the lobby. Contrary to his previous belief, he is still able to move around. While his torso has nearly disappeared under the crush of the bricks, his legs have thickened with rippling muscles as hard as brick themselves. Not bad for an old man, he thinks. With his current construction on his back, he wanders over to his previous skyscraper to see how he’s measuring up. It’s close. Only a few more floors, maybe.

Once finished, he is so thoroughly enmeshed with the skyscraper he can’t distinguish himself from his building. His arms remain absurdly long. He raises them into the air and uses them for antennas. His legs are only about a fourth their original length and, while they can support the structure, it becomes dangerous to move, lest everything topple over.

As with the ending of all his previous constructions, he is eager to climb to the top of it. Since he no longer has any body to climb with, he puts his head in the elevator and shoots it up to the roof. There he watches the evening and the fog roll in, the distant ships out at sea and, in the other direction, the twinkling lights of his previous constructions. He feels the cool damp breeze and hears the distant drone of airplanes transporting their sleeping cargo away to another city, careful to avoid the steady blinking of the architect’s fingertips.

Parenthood

I’m on my daily walk. It’s a nice day. Early summer. Birds are chirping and the air smells great. I check the curbside at the end of people’s driveways for treasure. Ours is a thrifty village and only trash goes out with the actual trash. Everything else is up for dibs. The next driveway over, I see what looks like a sizeable collection of children’s toys. As I draw closer, I see there’s an actual child—probably around one—playing amidst the toys.

The child reaches their arms out to me. It’s wearing a burlap sack, so I’m not sure if it’s male or female.

There’s a middle-aged woman doing some gardening around the house.

“Is the kid part of it?” I call up to her.

She turns, still kneeling down over the flowerbed.

“Yeah,” she says. “You can take him.”

“Cool. Thanks.”

“He’s been too hard to look after since I lost my hand.”

She fully rises to her knees and brandishes her stump. It looks reasonably fresh.

I take the kid home. I tell him we’ll take the wagon back to get some of his toys, but we never do.

We get drunk that night and the kid gets sick. He’s also really bad at talking so the night kind of turns into a bummer.

The next day he seems sluggish and not very fun at all. Plus, he apparently doesn’t know how to go to the bathroom.

I take him out to the curb along with a broken vacuum cleaner to make it look more enticing.

They’re both gone within two hours.

Bonus 8

I read an article that was mostly asterisks. I guess you can’t say anything anymore.

This Tattoo Burning Over Your Wasted Heart

Unsatisfied with my job, I go to a bar and drink until I black out. I wake up in a strange bed with a strange tattoo on the left side of my chest. Looking down at it, I can’t even tell what it is. There’s no one else there to describe it to me. The apartment I’m in is curiously devoid of mirrors. I put on some pants and knock on the door of the apartment next to this one. A haggard old man answers. I point to the tattoo and ask him what it is. He plays with his glasses, screws up his face, and gets really close to me.

“I’m pretty sure it’s a walrus. Maybe he’s standing in front of an American flag or riding a tricycle. I can’t really tell.” He pauses, moves away from my chest, stands up straighter. “Looks like he’s having a lot of fun.”

I mutter a quick thanks and wander back to the other apartment but the door’s locked. I knock and there’s no answer. I go out to the street. I visit a store to buy a shirt and go back to my miserable job.

I’m unable to really tell what the tattoo is until it heals completely. It’s definitely a walrus. And it definitely looks like he’s having fun but everything else about it is unclear. Why a walrus? Why now?

Over the years, I discover how much people hate mystery. They want to know why I have a walrus over my heart and when I tell them I don’t know, they get furious. Many of them think it’s a joke. They want to know why I would do something so permanent on such a lark. Others tell me it’s not permanent. They tell me I can and should get it removed. But I grow to like it. I learn to invent stories for it.

“My mom loved walruses.”

“That was my first wife. She had cancer.”

“I worked as a walrus trainer.”

“I’ve always liked walruses. Ever since I can remember. Ever since I was a kid.”

“I made a pact with my friends. We all have walrus tattoos.”

Eventually I fall in love with a sex worker. I feel terrible lying to her but I do it anyway. I have trouble keeping my lies straight and eventually she asks me why I’m lying. I tell her. I tell her about people hating mysteries and that I understand that because it’s even a mystery to me. I don’t know why it’s there. I can only tell her the day I received it. There’s no real context. And that’s the part she doesn’t understand. She wants to know how I’ve lived so long with this hideous thing on my chest. I tell her I just got used to it. I tell her how much I like it now. When I propose to her, she laughs. She tells me there can never be anything other than sex between us. She tells me my insides are cracked and broken. She tells me there’s nothing there. She says the tattoo’s really just an expression of the void in my soul.

And each time she asks, “Why a walrus? Why there?” I can only shake my head and say, “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Anticipation

The last house on the left is the first to explode.

Ana is in her front yard tending to her flowers when she feels the earth shake. The sound is loud enough to bring her off her knees and search frantically for the source.

There, at the dead end of the street, a small mushroom cloud rises from a pile of rubble that used to be Mr. Petroskey’s house. She rushes to gather her children and bring them inside.

The children are frightened and excited and it’s hard to wrangle the three of them.

“What was that?” Thomas asks. He’s always the inquisitive one. The other two are just screaming to make noise. Ana has trouble remembering their names.

“I don’t know,” Ana says.

Toward dusk, she ventures back outside alone to see if any neighbors are out, to see what they can make of what happened. All she finds is Mr. Petroskey’s head at the base of the mailbox.

She goes back inside to alert the police. They tell her they’ll get to it when they can. The children, their adrenaline long spent from the earlier excitement, are already sleeping soundly. Ana pours a bourbon and sits on the couch and watches all the news she can, but nobody mentions the explosion.

The next morning, Ana is surprised to see Mr. Petroskey shambling confusedly down the street. She goes outside and approaches him. His head is on backward. She tries not to appear disturbed.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“Have you seen my house?”

She wonders if she should tell him or not.

“I think—”

“Is your husband around?”

She was going to invite him into the house until this.

“No,” she says. “He left.”

“Left?”

“Yeah.”

“Where did he go?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t see how you can help me.”

Suddenly, Ana realizes she doesn’t like Mr. Petroskey. Never liked him. He was misogynistic and overly patriotic in a weird, self-serving way, mainly so he could wave guns at people from his front porch.

“Your house blew up. You don’t have a house anymore.” She wants to be more cutting but the guy’s head is on backward and the more she looks at the rough seam in his neck, the more horrifying she finds it.

He turns to look where his house used to be, the front of his body now facing her. He begins walking toward the smoldering heap of rubble. Ana goes back inside.

Shortly before noon, there’s another explosion. It’s not as loud inside the house, but the reverberations are even worse. The kids go wild. Ana steps outside to investigate. It’s Ms. Clausen’s house, three doors to the south.

Ana goes back inside and calls 9-1-1. They tell her they’re aware of the problem. She feeds the kids.

After eating, they relentlessly beg to go outside. This goes on for so long Ana doesn’t care if it’s dangerous or not. She lets them, telling them to stay away from the houses. Later, when she sees the kids laughing and playing with Ms. Clausen’s innards in the front yard, she makes them come inside and take baths. She doesn’t bother calling anyone.

The next morning, she wanders down to Ms. Clausen’s, kids in tow. The old woman always kept immaculate flowerbeds and Ana is planning on helping herself to what wasn’t destroyed in the explosion.

Ana moves close to an intact hydrangea while the kids stand on the sidewalk and pull each other’s hair. Ms. Clausen is down in the massive crater created by the explosion.

“Oh.” Ana is startled. “Ms. Clausen! I’m glad to see you’re okay.”

Ms. Clausen is down on her knees. “Little upset about the house,” she says, still focusing on digging in the dirt. She may not have any legs under her draped floral muumuu. “But I have so much more room for my flowers. Don’t know what I’m gonna do when it gets cold.”

Ana finds herself suddenly disinterested. She can’t offer any help since her husband left and the kids have eaten all her empathy.

“Well,” Ana says, “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

She uses very serious threats to wrangle the kids and take them back home. She wonders about Mr. Petroskey and Ms. Clausen. What it’s like to be shredded in an explosion only to re-emerge in a decimated version of your formal reality. It sounds horrible but maybe also … liberating? She wonders if the kids could survive an explosion.

Ana is woken the next morning by the house across the street exploding. It’s been empty ever since the previous owners were foreclosed upon. She no longer feels safe in the house. One of the younger kids is in the kitchen playing with some feces. After getting them cleaned up, she gathers some camping gear and tells them they’re all going to go camping in the yard.

On the second day of camping, Thomas asks why they can’t go into the house. She tells him it’s because it’s going to explode. It’s inevitable. This makes the kids less restless until anticipation takes over. She doesn’t even have to shush them like she does before a movie. They sit in their lawn chairs, the four of them, and spend their days white-knuckled, waiting for the house to blow up.

Two Children Who Want to Drive Off a Cliff

An eight-foot-tall man runs upon a narrow dirt path through a dense jungle. The jungle is very dark and smells like death. It’s filled with the squealing sounds of imagibeasts. Soon the man emerges from the jungle into the bright daylight. He continues running. The path ascends the side of a mountain. Halfway up the mountain a car is pulled to the shoulder of the path. The man, being so tall, reaches the car in no time. Two children lean against the driver’s side door of the black muscle car. A girl and a boy. They look about seven. The man, sweaty and mildly exerted, approaches the two children. The boy wears a stained white t-shirt and oversized jeans. He is smoking an unfiltered cigarette and smells like cheap whiskey. The girl is dressed so scantily it makes the tall man nervous to look at her.

“Need some help?” The man mops sweat from his brow with a giant hand.

“Fuck yeah.” The boy pulls a flask from his hip pocket and takes a slug.

“What’s the problem?”

“Fuckin broke down, old man.”

The man does not like this boy at all. He wants to smack him around but he’s just a kid. The girl is now giving herself a tattoo with a pocketknife. It’s a big, crooked bloody heart around her bellybutton.

“Where you kids going?”

“Top of the hill.” The boy points to the top of the hill.

“That’s a drop off up there. You’ll go right into the ocean.”

“Yeah. We know that. Think you can help us?”

Of course the man can help. Being eight feet tall, he can do just about anything.

“Open her up,” he tells the boy.

The boy tosses his cigarette onto the dirt road, opens the door, and pops the hood.

The tall man grabs some grass and dirt and shoves it randomly throughout the engine. “Oughtta do it,” he says.

“Get in the car, bitch,” the boy barks at the girl. She obediently runs around to the passenger side and gets in.

“I really wouldn’t advise driving off that cliff,” the man warns them.

“We’re fuckin’ goin off that cliff. We’re in love.”

The boy fires up the engine and shoots up the side of the mountain. The man doesn’t know why the path goes all the way to the cliff. He wonders why there isn’t some kind of warning sign at the end of the road. Maybe it is made for this purpose. He runs after the car. The car flies off the cliff and the man brings himself to a stop before going over himself. The car tumbles end over end until it crashes into the water. The man takes a deep breath and runs back down the path and into the dark jungle.

Bonus 7

I kind of just want to run in the background like a really annoying app.