Magen Cubed's Blog, page 52

It came from my notebook: The Case of Audrey Escher

She said her name was Audrey Escher when she called the week before to make a consultation appointment, referred to me by my colleague Jon Mathers. He and I played still tennis on the weekends, going out for a beer or two while our wives were preoccupied with church functions or book club. The sweet-sounding, optimistic girl on the phone was not quite the same person that turned up at my office, twenty minutes early for our session.

I'd barely had time to finish the bagel Melissa had warmed up from me this morning as I walked in to find Audrey in the waiting room, the first patient of the day, even as my assistant Nancy was still transcribing notes from the answering machine and making out my schedule for the day. Wiping the last few crumbs off my pant leg, I offered Audrey a smile as I passed her on the way to my office, promising her I'd see her just as soon as I was ready. She didn't smile back.

This Audrey Escher was a petite redhead with a purple scarf wrapped around her face and neck, pulled up over her nose like a religious shroud or surgical mask. She was an ordinary enough girl to look at, sitting on my couch in her red sweater, jeans and conservative brown high heels. Pretty but a little waifish, maybe a little uncertain about being in my office, with her squared shoulders and crossed legs, like she could make herself look bigger if she tried hard enough.

Sitting across from her, I folded my hands in my lap and gave her a patient smile.

"So tell me a little bit about yourself, Audrey."

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Counting the centuries

One breath away from mother Oceanía

Your nimble feet make prints in my sands

You have done good for yourselves

Since you left my wet embrace

And crawled ashore

I'm starting over again.

New domain, new look, new spaces to carve out in rock-beds and shorelines. My life has been all over the place lately, drastic highs and crushing lows, optimism and defeat making me dizzy when I wake up in the morning and keeping me pinned in my bed at night. I'm coping with it. I'm taking great strides to rein in the chaos one day at a time. I'm writing things down, throwing other things out, polishing others still and sending them out to editors and publishers who hopefully know what the hell to do with them. I certainly don't.

Like all things, this is a work in progress.

Stay tuned.

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Explosions come in due time

I'm done drowning.

I'm done feeling obligated to the past. I'm done letting people emotionally black-mail me to keep me around. I'm done soaking up others problems and letting myself be made to feel like the bad guy when I stand up for myself. I'm done being convenient. I'm done letting people assign a value to me, and withdrawing when I demand their respect, as though I ought to know my place.

I ought to be grateful. I ought to be happy for what I have. I ought to be so glad I have them in my life at all, because I couldn't do better if I tried.

And I'm done with all that.

For the last few years, and for varying reasons, I've let other people (romantic interests, friends, sometimes family, those who are supposed to have my welfare in mind) tell me what I'm worth. They've all put a cap on my potential, telling me I'm that "the fat girl," and I shouldn't dare ask to try to be anything better. So that's what I was: the fat girl, the fat friend, the fat girl at work. She's pretty but she's fat. She's smart but she's fat. She's talented but she's fat. If I tried to lose weight I lost friendships over it, because the people I considered my friends and loved ones felt I was "just too good" for them, or trying to be something that I wasn't.

Don't misread me: I'm a size 16 and I feel no shame for it. I'm comfortable in my clothes and in my skin. I will do battle with anyone who tries to make me feel any different, or attempts to hurt anybody else with weight issues. I exercise and try to eat right, and maintain a healthy weight for my height and age. But I was never heavy growing up, not for a single day before I found myself soaking up the ugliness from those who were supposed to support me.

So for the past twelve years I've tricked myself into thinking I was the fat girl, because I didn't know who else I would be if I wasn't. For the past twelve years, no matter how much weight I lost, no matter how much I exercised, no matter how hard I tried, I thought I would never be anything but what I am. That this is it. This is all I have to aspire to.

Then I woke the other morning, and wondered what I would look like if I didn't have such ugly people in my life weighing me down. And you know what? I liked what I saw.

So I'm done. I may not be a size 2 when I'm through, but I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing, exercising and trying to stay healthy. I'm not going to let myself be shoved into boxes and narrow definitions by people who don't have my best interest in mind. I'm not going to take on any more ugliness, and let myself be made into a punching bag for people who can't stand to look in the mirror in the morning. I'm setting my own goals and I'm making up the story as I go, no matter how it ends.

And I dare anyone to try to stop me this time.

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It came from my notebook: At the Heart of Mina Jones

When I first met Mina Jones I was living in a cereal box apartment down by the docks, shackled there under a smoke damaged ceiling by thirty thousand dollars in credit cards and debt.

The bachelor's degree I'd taken two loans out for didn't amount to much, just a string of office jobs crunching numbers and answering phones. After a while the corporate efficiency experts came down from the head office, sent in to cut the dead weight and bring down salary expenses. A stiff guy with a gray suit and a gummy smile handed me a tiny severance check and thanked me for my time, cutting me loose for a job tending the cash register and stocking shelves at Craigen Books for eight dollars an hour.  I couldn't say I was exactly surprised, but I took the check anyway, and faked a smile so they wouldn't think I was going to come back and shoot the place up. At home I burned my shirt and tie in the kitchen sink, and tried not to give in to the bank statements staring me down from the table.

Mina came in sometimes before we closed up shop for the day. I worked evenings and weekends, all the shifts Chris and Brittney couldn't work because of parties and karaoke nights with their friends. I was too broke to be discriminating about my hours. I knew Mina's name from the signed credit card slips, made out for cheesy romance novels with suit-and-tie heroines in high black heels and pencil skirts on the cover. She didn't look the corporate soul-killer type, even as pretty as she was, a small girl with big brown eyes like a golden retriever and straight black hair that curled a little at the base of her neck. I guess she had to have some money because I never saw her in the same outfit twice, not that I was really looking all that hard, except for a heart-shaped locket pulled tight around her neck by a black ribbon.

I knew better than to look too hard, especially at a girl like that. Girls like Mina usually had better things to do than to be picked up by cashiers. They had fiancés with quarterback good-looks and nice cars and careers to think about. At the very least they had doting fathers, who could pay their ways until they got out of school to be orthodontists or lawyers. I had no marketable skills and a diploma I still couldn't pay for. I didn't stand a chance with a girl like her.

Even for that, each time she came to my counter she smiled at me, if only just long enough for me to see it, signing her name and dotting the i. I always thanked her but she never said anything back. No one else seemed to come in after Mina. I was always kind of glad they didn't, left with her tiny smile as I closed up shop, counted the drawer and locked the doors. After work I walked the eight blocks home alone, warmed up some dinner in the microwave and went to bed, trying to chase off thoughts of Mina Jones before falling asleep to the sound of freight ships passing in the dark.

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Halloween 2010: Flesh Trap, Chapter One

It's Halloween time again, my favorite holiday and a high day for people in the business of telling scary stories. Today marks the official release of M is for Monster, An Alphabetical Anthology of Abominations, featuring my short, T for Trap. It's now available on Amazon and Kindle, and maybe some other places I don't know about yet so I guess we'll see.

To celebrate the release of this book, showcasing the introductory chapter to my novel Flesh Trap, I wanted to do something special. I wanted to do a bit of showing off, too, because, hey, it is the season. So today I'm going to bring you all a sneak peek at Flesh Trap, and a glimpse into Casey Way's world of nightmares and flytraps. Not just a snippet or a teaser, but the full first chapter of the novel.

As it stand now this isn't the final draft version, just the latest. Things may be changed, moved around, prettied up when I sit down to do more revisions. It may not be perfect, but hey, that's what editors and chainsaws are for. But I still wanted to give a taste of things to come, especially for those of who you've supported my efforts and awaited this story as I've worked through it.

So for Halloween 2010, I give to you,

FLESH TRAP, CHAPTER ONE

For twenty years Casey Way dreamt without sleeping. He slipped into the spaces between death and wakefulness where his father still walked the streets and behind Casey's eyelids, a long shadow in clean gray suit pants and white button-down. It was his father that woke Casey, dreaming of David Way's face as raw meat, lips peeled from straight teeth and nostrils flayed open to the bone. Blood trickled down the rivulets cut into his chin and neck as he sat down beside Casey on the 3:25 cross-town with the squeak of plastic upholstery. From the bench seat, Casey watched sunlight filter dirty-gray through the sweat-filmed glass, like a halo around his father's missing face, and felt empty.

"Hey Kiddo," his father spoke with a skeletal mouth. They were alone on the bus. The fact of it made the strange pull of his father's cheek meat into something akin to a smile somehow colder to Casey.

"Yeah, Dad?" Casey was thirty-three years old and staring levelly into the wet cavities of his father's eye sockets. The last time Casey had seen his father he was thirteen years old, made of a knobby angles and freckles that faded had with time. In his mind his father still towered over him in broad shoulders and large hands, made of steel and stone beneath his Oxford shirt and tie.

"You know it wasn't your fault, right?" The bus's empty gut lurched. It made the flesh hanging from his father's cheekbone dangle above his pristine white collar, a dangerous pitter-patter of blood. "I would've just ruined her anyway."

"Yeah, Dad," Casey said. His hands felt sweaty against his jeans, alternately hot and cold from where he wanted to both rip the meat from his father's skull and push it back into place, preserving the semblance of his character. "I know."

It woke Casey in a start of cold sweat and tangled sheets. The bedroom spun above his head until Casey shook it clear, rooted to his side of the mattress by the arm and leg Joel slept with thrown over Casey's side. Fingers skimmed the bony ridges of Joel's knuckles, and closing a hand around his wrist, Casey exhaled in relief. Practice allowed Casey to ease away in a gingerly slide, out of bed and toward the doorway without waking Joel. His head was still full of blood and bees, his father's face drained from his mind and pooled in his fingertips and toes as cooling sheets of nausea before finally dying away.

The dream thinned into the black space between Casey, the bed, and the comforting trap of Joel's body, all knobby joints and a rooster's crest of blonde against Casey's stolen pillow. The soft promise of skin bid Casey fond farewell as he dug the sleep from his eyes with a knuckle and a sigh. At the doorway he slipped on his red chucks, gathering Joel's Manchester United jacket from the bureau and his composition notebook from the bedside table, tucking them under his arm. Outside the door he waited until he heard Joel turn over in bed before pulling it shut; down the hallway and into the living room, he stared at the sliding glass door to the patio. His Venus flytraps slept outside under the yellow warmth of streetlight, gathered in neat clusters in pots and stands, mouths shut for the night like folded fingers. For a moment Casey held a breath and half expected the door to open, but Joel didn't wake and neither would they.

The city seemed half-dead at this hour, empty save shadows as Casey walked the four city blocks to Jay's 24-Hour Coffee on Walker Avenue. His cigarette drooped half-smoked from his mouth, armed with a notebook and pen until his brownstone on Davis Street vanished between alleyways and the bobble of head-lights at his back. Navigating stoplights and crosswalks across empty streets Casey followed old footsteps to the corner booth in the smoking section where a waitress Sherrie with bright red hair waited tables during the graveyard shift. His corner was under the air conditioning vents at a booth with cracked fake leather seats. Customers never wanted to sit there, leaving Sherrie's section one table shy every night where Casey could smoke cigarettes and drink coffee, and no one would watch him write.

Casey took out his notebook, black cover with white pages, college ruled and taped back together from where it had torn at the spine. It was only the latest in a series of journals that he'd kept since high school, one of the few things he learned from his hack of a therapist Dr. Randolf. The idiot had concluded that Casey's nightmares were rooted in unresolved sexual issues with his mother in the summer between ninth and tenth grade. Casey had spent eight sessions trying to convince Dr. Randolf that his tendency to make out with Jimmy Carmichael behind the gym after school ruled out most sexual feelings toward women in general. Eventually he threw one of his journals across Dr. Randolf's office, effectively killing a potted fern, and told his therapist that they were done professionally.

He laid the notebook open on the table in a haphazard cut-and-paste of newspaper clippings, sun-bleached fliers and bus tickets, articles of life collected and remembered. The clippings sold headlines of man-hunts in sleepy neighborhoods and missing grocery store clerks and teachers, telling stories about people thought dead and never recovered. They were sandwiched between photos of smiling faces that no one could seem to find anymore, stolen from lamp posts and store windows where they had been taped to like a lost dog sign and Casey knew they would not be missed. That was the thing that Casey found strange about missing persons fliers, that people never noticed them, never even looked up at them, even to see when they weren't there anymore. Underneath them he kept a journal of his dreams in black ink and blocky paragraphs, sectioned off by dates and places, twice underlined for emphasis and smeared by elbows and knuckles when Casey wasn't of mind.

If asked about the notebooks, Casey would only say they were a matter of survival. Sometimes he shrugged, sort-of smiling, and only when he wasn't of mind of that either. No one ever smiled back.

4/1/10, At home

Dreamt of Dad again, third time this week. He said it wasn't my fault.

Staring at what he'd written, Casey took a drag of his cigarette and tap-tap-tapped the end of his pen against the page. Inside Joel's oversized jacket the air pouring out of the rattling vents left him cold, warming the fingers of his free hand against the mug of coffee he'd ordered. He yawned, the weight of sleep still heavy in his limbs as he rubbed the chill from the tip of his nose with Joel's sleeve. Behind his eyes Casey could make out the skeletal composition of his father's face beneath the dripping meat, and after a moment, he sniffled dryly.

Fuck him anyway.

"Rough night, huh?" Sherrie asked, stopping by his table with the coffee pot in hand. It was already the end of her shift; Casey knew this, but Sherrie didn't say anything.

Casey folded his notebook closed. Looking up he caught the purse of Sherrie's pink-glossed lips, understanding despite the hour. She dipped her head to the side in a jostle of her high red ponytail and refilled Casey's half-empty mug.  Casey knew Sherrie to be a twenty-two-year-old from Vancouver who studied pediatric nursing, reading cheap pulp novels when she wasn't serving coffee in the middle of the night. She knew Casey to be a librarian with a cute English boyfriend, who kept a garden in his apartment and had trouble sleeping, because he didn't have the heart to correct her. Casey was content in their relationship, and what Sherrie did or didn't know.

"Oh, you know." Casey patted an unruly piece of black-brown hair back against his scalp and put on a good face. "Better than some, worse than others."  He pushed his notebook away, tapped the ashes from the cherry tip into the nearby ashtray. "You almost off?"

"Almost." Sherrie flashed him a tiny smile, her eyebrows knitted like a frown. It was particularly warm, which meant Casey must have looked worse than usual.

"You know you can just throw me out of your section if you need to," Casey offered. "I can park myself at the counter for a while so you can clean up."

"Nah." Sherrie's smile broadened. "You keep me company."

Sherrie patted Casey's wrist and moved three booths over to a table of cops. Through the partition window to the kitchen and the clarity of black coffee, familiar chords rattled out of the tinny old speaker system the tattooed fry cook was listening to. If he concentrated, Casey could hear Mariska's voice on 92.5 KVBS, the smoky rumble of her laughter slipping into the dining room between tracks of ZZ Top and Led Zeppelin. She was the late-shift DJ; seven at night to one in the morning, Monday-through-Friday, Classic Sounds with Mariska. He imagined her sitting in a hazy studio booth in her favorite cowboy boots, all long legs and jeans, wearing sunglasses at night like a poster from a 1970s movie about drug culture and rock-and-roll. Mariska always had a knack for looking the way she sounded, and acting the way she looked.

"For all my little lovelies out there who can't sleep tonight," Mariska said, the way she always did between commercial breaks, voice dark from too many cigarettes and late nights. Casey could see her pressing buttons on her board and sighing into the microphone. It was a comfort between cups of coffee and Sherrie's table visits, settling in Casey's bones like nicotine and the urge to sleep.

Thinking of his father's face, dripping from his skull in strips of flesh and sinew, Casey sagged against the booth and sighed. Sherrie filled salt and pepper shakers at the next table and hummed along. As he listened to his sister's voice over the tinny radio, Casey just closed his eyes.

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