A wheel spins made of plywood and supplied from the local hardware store, painted in primary pastels, culled from an era where men wore sideburns and shouted to a hungry audience, “Cash! Prizes!” A crowd of distracted workers huddle around the bell, peeking over shoulders to glimpse the results of the ticking wheel, clicking noisomely, winding down to the final slot. He stands remote, looking satisfied, arms folded authoritatively, occasionally glancing toward the dispatch terminal. The hive murmurs, his workers summoning their gifts on demand, every greeting warm and friendly, smiling through the phone. Tangible levity elevates the room, plastered with kitschy bric-a-brac, like a tech-themed diner in the obscure Midwest. As the spinner lands the final blow, he nods with approval at the fateful result. The president of sales howls a cry for victory, and the rabble disperses quietly hoping for a puppy party or go-karts this time. Mike returned to his desk, burrowed into a cozy dark crevice at the heart of the company, keeping it warm with cheer, and jotted down the result in his mail calendar. Moments later an email would circulate throughout the office, announcing the pending decision: a company event in celebration for landing another contract. Mike scrolled through his unread messages, bobbing his head side to side, humming a ditty culled from broadcasting history, a blithe tune indistinguishable from the hundreds before and after. A crudely rendered, yet charming printout from a LaserWriter is mounted beside a Linnea Pergola print of Sunset Boulevard at the threshold beside the door, visible from the exterior, nearly obscured by the suspiciously emasculating antivirus mascot that absconded to the office after the previous month’s V.A.R. conference. An eclectic mix of pop singles from the most recent decades played low, masked occasionally by his typing, precise and confident. Mike read back a sentence and raised his bushy eyebrows in surprise. He hammered the backspace key with his middle and ring fingers, depressing with the appropriate severity and intensity, loud enough to indicate that an error was made, rhythmically consistent to demonstrate his handle on the issue. The volume of the outer space ebbed and flowed like the tide, cresting at 10 am and waning between 2:45 and 3:20 pm. When the volume increased, when the salutations grew ragged and thin, a stronger hand was required. Subordinates and superiors, passing between one another as a red light was erected to declare violence, Mike subsisted amidst the fervor, arms folded, glancing up at the alert triage, directing with a firm and steady hand. And when the day is done, when there is nothing left to do, he departs, bicycling home beside disgruntled commuters and sexually frustrated housewives. Mid-century modern, Ranch-style homes, each cut nauseatingly specific, one of four styles, over a two-hundred unit swath, line the causeway, situated over what once was a marshland extending to the sea. Convincingly normative and eclectically contorted to eke out an approximate variety. Mike’s mother-in-law, come over early, pulled up curbside, ready to relinquish his children into his care, eagerly thanks him and departs and, in some respect, he is relieved. Alex and Michael busily regurgitate their day, pointing to their matching bracelets, applied by their eco-conscious teachers in memory of democracy. When the door shuts, it is final. The moment of catharsis that purges the day’s concerns and challenges, until the next arrive tomorrow. The couch feels his body sink in a few moments later, as sugarplum animations dance on the LED screen and submerge him into a blissful stupor.

Tenderly you touch me

Kissed by the sun

The wave rolls slow and steady

Flowing back to the sea

I ride the current of time

And we become one

#romance #erotica #micropoetry

Painted horse tied to the cherry tree

out front. // Pushed in place. // Views

from the kitchen table.

Hatchet in hand—

been there since birth // I guess.

Dad says it’s past use and yet

runs thumb over grain

under all this moonlight.

(a shameful hand-me-down)

Swing, brother, swing

and keep it dull.

Don't cut too deep now.

Better take it slow

or they'll catch on // those

spectators—plaster skin and eyes

like ours.

Watch that trunk.

Steady that arc.

Cleave its skin

and see it run like // rivers after

spring has come down the hillside.

Notice Horse and Tree:

Reared Up // Bent Down // Bleeding

Their weeping calls

to flies and mosquitoes—

and all the white folk come running.

Our native reaping,

cooked up right,

is cherry pie for breakfast

with Cool-Whip on the side.

A family recipe // passed down

like this for generations.

Savor it // before they take it back

and we call it thieving.

When he promised me it would all be better, I believed him. He told me all about how I would someday rule the world with him, and look down at our loyal subjects. He said I would be second in command and have a say in everything he did. 

I believed him. I stayed by his side as he brought up an army of fighters, who were mostly kids, I might add, and I didn't wonder if this was a bad idea. Everyone would be listening to him. They would all know peace, instead of war, which has been ruling this world for too long. 

He said the one things we have to do to reassure our victory is take down one group. That was it. One group of four kids who weren't older than eighteen yet. If we just pushed them away and sent them crying, we could do it. Take over the world. 

I didn't question his motives. Not even when he said he was going to send me to meet them and get started on taking them down. I simply agreed and went on to do so. 

It wasn't until I got to their base I began to question everything I knew. Until I walked in and saw them waiting for me, knives in their hands, and a foul look on their faces. My own son and daughter were waiting to kill me. 

When you first see her, the first thing you’ll notice is her hair. Red like flame, red like love, red like cherries and chapstick and death. After that, maybe her white skin, stretched so thinly over her bones that you can almost see the spasms of her muscles. And then, perhaps her eyes, a green that you’ve only read about in books, a green that looks like jealousy. You take in all that, come to terms with all that, and then you look at her as a whole and think, She’s an abomination. 

Then, you watch as she goes about her days, not moving like a normal person would, oh no. She prowls. She stalks. That’s how she moves. As if every last thing with a heartbeat and a breath is prey and she, a predator. Corners a child, steals his lollipop, sucks on it with malice dangling from a ear and her foot pressed against his chest. Drags a businessman into a dark alleyway where no one will hear his screams, and asks him how his day has been. He stutters, and then the knife is in his throat, so fast that he doesn’t even notice it until the pain bites. Never even had a chance to open his mouth, and she’s a tad disappointed. You can tell from the pout on her lips, not unlike one that a petulant child would wear. She likes it when her victims scream. Relishes it even, like hot chocolate on a chilly day. You observe her as she lies and deceives, steals and threatens, kills and smiles, and you think, She’s a monster.

But then you get to know her.You peel back her barbed skin and peer into her dead eyes and take a hold of her scarred heart and it overwhelms you. And you hear pink. The pink of her father’s tie as he throws her onto the streets, mouth stretched into a word you wouldn’t want your child to overhear. You taste teal. The teal of the river she lays next to, hair matted, clothes torn, eyes glittering with loss. You smell beige. The beige of the thugs’ boots, who’d encircled her on Christmas Day, and violated her until she’d shrunk and become half a person, a fourth of a person, a percentage of a person. And then there’s the red. The red of a new opportunity, the red of a new life, the red of a whole new person, one who is a predator amongst predators amongst predators. You drown in her colors and you think, She shouldn’t have ended up like this.

   “The difference is, I lie for a reason.”

     Ali’s words were clear and concise, cutting through the lunch hour chatter of the restaurant like a stainless steel blade.

     Robert looked into her face, void of emotion. Her green eyes used to sparkle when she smiled at him. But now, he studied her as if she was some unknown exotic species discovered for the first time.

     She continued to stare him down, silent and unwavering.

     “What are you talking about? Lies? What lies?”

      Ali’s behavior over the past couple of weeks had been erratic at best. Pleasant conversations took sudden detours into dark places, ending in soliloquies of a brooding nature. Hours later, her jovial attitude made the earlier encounter seem like a fleeting nightmare one couldn’t quite remember upon waking. Robert was aware that hormonal shifts could be more pronounced as women aged, but this was bordering on bipolar.

     “Your entire life is built on lies,” she snapped. “I thought it was a harmless game at first, watching you manipulate others by telling them what they want to hear: your friends, your colleagues, your employees. You lie like you breathe: effortlessly.”

     “Why are you—“

     “Let me finish,” she interrupted. Another pause. “I have been with you for three years. I had so much hope for the future. I fed off your passion; it was a drug to me. But now I see you for who you really are: A con artist, preying on everyone who crosses his path to get what he wants. Including me."

     Every sentence, every word was cold and robotic. The lack of emotion was more disturbing to Robert than the words themselves. He had a thick skin--he had to, given the nature of his business. But dealing with this shell of a person whom he knew intimately was something otherworldly.

     Ali sat perfectly still, unblinking, waiting for Robert to respond. His confusion quickly turned to annoyance as he sat back in his chair and crossed his arms.

     “Look, Ali, I don’t know what’s got your panties in a wad. But I’m tired of your irrational accusations.” Robert pushed his chair back from the table and rose to his feet. “This conversation is over.”

     Ali reached into her purse and produced a candy bar-sized item in a pink and white metallic wrapper.

     “Perhaps I wasn’t being clear.” She slid the item across the table, glaring at him the entire time.

     Robert reached down, picked it up and pulled back the already opened wrapper to see what was inside.

     “I wasn’t implying that I’m perfect and you’re not. What I’m saying is, you lie casually. It’s your way of life. I, on the other hand, lie...but for different reasons. Big reasons. Like the one you’re holding in your hand.”

     Ali smirked, showing the first sign of human emotion as the gravity of the situation was realized in Robert’s expression.

     “I lie to Tom all the time,” Ali said. “I tell my husband it’s okay that he’s unemployed, and that I understand he’s looking really hard for a job. I also lie and say it doesn’t bother me that he has a low sperm count, and that we can’t have children. I smile and pretend that it’s all okay, because, what choice do I have?”

     Robert stood like a statue now, white as alabaster.

     “I lie and tell Tom, ‘It’s a miracle! We are finally going to have a child together!’ Well, we are going to have a child together. It’s just not his.”

     Ali slowly stood up, both fists on the table supporting her weight as she leaned into Robert.

     “You have used people your whole life to get what you want. Now it’s my turn to get what I want: The child I could never have, the family I’ve always dreamed of...with a promotion comfortable enough to support the three of us. I’m sure that can be arranged. Right, Senator?”

The clickety-clack of the Trans-Siberia Railway was equally hypnotic and torturous. I woke up half-naked in my compartment, with a throbbing, two-day, drug-induced headache and a note taped inside my briefcase that read, “If I can do this, think of what the FSB and CIA are capable of.” My thoughts ran to self-preservation rather than the mind-numbing sounds.

So much of my odyssey had been a living combination of Monty Python meets Dr. Strangelove that I had almost forgotten I was dealing with superpowers, real people, and telling a secret that would change the world. I entertained the notion that if I could concentrate, the migraine would dissipate.

I reached for my backpack and pulled out my notes. I spread them on the bed and tried to make some sense of what I learned on my journey thus far. After sorting through them aimlessly for a while, I decided there had to be a system: put each prong of the story in one pile rather than trying to make a single, convoluted epic from four diverse groups who had no idea any of what the others were trying to do. The participants sounded like a bad joke. What if the Soviet Union, the US, a small European prince and an angelic African leader were all trying to save their countries at the same time?

The first portion of the story came from the data I had collected about the Russians-Soviets, as they were known at the time. I’d uncovered a lot of information about the inner-circle of the Kremlin. I read it and re-read it, unable to believe what I knew from experience was true. There was no way these megalomaniacal buffoons and paranoid apparatchiks could have run an empire that spanned major parts of three continents.

As was always the case, the worker bees were the competent ones, brave and able to work under pressure. Much of my information had come from former KGB operatives who had been involved all those years ago,

Damn, I kept thinking during the five-thousand-mile journey each way from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, this can’t be true.

My piles of notes kept shifting with the movement of the train on antiquated tracks. I grumbled and stood, opening the door of my compartment to recapture the ones that slipped under the door.

A beautiful conductor bent over to help pick them up, and her skirt rode up to show spectacular legs. She smiled as she handed me the stack of papers. I struggled to remember my rudimentary Russian, finding her beauty distracting. “Are you writing a book?” she asked me with a brilliant smile.

Oh shit, had she read my notes? I swallowed against the sudden dryness in my throat. “No, I’m helping with some research for a university.”

“How interesting,” her eyes sparkled.

The train shimmied, and she fell into me. I wrapped an arm around her to steady her, or so I told myself. Her smile grew to almost feline proportions. Man, this was more of a test than any other I had thus far. I couldn’t cheat on my girlfriend. More importantly, no matter how cute she was, I couldn’t let this conductor see what I was doing. For all I knew, she could be FSB.

“Th-th-thanks. I need to get back to work,” I said, releasing her and clutching the notes to my chest.

“If I see your papers in the corridor again, I’ll knock on your door,” she smiled and walked away and into the next car.

I closed the door, sat on my small chair, and took a deep breath. Looking in the cabinet for water, I discovered only a bottle of vodka. I drank it straight from the bottle like a true Russian.

Fortified by the liquor, I returned to my review, starting on the next stack of notes: the scant of information referencing the United States. As I read through it, I couldn’t help but laugh. Doonesbury wasn’t a cartoon. It was a documentary.

I gagged on my next slug of cheap vodka. The idiots in charge of the United States were every bit as crazy as the Soviets.

I found that the American team left a land of Victoria’s Secret, Monday Night Football, and shopping malls for Russia, a country of perpetual gray skies, no hot water, and umbrella-wielding babushkas. The KGB was omnipresent, and the Americans could be shipped off to enjoy the Siberian winter if they were caught. Hell, if someone caught them, being sent to Siberia would have been downright lenient. I doubted any of the Americans would have made it to the next street corner. Stealing Soviet national secrets was understandable during the Cold War. But how could anyone have come up with this crazy plan?

I understood why the world’s superpowers were so frustrated and willing to try anything, but their plans weren’t what really ended the Cold War. In the geopolitical world, as in the real world, accidents often create the greatest results. I needed more vodka and sucked down a third of the bottle in one swig.

My notes blurred, and my head spun as I considered the two men central to my journey. The key players in this farce couldn’t be more different. No amount of vodka could possibly make this make any sense, but I had met them and knew all of this was real. Insane, wild, crazy, but real.

Of course, I had to change the names of countries other than America and the USSR. The names of the players had to change, also. For my own safety and the safety of everyone involved.

The next player in this mad story was President Mbangu of Madibu, who has often been considered a living saint. Hell, he’s known as The Great Man throughout the world. During a time when Africa suffered through brutal civil wars, dictatorships, corruption, and economic unrest, his idyllic island nation was poor and happy. He was a much better man than I ever could hope to be. However, his nation’s successes were waning and he had to come up with a way to turn Madibu’s fortunes quickly or chaos could ensue.

Although it was against his better angels, he tricked the U.S. and U.S.S.R., but no one lost, and his people benefitted greatly. How could he ever know that his beaches, hotels, a cargo/cruise ship port, rhesus monkeys and new-found libation production would help end the Cold War?

Mbangu’s friend, and polar opposite, was Prince Claude of Luxenstein. All anyone needed to know about him was his nickname: The Pied Piper of Pussy. As outrageous as it may sound, it was a gross understatement of his life. Casanova was a virgin compared to the Pied Piper, and the Pied Piper was real. He was a one-man good year for casinos around the world. But this time he had gone too far, he only had a short time to fix it or his fairytale nation would be gobbled up as a province of France or Belgium to protect the public from his excesses. His family’s five-century-old principality would be history. He couldn’t hold back. If he had to be dangerous and crazy, so be it. Who would take him seriously anyway? So, he jumped in full force, hoping he would succeed against all the odds.

The last notes I organized before putting them back in my briefcase for the evening were the perfect ending point for the night. They came from Petey, an eighty-five-year-old former pit boss in Vegas, who had seen the Pied Piper in his wildest days.

“You gotta promise me one thing,” Petey had told me.

“What’s that?”

“If you find out the real story before I die, you gotta tell me.”

“Absolutely.”

A huge smile lit his wrinkled, ancient face, “When you come to tell me, make sure I give you my will first.”

“Why?”

“Because when I hear what he did, I’ll probably laugh my ass into the big one. It’ll be a helluva way to go. Die with a smile on my face. Man, I haven’t been this excited since that hooker in ’83. You’ve made this old man very happy. I’ve got something to look forward to now. Thank the Pied Piper for me.”

“You’ve got it, Petey,” I said with a snicker.

Perfect. I let the vodka and clickety-clack of the train put me to sleep. I smiled to myself with that one last thought.

When your kid asks, “How did the Cold War really end, daddy?” You can tell him, “This is how. Don’t believe what you read in the history books. Sit back and read the real story.”

I had been watching her for a long time as she sat at the bar, sipping her drink, waiting for an attractive man to hit on her. When she didn’t get any immediate takers, she hitched up her skirt almost to the panty line and shifted her shapely ass on the bar stool in a fascinating concentric motion. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her but I knew the smart thing to do would be to bide my time until the moment was right. Sometimes, she would twirl her shiny ebony hair around her finger or flip it back from her face. I figured she was an avid reader of Cosmopolitan, swallowing the nonsense that this was the way to become a magnet for male attention. I watched with fascination as she swirled her drink with a finger and then sucked it into her moist pink mouth, in and out, in and out.

She was beautiful and mesmerizing as she played her little game. I knew if I just waited until she tired, I could make my move. Once in a while, her gaze would shift in my direction and I imagined that she showed a slight interest. I noticed that several men sat on the bar stool beside her and then left when she rejected them. Oh, this was such fun to watch. I realized she was waiting for me. I looked at her soulfully, certain that she would fall for my bait. For my ploy, and it had always worked in the past, was to wait until my target became tired of waiting and came to me.

After several hours of dangling her bait on her hook, she apparently tired of this pursuit and sauntered toward me. The desire for her almost overwhelmed me but she passed by my table without a glance and headed to the restroom. Unable to control myself, I followed her and waited outside the restroom door. As she walked out, she gave a quick look at me and walked right past me. Grabbing her arm, I told her to quit playing her game.

She laughed at me and said, “You’re wasting your time. I’m not turned on by you.” She made the mistake of smirking as she said it and that was the last thing she ever did as I plunged the knife into her belly.

That ought to keep these bitches from always rejecting me! I had the sudden urge to go home and scrub myself clean, once again. Mama always told me to stay away from these dirty, nasty whores and I was positive she would be waiting up for me, with milk and cookies, to hear my latest story.