He saw her

first on the streets.

Spring –

a joy to remember

that you’re not

so far removed from

an adolescent hormone-cocktail

and spaghetti strap voodoo,

pale winter thighs.

Her contoured clavicles cluttered

with moles like the

constellation Cassiopeia, crushed him,

collapsed his lungs by sheer force and heft of hips,

lips, his diaphragm spasms and skips.

Since he couldn’t look at her

he tilted his eyes

toward yesterday’s taffeta skyline,

head held at 45 degrees by tented fingertips.

Pushing a pen knife past his own scalene muscle

until it just clicked the spinal cord,

he half-moon

rotated his wrist,

severing external carotid artery,

thyroid cartilage, larynx, superior belly of omohyoid,

and jugular.

He knew the slowing sporadic blood-spurts

from his dedicated cardiac system

would say more than contorted vocal cords.

“Thump spray thump spray.”

I hope the stains on your spring days

and sundress

never wash out.

My people come from Boston by way of Ireland. I'm the son of a man who drank every day since he was fifteen and only got three DUI's in his lifetime. I went to college in Iowa, where every crop can be turned into whiskey. Which is to say that I am a 5'11, 150 lb, twenty-three-year-old. unassuming, bookish Freak of Liver. Throat wide as a sewage pipe, a roaring tunnel of beer and pickle juice. I pride myself on marksmanship, and so always vomit into a toilet with minimal splash. I'm the drunkest man in the room and you'd never even know. 

I remember making an Australian vegetarian cry in Barcelona. 

Skulls and spiked helmets were super glued to the walls. I lost several arm wrestling matches to a guy in his mid-thirties on one of the fold-out, padded, wrestling setups in-between the other biker memorabilia. We competed for drinks, and I paid out three in a row. My body is slight, but my fight is hulking and dumb - amplified by liquor. I knew I’d lose but I couldn’t stop myself; no way I could win against this guy, but he had to know I wasn’t afraid of embarrassment. 

Nor could I stop myself from making the Australian, twenty years old, jubilant, and naive, cry. She was “on holiday” before starting “uni.” She wanted to study environmental science and marine biology, save the reefs with charm alone. She dove regularly in the Pacific Ocean and never once considered being eaten by a shark.

A group of us sat around one of the arm wrestling benches, salt on the rims of our glasses. I described the virtues of meat to the Australian and her older sister in florid detail. How rare flesh tastes, the juices, the texture of baby cow versus more mature beef. Tacos, filet mignon, salami, breaded chicken, dark meat! My mouth watered as she grew more uncomfortable. I had visions of barbecues and the halal method of slaughter, where the lamb never sees the knife coming. 

At first, I thought she was joking, putting on a show of sensitivity, so I leaned in all the harder, invoking five-gallon buckets under a suspended deer, the animal cut and dripping from pubis to sternum. I told her to drink from the bucket of my mind and what she found there was hot and stank of pennies. 

But then she put her fingers in her ears and started singing to herself. That’s when I saw the tears in the red neon. My teasing went too far and I was angry and embarrassed, just as she must have been in that moment, angry and embarrassed. I think I was jealous of her: the marine biology, the diving, the belief that people are essentially good and that there is a solution to every problem. 

I grew up with lies and predators who loved me. On the nights he actually came home, dad sat in the driveway for hours, making phone calls and spiking a single can of ginger ale with the vodka bottle he kept in his car, again and again, until the ginger ale was actually spiking the vodka. He thought he was so slick all those years, but the screaming matches and the text messages from misstresses and the explosions of drunken self-righteousness will were as impossible to hide as his red face.  

The man who beat me at arm wrestling and I went outside onto the cobbled street for a cigarette. He spoke of his wife and aging, how he couldn’t stay out drinking late anymore like he used to. At that point, it was four in the morning and we’d been drinking since eight or nine. The bar wasn't closed yet and I had a hunger brewing. 

Before we went back inside he told me about Catalonia, about the giants that lived there before people, about how their bones littered the hills. 

Wintertime smokers

numble with fumb

digits and

puff like thermal protrusions along oceanic fault lines.

Dope-sick spoon-holders make me go click

before they stick their blood-straws.

Opioids and hypodermic intrusion introducing

heat into chilled, sub-limbic meat.

Little boys torture ants and deer ticks with me,

All of us laughing, clicking and merry –

except for the insects

and stricken parental units.

Squirmy worm-pyre and psychiatrist mom.

I am butane’s black hole,

Gaseous Clay, ignition powerhouse, ur-fire,

licking the market despite trick-

ass hipsters torching with Zippos

(fuck Zippos, indisposable pricks).

Marlboro Red Pocket Pack, Camel Blues, Parliament Aqua Blue, 100’s, Newport Menthols, Pall Mall Tropic Twist Slims, Drum, Amber Leaf, Unfiltered Turkish Blends, Swisher Sweets, joints, spliffs, Zig Zag, carved Aromatic Macintosh feverishly roasted in supermarket parking lots.

Person, meet Product.

Fire, meet Flammable.

Lung, meet Cough.

You flick, I say click.

Hi. This is a project close to my heart but I feel as if I may have misfired here. It's only an excerpt of a longer story. What do you all think of the writing so far? 

Smash Cut; or Fammi Impazzire; or A Bevy of Acceptable Fricatives; or The Ledger of Recorded Omens and Blue Junk Spotted Along a Series of American Highways

The first inkling Cosimo gets that he cannot control the weather is at age ten, one June noon on a Cape town main street outside of a penny candy store. After that day – hot and fuzzy like the Saab’s chrome grill – he will be only sixty-three percent sure he can control the weather; the kind of odds that make poker players’ eyebrows twitch behind mirrored shades and their barbwire tattoos anticipatorily wriggle across biceps. Twelve years pass, a thousand inside straights and dead-eyed bluffs fail to pan out before Cosimo reaches the Utah desert, where he is, for good and all, dissuaded.

Absolute power over the weather is one honey of a skill in beach town – especially for a ten-year-old, chubby kid without a friend in a hundred mile radius. He wakes up early and eats a cinnamon roll on the front porch, watches the fog thick-hung over the marsh across the street, a mosquito-ridden fairyscape. Cosimo puts his feet up on the railing, on the fluorescent beach towels, forgotten the evening before and left to collect dew all night; he thinks about how he feels that morning.

Hot, cold, or medium.

It is the same process for each: pucker that precious, glazed mouth and blow at the marsh. He cuts the mist like codfish.

If he blows hard the day will be hot, a wicked New England scorcher that everybody loves to complain about. A beach day. Cosimo suffers the indignity of sunscreen. His mother makes sure to slather the delicate skin behind the ears and knees; she, a tall, light-haired woman from the distant land of California, puts salami sandwiches in clear plastic baggies: sourdough, yellow mustard, cheddar. While his sister and mother lay out in the sun, reading paperbacks and drinking iced tea, Cosimo strikes out for Europe. He never makes it past the sandbar a few hundred feet off the shoreline. He is a bald otter, slick and blubbery, the ocean is a forgiving home. He splashes around the sandbar where the water is clear and hunts spider crabs. Sometimes he looks back towards the beach, sees the people like paper dolls, stiff and awkward in the dry air.

Medium days are good too. Cool, a few clouds boiling over the trees, into a sky that will one day remind Cosimo of paintings by Dutch masters in which a squadron of angels scrambles around God’s little finger. He rides bikes on those days. Pumping his teeny-weeny legs like the mad bastard he is, then shooting down a hill, never once touching the brakes, until his cheeks ripple or he hits a stick in the road, flying off onto concrete or gravel or pile of wood chips. Helmets are for cowards, bruised ribs and cheesegrated knees for heroes.

Cosimo, on the porch with the sopping beach towels and his father’s yellowed cigarette butts, hardly blows at all when he wants a cold day – more of an exhalation than a purposeful puff, so that the fog above the marsh just swirls a little differently, acknowledging his will. Cold days are good for being read to on the couch. He cocoons himself in a fleece blanket and listens to his mother tell tales of mice and badgers who drink dandelion tea and hold hands wherever they go. Or they (the humans) play Monopoly. The games always end with Cosimo’s sister getting frustrated and storming out, vowing to hoist vengeance on all the cheaters she is related to.

No matter the weather, Cosimo’s father drinks beer and vodka from early until late. Neither he nor his truck is around much. But they don’t talk about that. In New England families, some undercurrents aren’t discussed, but instead form barren sandbars right bellow the surface.

The particular noon in June when Cosimo starts to think he might not be the god of weather patterns is supposed to be Cold. Except it is hot. Really freaking hot. Too hot to go to the beach, his mother says.

“You’ll fry,” she tells to his sister, “Look at your shoulders. Another minute in the sun and I’ll be able to peel you like a banana.”

“Mom, this is unfair, the A.C. is busted and I don’t want to be around my stupid brother in this house for another minute.” Little brothers get used to abuse pretty fast from their teenage sisters. Cosimo never understood her hostility towards him, but is sure that he has done something to deserve it. “Can we go downtown?” she says.

Their mother looks towards the driveway where there was only one car, and no shiny black pickup truck, and sighs. She bites at the frayed cuticles of her left hand. “Put your shoes on, Cosimo, and grab a hat, you already look like one big freckle.”

The main drag of the little Cape town shimmers between a puritan colony and a gift shop. Bleached out church steeples, pink pastel awnings over the jewelry store, wrought iron water pumps without a spot of rust, old white people in salmon shorts and dress socks.

Cosimo and company slide down the street like pads of butter on a hot frying pan. The boy is mad at himself for frigging up the weather. Tomorrow, he promises himself, he will concentrate and threaten the weather, if that doesn’t work he will plead.

His mother and sister are ten-ish feet behind him, bickering about curfews (“Diana gets to stay out until ten-thirty on Fridays”/”That’s fine, I just want to know where you’ll be. Have I met everyone you’ll be with? Are you lying?” etc.) when Cosimo steps out into the middle of the street – tributary to main street - without looking both ways, lost in thought as he is about Earth’s tilted axis and the waxing nights of late summer. He hears his mother yell, “Cosimo!” before a black Saab convertible, with a shiny-ass chrome grill, hits and kills him.

Beat.

Then he is back on the curb. And the Saab with its top down and polished black body, rolls on past him. The driver has gray hair going black at the temples, oil-dark sunglasses, and teeth like seventeenth-century tombstones. Cosimo sees his own pudgy reflection in the Saab’s door panel: an O mouth and a pair of O eyeballs.

Just what in the good gosh darn has happened. He is dead. Had died. Has felt the heat of the engine as it would feel inches away from his flesh, so that the barely-there hair on his thighs twist and shrivel. And then a moment of blackness. And then back to the curb.

Is Cosimo immortal? Does the world around him exist only for him? Are his mother, sister, father, and the man with the tombstone teeth only props and figments in a world where he – Cosimo – is the only real person? Was he, perhaps, road-splattered in one version of Earth, then instantly dumped into an alternate dimension where everything looked the same but might, in some fundamental way, not be the same?

His mother, who had not screamed his name, he knows, takes his hand. They looked both ways before crossing the street and get ice cream. His sister gets a scoop of cotton candy, his mother a coffee frappe, and Cosimo a cone of something dyed blue, full of chocolate swirls, and malt balls.

* * *

Smash cut. Twelve years later. Cosimo has grown pubic hair, gone through high school, lost friends to time or heroin, wept in front of a woman he at one time loved in the clumsy youthful, tempest sort of way. Because of George W. Bush and the second Gulf War, Cosimo will never hear the word ‘coalition’ without connecting it to the phrase ‘of the willing.’ In the twelve years after his first death he laughed from his belly, threw punches in anger, read sentences in books that made him happy for weeks after, drank so much that when he vomited thin yellow strands leaked out of his nose, put cigarettes out on his tongue, popped pills, and spent a lot of time alone listening and watching the world he found himself in; he was lied to, fucked, cheated on, laughed at, disdained, applauded, confronted, rewarded, condescended to, arrested, loved and hated by the same people.

He is a sad young man who only identifies with other sad people. Which is how Cosimo finds himself in the Illinois Room, on the second floor of the Iowa Memorial Union Building, at the introductory meeting of the feature film he and his undergrad comrades plan to make over spring break. They’re in the midst of both midterms and winter, a dehydrated pit of time that seems endless, as they wake before sunrise and return to bed well-after sunset. Spring and sunlight are rumors, not promises.

PANASONIC. At the front of the room, buzzing bluely in the light of the overhead projector as it boots up, Siegfried French and Riley Adams (AKA Counselor Rybot, AKA C.R.) bicker over a clutch of papers. They are the writers, producers (C.R. is the executive producer due to ‘mad spreadsheet and timetable skills’) directors, cameramen, and cinematographers – holders of the sacred plot and Cosimo’s friends.

Cosimo (sound guy) sits, legs up on the front row of Formica tables, next to Ollie Sands (actor, comic relief) discussing caffeine headaches. Behind them, Wesley Smith (lead actor) has his nose inches away from his notebook, doodling small gopher-like creatures stampeding away from a figure not yet drawn. Off by her/himself worrying her/his nails – on the hand without nail polish – is the frustratingly non-binary Sam/Jo Bernardino (actor, wise exposition pipeline).

“I just need this next week to be over,” says Ollie, “Two papers due on Wednesday, a midterm in Chinese that I have not studied for – tonal languages are messed up, dude.” He yawns like he wants to swallow an ostrich egg whole.

“Feel you, Ollie,” Cosimo says, “I’ve been beerbonging pints of coffee since, like, last month. My adrenaline glands must look like prunes.”

“Dude, forget your glands, what about your throat?” Wesley says, still drawing, his nose speckled with blue ink. “That must burn like shit.”

“No way. I make a pot the day before, then put it in a pitcher in the refrigerator. It’s what my mom always did. What are we waiting for here, anyways, Siegfried?”

“Leading lady, she was at work but will be here in a minute. I’ll have you tucked in and snoozing shortly, Cosimo, don’t you worry.”

“She cute?” Ollie says.

“Yeah.” Wesley puts his pen down and flexes his wrist. The whole room hears the snap. The figure in the doodle that the gopher-like creatures are fleeing from is a colossal Friedrich Nietzsche – the give away is his mustache. “I take theater classes with her. She’s good.”

Siegfried, his long thin arms on his long thin hips, tilts his head and speaks through his beard. “None of you filthy animals even think about it. She has a boyfriend, and I don’t need any of y’all’s drama interfering with my production.”

“Yessir, co-director, sir.” Ollie snaps off a salute.

Cosimo has a girlfriend, sort of. In Iowa, where vast tracks of cornfields allow the wind to split the horizon, winters are brutal affairs. And although Cosimo hates to think of Her this way – She is a very sweet girl – he considers Her a placeholder, a warm body to share the Martian night. He does not wonder if She thinks of him this way; Cosimo assumes nothing about her, including the place he might hold in her life, he simply attempts to minimize the pain of any given moment, and fan the sparks of joy. That there are sparks of joy is something he tells Her, the girlfriend, often as university bills, coursework and the season bury her. Cosimo remains cheerful for Her, would wish her no ill, holds Her when She needs holding, but little more.

At the head of the room C.R. clears his throat, opens his mouth to speak but before he can the door to the Illinois room slaps open. There is Frances Le Frances (actress, ingénue).

“Sorry, guys, my boss is doofus who can’t figure out scheduling. I brought a pizza from work, though, best in Iowa City.”

“Better than that place on Dubuque?” says C.R..

“If I was on death row I would ask for one large Flying Tomato Taco Deluxe –

sub chicken for the ground beef, hot sauce, no sour cream – as my last meal.” Frances sets the box on the table at the front of the room, scattering the stacks of informational packets and plot summaries that Siegfried and C.R. have lain out at ninety-degree angles.

“I can’t eat pizza because of a gluten allergy,” Siegfried says, “but thank you, Frances Le Frances, you’re a hero. I also don’t think you’d last very long in a prison setting. Now can everybody sit down and shut the fuck up so we can get on with it.”

Cosimo uses his new packet for a plate; tomato sauce and grease smears the schedule break down on the first leaf. Cosimo takes note of this, considering it an omen. A good one: pizza is delicious, especially when it is free. A bad one: some stains don’t wash out, ruining shirts and obscuring whole passages of text.

C.R. hits a button somewhere and a Google map of the western half of the United States shoots out of the projector, onto the wall behind them.

“Welcome to Napa Nuptials, a comedic feature length film about family, deceit, delusion, and, as a function of setting, road trips, I guess you could call it a journey of self-discovery disguised as a trip out west.” C.R. Adjusts his glasses and smiled as wide as he can at his cast and crew. “We’re going shoot this puppy in eight days, two cars, four-ish states, and one desert. Now, actors, you’ll be playing characters with your same names with very similar personalities to your actual selves. This is to create a sense of realism and real reactions to what will be going on.”

Wesley raises his hand.

“Let me get through this spiel and then we’ll open the floor. I bet I’m about to answer your question right now.” Wesley put his hand down. “OK, in addition to playing characters that are, in large part, you, a lot of the dialogue will be improvised –“

Frances raises her hand, “Say what?”

“Improvised. We’re hoping for natural responses to natural conversation. Don’t worry we’ll have specific, written lines to keep you all on track and moving the plot forward. We have a plan; don’t worry.”

Ollie raises his hand.

“We’re not taking questions right now. Put the hand down.” Siegfried rubs his hands together like he needs a cigarette. Cosimo knows how many hours he’s spent planning this project out with C.R., how much money C.R. had already dropped on motel rooms, campsite and rented film equipment.

Siegfried didn’t usually have money for anything but a few key vices. Often, towards the end of month, his cellphone service would be discontinued for lack of payment. He worked two or three jobs at a time but never seemed to get anywhere. And, while he often gushed with ideas for screenplays, essays, and TV pilots, in the nearly four years that Cosimo had know him, Siegfried hadn’t completed a single creative project for himself. But now that he’d financially burdened C.R. and conscripted a cast and crew by the force of his own enthusiasm, the pressure to produce a film worthy of their efforts both motivated Siegfried and scared him shitless. Cracks in his shining self-assurance he’d shown only days earlier had started to alter the topography of his shoulders – crushing them, pinning him in place under the weight of expectations.

“Right,” C.R. pushes on and points to the project map, their route, a red squiggle, “So, a lot of the scenes will take place in a car or at roadside attractions along the way. Monday morning we’ll do some scenes in Iowa, then down to Missouri so we can buy a shitload of cigarettes on the cheap, then into Kansas, spend the night in Topeka, check out any roadside attractions that we want B roll of, then drive to Colorado where we’ll stay with Ollie’s dad where we can pick up a few extra sleeping bags – right? Right. – then into Utah where we’ll sleep at a motel for one night, then we camp in the desert, Canyonlands State Park, for two nights, then we’re on our way back, more shooting, a lot of driving, yadda yadda yadda.” C.R. pauses for breath. “Questions?”

There are questions. Sam/Jo asks about the actual plot. Siegfried explains that only the individual characters should know their actual reasons for going west, that the characters would learn each other’s motivations naturally.

“But Wesley, our main character, in a general sort of way, is going to California for his estranged sister’s wedding and has to deal with his anxiety about seeing her and his wacky family after years and years and what it means to be ‘family’ and all that shit, which will slowly build throughout the film.” Siegfried’s hands were shaking.

“If this film had a subtitle – like, Napa Nuptials semicolon blank –” asks Wesley, “what would it be?”

Cosimo sits back, figuring that sound guys are all about listening rather than speaking up. The others ask about logistics and artistic vision, available trunk space and camera lenses. He lets the words rush into him, happy to get out of Iowa for a few days, see a more varied landscape, do drugs in the dessert, produce something beautiful. Siegfried is the one he worries about, his friend has a habit of taking too much on himself – whether it be semester hours or unpaid side-projects for friends – and when his repsonsities build to a critical point he shuts down, losing whole days in bed, or, worse still, triggering a manic episode. Back when he was an R.A. he didn’t go to classes for weeks on end, but always greeted his freshman wards with a smile and a handful of condoms.

C.R. sooths the actors with an activity counselor’s charm. “This trip is going to be a lot of work, but it’s also going to be a lot of fun. You’re free to bring any drugs you want – Colorado has legal weed so you might want to wait to pick up – but please keep it safe, and keep it in the trunk of my car while we’re driving: it’s separate space from the rest of the car so if we get pulled over it should be cool.”

Frances asks if his lawyer had told him that. Cosimo laughs, a single tar bubble pop of laughter. The pizza, detailed road maps, and descriptions of the Seven Wonders of Kansas have reassured everybody. Like the Iowa plains, smoothed and made fertile by continental ice sheets, beauty takes time and overwhelming pressure.

This is going to be fun, Cosimo thinks, everybody is either going to be in love at the end of this or never speak to each other again.

“It’s all about the human reality and conflicts, so finish midterms strong, and bring your war faces.”

“Also, keep in mind,” Siegfried says, fumbling for his lighter and pack, “it’s a comedy.”

* * *

Smash cut. Sam/Jo cracks the driverside window to toss a cigarette butt; Cosimo snaps the glove compartment open and shut in rhythm with the radio. Travelers on Midwestern highways do what ever they can to prove to themselves that they exist, so they make a bubble of sound and smoke and drive thru hamburgers as they hurdle along grasslands that do not care about them.

Sam/Jo’s character isn’t in the early scenes of Napa Nuptials; the rest of the cast – in the world of the movie – lived in the immediate Iowa City area, Sam/Jo is a traveling musician (“Harmonica, Cosimo, I think of it as an aluminum-steel sandwich and I am a robot who hasn’t seen an oil can since I achieved A.I. in the last war of mechanical independence”) who responds to a Craigslist rideshare post. They and Cosimo – who has been temporarily relieved by a chipper C.R. of any sound guy duties for “just this once” – could sleep in, driving Ollie’s mom’s car to Colfax, Iowa, where the two groups will merge for lunch and a status report. The other group is thirty minutes behind. Cosimo Checks his phone.

“Ollie says they’re just leaving I.C. now.”

Sam/Jo checks their phone too. “Siegfried won’t respond to me. He either lost his phone again or is ready to give up already.”

“Equally likely. Looks like we have time to kill.”

“Let’s stop at that gas station,” Sam/Jo says, “I want to take a picture of that van.”

“Thank God, dude.” Cosimo had had to piss for the last thirty miles or so, the seatbelt cutting into his distended bladder. He tests himself, seeing how long he can keep his sphincters tight, assuming that discomfort meant improvement, that he is training his excretory system for the long days ahead.

“No need to be a hero or nothing: we’ve got time for bathroom breaks. All we’ve got is fucking time.” They park Mom Car around the side of the gas station, next to a junked out minivan painted to look like Scooby and Shaggy’s trusty Mystery Machine: aquamarine base splashed with sea-grass green accents. Seventies cartoon cool abandoned at the edge of Colfax by the propane tanks and overflowing dumpsters. Cellophane scraps tumble in the wind but there is no direct sunlight to make them shine or glitter. An overcast day and nobody will text them back.

Despite his wicked need to piss, Cosimo watches Sam/Jo take a few pictures. They only use film cameras. Cosimo asks why they did that, if there is, like, some objective benefit to film over digital cameras.

“No, it’s not that the picture is any better – although a lot of people say it is. Digital is instant and that’s what I don’t like.” Sam/Jo crouches onto their heels, combat boots scrape against the concrete.

“You don’t like instantly seeing how the picture is? What if you fuck up? What if the light is wrong or you missed something shocking in the background?”

Sam/Jo pauses and turns a sly eye toward Cosimo. “What could be so shocking in the background?”

Cosimo scans the horizon for a worthy specimen. “Well, what if there’s a pack of wild dogs taking down a deer.”

“Then my picture just became more interesting by a factor of twelve.”

“Granted,” says Cosimo, “bad example. By why not know if it’s good or not right away? Seems like a usefully digital perk.”

“Just for that reason. Because it takes three weeks to get these photos developed. All that instant gratification bullshit sucks all the fun out of it: delete and reshoot until you get exactly what you want.” Sam/Jo stands up, lets their camera rest on their chest on its strap, and pulls a pack of Parliaments out of their jacket pocket. Empty. “Shit. Did I take a bad picture? Maybe. I like waiting and finding out. Good or bad, these photos will be the only memory I have of this particular Mystery Machine no matter what, and that makes them all good, in a way.”

“I can dig that. Not good or bad, just different.” Cosimo and Sam/Jo watch a motorcycle pull up to the number three pump. The driver, all-black denim everything, has a full-faced helmet on, strange for Iowa. A five-pointed star caught in circle, the words ‘U.I. Partial Marshals est. 1847’ stitched onto her jacket.

“Exactly, well, sort of. Not good or bad at all, just the way it was or is. Not curated and bullshitty. Hey, do you know that girl? Is she wearing Seven League Boots? Those are fly as fuck. Why does that patch on her jacket look familiar?” Sam/Jo gestured at the biker. She removes her helmet and click clacks across the parking lot into the station with a twenty-dollar bill peeking out from between the fore and middle fingers of her left hand. Sandy hair that just pokes out from under a Jolly Roger dew rag. Cosimo recognizes the boots.

“Sure, that’s Theodora, umm, Weaver. She’s my girlfriend’s friend. Don’t know what the patch is – some student org. I guess. I don’t know her well. Not a huge fan. She’s a little theatrical, I think, like she’s putting on a show and the audience just can’t get enough.”

Cosimo, in fact, made out with Theodora last Halloween, before he and Her, the girlfriend, had met. She, Theodora, didn’t like Cosimo either; that night she was using him to make her ex jealous. Cosimo went to that party dressed as Abel with Ollie as his Caine, he wasn’t sure what Theodora had gone as; he remembers the hike of her skirt, an arterial splash of cornstarch blood across her white blouse, and hydrant-red lipstick creeping beyond the corners of her mouth, but most of all he remembered what her eyes said: I know something you don’t [blink] I am smarter than you [blink] you’re costume is shit [blink] [blink] [blink].

“Like a digital photo, I grok the type: I’ve seen Instagram. Hey, didn’t you need to piss?” Cosimo jumps and fifty ounces of use-to-be coffee jump with him, his bladder, like poor intentions, rushes to the forefront of his mind. He sloshes into the station, B-lining to the bathrooms. Sam/Jo follows him as far as the candy and beef jerky aisle. Cosimo gives a little wave at Theodora as he passes her. He doesn’t think she notices – too busy drumming her fever-orange nails on the Formica counter as the kid working the register makes change –, or else her stiff neck and laser-guided eye-line on the kid’s hands are affects, studies in oblivion.

When Cosimo shakes off and slides back to the parking lot, Sam/Jo sits on the hood of Mom Car, blowing Parliament smoke into a half-drained sports drink bottle then spinning on the cap so the smoke hangs over the liquid like storm clouds.

Cosimo stretches out his quadriceps and spits on the front tire before popping open the passenger door. “That shit is way too blue to be anything but poison.” Sam/Jo removes the cap and drank all that remained. Smoke dribbles from his nostrils. They toss the bottle into a trashcan with a parabolic wrist-flick.

“Kobe, motherfucker. I figure the electrolytes counterbalance the cigarettes. Any word from those goofs in Picture Car?”

“Just that they’re leaving Iowa City now.”

“Man, shooting with these people is always a waiting game. And this time I don’t even know how my character arc ends,” Sam/Jo sighs and shakes their head, “Siegfried has a surprise for me, some big final gag.”

Cosimo looks at his watch, resigns to waiting. Looks at the grayed-out sky, considers turning the day sunny with a strong exhalation, but instead locates the sun by hint and inference, and orients himself on a north-south axis. He clears his throat. Taps his foot. Scrapes dirt from under one nail with the sliver of another, pulls a pen from his pocket and scribbles bluely on the delicate membrane between thumb and forefinger. Sam/Jo whistles real low. “Didju know that the Greeks didn’t have a word for blue? It doesn’t appear once in the Iliad or Odyssey.”

“Oh?” Sam/Jo turns Mom Car on and flicks through the FM stations. Christian electronic dance music, southside tire and automotive care services, classic rock.

“Yeah. Before dyes or anything the only blue things were the sea, kind of, and the sky, sometimes. So no need for the word. They thought the sea was wine-dark. Wild, right?”

“Uh-huh. You know your girlfriend’s friend smokes American Spirits Ultra Lights?”

“So?”

Sam/Jo rolls their eyes and flutters their eyelashes like wind through the pages of a foreign language newspaper on a café patio – the kind of joint that sells more espressos than anything other item and only features clown-related artwork from local artists. “So, my new buddy, that particular brand choice means she’s either a neo-hippie with an addictive personality or a narcissist with no self-regard – with an addictive personality.”

“Isn’t that a contradiction, buddy? What do parliaments say about you, then?”

“Maybe it is. Wouldn’t you like to know.”

They sit, parked at the gas station, without speaking then. Waiting.

On the radio Credence Clearwater Revival plucks their way through “Have you ever seen the rain?” Cosimo pulls a notebook from under his seat (a slim blue moleskin his mother had given him the last time he was home, months before) to record yet another omen.

Smash cut. Wesley Smith is the kind of cat that prefer to put eyes on you before you put eyes on him, at least six feet off and not moving too much either – an ‘unwelcoming holdover from childhood’ is what he told Cosimo one night at some basement or another all gacked out on his own prescriptions. His mother, a Spanish painter with the oil-based paint staining the walls of veins – her father initiated an entire artistic system of thought, the details of which Wesley failed to remember in that particular basement where the stone walls shed dust-waves from the clash of feet and bass and microphone feedback. It was she that taught Wesley the importance of stepping back, way back to the far wall of her studio far from Barcelona, to let the painting hit your eye in it’s wholeness.

“Especially the frame. That woman loves a good frame. But it, the practice of stepping back, doesn’t translate to people well,” Wesley had said. Cosimo understands the value, though, of keeping a distance from a person before approaching: trust is one slippery sack of shit that cannot, should not, be given or received without a mandatory-type trial period. Poor Cosimo: he thinks you only learn that lesson once, rather than again and again. What Cosimo said at the time, drunk and not wanting to be, was ‘people are weird; what’s up with your dad and their relationship?’ Deflection is an art.

This is why Wesley jumps so fucking high when he and Sam/Jo whipped around the same corner of the same pharmacy in the same adobe building along an unused main street. The brick of the pharmacy’s outer wall is painted white and, stenciled in eight foot black, block letters: DRUGS.

“Welcome to Colfax, gang,” Cosimo says, “run into some shooting snags or are you always this jumpy around lunchtime?” Everyone ignores him. The three actors who are not Sam/Jo – Frances Le Frances, Ollie, and Wesley – are identically grim. Lines around their mouths as deep as they would be decades after college; Frances left eye (like muddled lime in a blueberry cocktail, Cosimo thinks) twitches; Ollie’s orangutan t-shirt is the same color as his hair, bird-belly red; Wesley still has a dollop of shaving cream clutching the external cartilage of his right ear.

“Fuck, Sam/Jo!” Wesley took several steps back, off the curb of the sidewalk and into the street.

“Sorry, dude, next time I’ll wear tap shoes. What took you so long?”

C.R. scratches under his American flag bandana, tied pirate-style. “Well, it took sometime, setting up equipment, costume choices, getting used to the improvisation. First day kinks. That’s all.” He smiles his best camp counselor’s smile: all teeth and arched eyebrows – Aren’t we having fun, Kiddies?

“Frances saw a Mexican restaurant back that way.” Ollie juts his thumb over his shoulder.

The wind kicks Frances’s hair into her face; she spits out the strands that stick to her mouth. “I crave hot sauce when I get in a mood – my boyfriend has gotten real good at making Hunan chicken over the past ten months.”

Cosimo digs his nails into his forearm when he gets ‘in a mood’ or puts cigarettes on his tongue, but he understands the principle. “Salsa verde sounds good to me.”

The streets are empty. In small, dusty towns business rarely booms, no such thing as a lunch rush. The Playa Sabroso is about to close for the afternoon, but the kitchen would stay open if they ordered in the next ten minutes.

Siegfried touches Cosimo’s elbow and spoke for the first time. “Stay out and smoke for a minute.”

Cosimo, Siegfried, and C.R. hang back.

“We’re fucked,” Siegfried says.

“No, we aren’t. We just need to reevaluate certain goals and expectations,” says C.R., “It wasn’t that bad.”

“I swear if Wesley makes another suggestion or fights me on one more goddamn line I’m going to leave him along the highway.”

C.R. looks at Cosimo for help. “Breathe, Sieg.”

Siegfried drags.

“Cosimo. You weren’t there, those clowns blew through ten minutes – what should have been ten minutes – of material in forty-five seconds.”

“They were getting better towards the end there.” C.R.’s hands are on his head like he’s about to be cuffed.

Siegfried bristles. “No riffing. No improvising. No attempt even. They can’t. They can’t. Maybe we should call it off while we’re still in the state.”

“Whoa there,” Cosimo says, “hold your oxen. Like C.R. said, couldn’t it be first day kinks? We’ve committed a lot of time to this. We’re invested. We can’t cut and run without even trying.”

“Thank you, Cosimo, exactly. Not to mention the money I’ve put into this. The camera alone –“

“I know,” Siegfried put a hand up to stop C.R. “I know how much the equipment was, I know how this looks but, man, oh man, why don’t we just give up?”

Cosimo takes Siegfried by the shoulders. Siegfried won’t make eye contact. Cosimo puts in his voice the ocean at low tide. Speaks about trust, faking positivity until it’s the only lens you see through, and adapting to changing circumstances. “The Greeks didn’t have a word for blue until they needed one.”

“What the shit?”

“It’s only the first six hours of an eight day trip. Let’s finish out the day and readjust when we get to Topeka if we need to.”

Siegfried rasps a hand through his beard and nods.

They enter the restaurant. Tacos and enchiladas and shredded cheese make everyone jocular, a braintrust bent on solving the movie. Siegfried doesn’t say a word.

A bull and matador dance together on the bathroom wall, a drift of flowers at their feet. Both are corded with muscle and shine with the sweat of a challenge.

Smash cut. The kind of Miracle Mile on the edge of any American city. Chain motels, chain restaurants, chain-link fences separating one parking lot from another. Topeka, Topeka.

A motorcycle rips down the yellow seam of the road.

Smash cut. Everyone is in a single motel room at ten at night, even though the actors have their own room next door. Contained chaos.

“Can someone grab me a tissue? I'm sick and feel like a big baby.” Frances Le Frances say ‘baby’ like she is a baby, forcing in foreign syllables.

“Nobody is a baby here,” says Sam/Jo, “we’re all fully formed adults.”

Cosimo puts aside the book he is pretending to read, goes to the bathroom and comes back with six feet of tissue paper. He throws it on Frances. It cascades done over her like spider silk. “Never say that I’ve never done anything for you, baby.” He returns to his book, seeing but not reading, trying to remember the last time he texted his girlfriend.

“She’s not a baby. Don’t take away her agency – even though she gave it up.”

“What agency? I was cast as the only female in a film full of men I don’t know, except for Siegfried,” Frances says. “If Cosimo wants to help me out in my time of need, then he’s that less of a stranger to me.” Frances then promptly ignored Cosimo for the rest of the night.

Ollie lies perpendicularly to the head of one of the two twin beds in the room – bedspreads like tropical smoothies at a middle stage of digestion – listening to Chinese history podcasts, occasionally broadcasting a factoid to the room at large. He isolates himself beneath his massive black headphones.

Siegfried and C.R. listen to Wesley’s ideas about scrapping the feature length film in favor of a short film with the same plot, “or maybe, like, three independent but thematically related shorts –“

“The history of the Shang Dynasty, called the Bamboo Annals, was written around 100 B.C.E.”

C.R. cracks open a plastic liter of whiskey, pours some over ice with the faintest splash of coke.

“We should order a pizza,” Sam/Jo says, “I’ll look up deals.”

Contained chaos. The noise in the room grew. Cosimo doesn’t like noise, it felt indiscreet, like all of Kansas might lodge a noise complaint. Even the sound of Frances blowing her nose with toilet paper is an invitation for ruin.

“The last Shang king was named Shang Zhou. He lost the mandate of heaven like King Jia of Xia Dynasty. His people rebelled when he needed them most.”

Cosimo catches Siegfried’s panicky eye and jerks his head towards the door.

Their rooms are on the second tier of the motel, 201 and 202. Cosimo and Siegfried scoot around the walkway until they find an out of the way flight of stairs to hide in. Siegfried seeks a corner to hide in, where the overhead fluorescents only creep over the lower half of his body, face in shadows. They light cigarettes (Siegfried a Camel Blue 100, Cosimo Marlboro Reds – his first and only brand), like lanterns in the night.

Siegfried draws long shuddering breaths. Even in the shadows Cosimo can tell that his friend’s eyes are cast down to the dusty concrete steps. Shoes full of holes and duct tape at the heel.

Silence for a while. It’s a sound guy’s place to listen even if nobody wants to speak.

Siegfried pushes at the corners of his eyes with thumb and forefinger. Exhales. “I don’t know what to do.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Give up. But I can’t. I dragged you all out here. I told you it would work and it fell apart immediately. And –“

“And?” Cosimo waits. Siegfried quakes, finished his cigarette and starts another one.

Siegfried’s mother wants to have him committed, he says. Not without reason, she thought he was unstable, going to kill himself or get hooked on meth – ‘We already have one methhead in the family, I don’t want another’ – and lose his immortal soul. Grades were shit. No way he’d finish school in four years.

“Visits home now are like going down waterslides with low-grade acid instead of water. I hate waterslides.” Siegfried thinks this is it. This film project, if he can pull it off, will keep him out of a psychiatric hospital, prove to himself, and everybody who he compares himself to that he is capable, sane, sane, sane, sane. “I can feel myself falling,” he said, “Getting bad again I mean. I can’t go back to the hospital.”

Cosimo does all he can. Very little. He puts a hand on his shoulder. Says things like “fuck the opinion of others,” and “we’re just here to have a good time and in the process make a cool flick,” and “your mom doesn’t want you to commit you.” Lies swirl with truth.

“Listen,” Cosimo says, “you’re not alone in this. If the improvised lines don’t work, we’ll write it out. We’re not stupid. It’s only a disaster if we let it be. Let’s get a few hours of sleep then hit it hard in the morning. We’ll pivot if we need to. Adapt. Everything will be alright if we focus and don’t let this shit get to us.”

A mosquito – pregnant and slow with someone else’s blood – lands on the tip of Siegfried’s cigarette as he hides his face in his hands and hat brim, and fries itself on the glowing tip. Twenty minutes later, when they return to room 201 for tissue paper and to kick the actors out, Cosimo pulls out his moleskin notebook and scrawled a few lines about the insects and light and hypnotic quality of fire.

Smash cut. Cosimo, C.R., and Siegfried get dressed in the dark. It is an hour before dawn, according to C.R.; he consulted a farmers’ almanac in preparation, charting out the position of the sun, so they might rely on it for lighting scenes and save the batteries on their portable LEDs – “borrowed” from the University of Iowa film club. From one of the coolers, C.R. pulls a garlic and onion bagel. The tubs of cream cheese have hardened in the chill of the coolers, and the plastic knife he sticks in one of these tubs snaps under the pressure of his scoop.

Outside, the air is made of ice and diesel fuel. Across the highway, opposite their motel, is a Starbucks coffee shop, a stable known, a nationwide symbol of corporate synergy, caffeine, and free Wi-Fi. The three young men make their way across the concrete landscape, square buildings rise out of the asphalt, reminding Cosimo of tribal burial grounds – structures built of the earth they rested on, built of the mysterious attitudes and tastes around them also. In the case of Topeka, Kansas, or at least the outskirts, the architecture bends toward brutalism, functionality, and proven reliability.

Except for two middle aged women discussing the flaring remnants of winter with a city police officer and the barista, the Starbucks is empty. The cop and women make it clear that Cosimo and company are out of place in their youth and tank tops. But they take no mind. They have brains to storm and a movie to save. The sun will be up soon, the actors ready to roll, in need of direction.

But they had to wait for coffee. You can’t expect to be in any way productive without coffee. Cosimo couldn’t stitch together a complete sentence without coffee, his saliva glands brew up gallons of spit until that first taste, his body yearning, muscles slack. Fuck the movie, Cosimo thought, I’m trying to not drown in my own fluids over here. Black, cold coffee. Bitter, utilitarian energy.

Then, once they have coffee, a table, and their notebooks laid out before them, Siegfried wants to discuss Wesley. How he needs to have more ideas about his character and less about the project as a whole, they already have two co-directors and a pushy actor could derail the whole project, not to mention Frances’ unwillingness to put herself out there and improvise some lines, but that’s the nature of the film, it takes shape as it is made and everyone just needs to embrace their characters. “Fucking riff!” Siegfried says. He goes on, talking about specific incidents of yesterday’s artistic insubordination, what a disaster it was, while C.R. takes first half of an amphetamine sulfate tablet, using his body to block the cop’s view, then the second half a minute later. It is nearly seven thirty before someone pitches an idea about how to proceed with the rest of the trip.

“What if we maintain the overall plot and structure but reduce it from a ninety minute feature length to a short film?” Cosimo says. C.R. and Siegfried exchange looks.

“I’d rather give up entirely,” Siegfried says.

“We are capable of making creating exactly what we want, I know it.” C.R. says this then goes to the bathroom, the amphetamine is good for a radical colon cleaning, if not creative inspiration.

Siegfried’s head is bowed to he collarbone as he flips the pages of plot summary and what little script they have. There’s maybe thirty sheets of paper. What felt hefty and substantial in their initial meeting, now looks like what it is: an overly ambitious timetable, a uselessly zoomed out map that covers over thirteen hundred of North America and zero discernable landmarks, and scene descriptions left purposefully vague so as to not stifle natural human responses. The document, Cosimo sees, functioned better as a pizza plate than a script.

C.R. returns from the bathroom to suggest an emergency, crash course on the making of unscripted movies. Hunching over his laptop he rushes his fingers over the keys, Googling wiki pages, YouTube tutorials on comedy, the award speeches of famous filmmakers and their inspirations. He’s lost down an internet rabbit hole the way only an optimist on amphetamines can be lost.

By the time C.R. discovers highlight reels of Fatty Arbuckle and Mabel Normand, Siegfried has been silently staring into the creamy-sweet depths of his coffee for longer than Cosimo is comfortable with. The faces of the west have always been too many, a promised birthright from the Anglo God, a hall of ancestral bones stolen from the Native Gods, salvation from the Latter Day Saints’ God, a playground and soundstage that creates new gods just in time for award season, and an impenetrable landscape of the Reality Gods – snow-filled mountains, gold in the earth, fertile valleys, whale skeletons in the desert. Possibilities unfold like railroad tracks, hard, improbable, far of engines making the steel hum. They are paralyzed with both overconfidence and underconfidence –

Until the door whooshes open. it creaks back on springs by slow degrees, footfalls click on tile. Frances Le Frances has arrived, and with her is Theodora Weaver – kick-ass black boots and jacket with the five-pointed star stitched on the back.

Seating

Like November, Death waits for you. Death made flesh, your dinner date: wrinkled, three-piece, ivory and geometrically patterned pocket square, linguini-thin mustache. He’s waiting at a table for two in this faux nineteenth century, upscale restaurant, the last joint in the city where you can smoke indoors. Death extends and pendulums his arm. You see him waving, at your table already, displaying inches of white shirtsleeve and a wristwatch without any numerals on its face. White tablecloths, white plates induced to glow by a crystal chandelier, slim white candles beaded with melting wax. It’s late, and the staff is breaking down the remote, back tables in preparation for close.

You take your seat, chair legs screeching on hardwood.

This isn’t your first meal together. You and Death have history stretching back to grade school. Even now, you apologize to Death for giggling at him until chocolate milk dribbled from your nose during that first midafternoon snack you shared. But here’s the last meal. Just like the previous dates, Death lets you do the talking. While Server Winona scribbles “seltzer water/lime” (for Death) and “Maker’s Mark Manhat/x2 cherry” (for you), words windmill off your tongue, platitudinal self-assurances that you are still drawing breath.

Death just curves his lips, nodding those hazel eyeballs in steady arcs.

Condescending Death.

One perk to these dinner dates is that Death will never tell you something you already know. He listens, offering no confirmation or correction; your theories about the end of mortal life vary only slightly from ones Death has heard since his birth.

Rather than speak to order, he taps the menu and nods to confirm. Three courses: feta-flecked walnut salad, grilled Atlantic salmon in a bed of baby coconut shavings, and the night’s special dessert. You order the same and continue regaling Death with a panicked summary of the latest hit Hollywood horror show and your preferred cause-of-death scenarios.

“Sure, we’re all naked under our clothes, but I’d be so much more comfortable dying while wearing pants, stay on the right side of the line between decency and shame. Pants aren’t too much to ask for? Tell me, Death, do quote unquote noble deaths still exist? Cicero altered the course of western language, his speeches moved the wealthiest and most intransigent senatorial fuddy-duddies to action, and tried to protect a republic against a tyrant. But they still nailed his hands to the senate doors. Is that noble? Does it matter to Cicero that we remember him?”

Silence.

Salad

The salad crushes any remaining hope you have of Death letting you live: near-embryonic spinach, confetti-fine carrot shavings, dried cranberries, nuggets of walnuts like California pan-candy. Rinsed, diced, tossed, then draped in a balsamic honey dressing drizzled in the shape of a cabalistic glyph. This is the kind of food convicts get, huddled over stainless steel tables with suicide-proof edges – plastic cutlery – before they take that last, long walk. You’re done for.

Over Death’s shoulder, in a back booth, you Server Winona and Anonymous Male Bartender roll clean silverware in linen napkins and judge you for not figuring out this meal’s portents sooner: there are forks dedicated to each course, gum doesn’t stick to the underside of the table in a quilt-ish globular mass, like the phrase “Ask me if I give a fuck” given a sticky body. Nobody even thinks that here. This is end of life food, parting consolation food, release-me-from-my chains, last meal kind of food, which concludes this one-sided dialogue, the voiceless dry spell. Death, not just participating, but initiating contact.

Part of you is flattered that Death thinks well enough of you to shell out this kind of dough on The Big Day(!). Your Big Day.

Death looks at you with a fork balanced vertically by an outer tine on his right pinky. Tonight isn’t special to Death, it’s only special to you.

Jaded Death.

You eat that salad slow. Leaf by leaf.

Some companion, some raw deal you never agreed to, some single-talented guest to entertain you while time runs out. You brood.

You’re sure Server Winona and Anonymous Male Bartender are sleeping together. He just kissed an errant drop of demi glace off the side of her thumb, showing a reckless disregard for the germs he could pass on to the silverware. Server Winona attempts to dry her smooched thumb on Anonymous Male Bartender’s forehead. They giggle, pretend to grapple without drawing attention to themselves. They settle back to their task but, as they roll, Server Winona leans imperceptibly towards Anonymous Male Bartender every 10 seconds to inhale his scent on the sly. She sips the air like top shelf scotch. He’s sniffing her too, except he takes full capacity lungfuls of her smell at thirty second intervals, flexing his diaphragm until it creaks and frizzy strands of her hair flutter in the negative pressure created. Death isn’t interested in them tonight. They aren’t interested in Death.

Entrée

Server Winona stops rolling silverware, glides away – leaving Anonymous Male Bartender in a blissful hormonal daze – to clear your salad plates and fire the entrees. In the kitchens, line cooks laugh with the busboys about overdeveloped secondary female sexual characteristics while they plate your salmon. Death pats at his mustache with the corner of his napkin. His jacket’s black shoulders are starshot with dandruff.

Sloppy Death.

Server Winona puts a dish in front of you. It’s loaded with an opportunity and a Scottish Salmon over a bed of mixed greens and shredded coconut. You employ your last survival tactic: bullshit.

You smack your palm against your forehead like it (your forehead) gained consciousness and independent agency solely to run over your pet cat.

“Oh, shucks!” you say, “Oh, dearie me, I just remembered that I’m a vegetarian. To harm a living being for the sake of my own nourishment is, like, wrong; that’s a core principal to my identity as an individual and unique person, but it slipped my mind because I inadvertently inhaled a poor mosquito earlier today.” You load your words with gelatinous emotion, “I cannot forgive myself for such a heinous act. The incident put me in a funk. I’ve been quivering on the edge of a breakdown all day now. Plus, I inhale/annihilate a microscopic organism metropolis every time I breathe – microbes and such; see, I deal with a mass murderer’s psychological fallout, a pain so continual and fiery, that I ordered the salmon in a fuguish guilt-blur.”

You sneak a sidewards peak at Death.

Server Winona promises to inform the chef so he can make a vegetarian meal despite the late hour. She apologizes for your mistake, on behalf of restaurateurs both past and present; she shakes a raised fist to express her rage towards the hunnish agriculture conglomerates’ inhumane treatment of inhuman people.

“That’s right: people!” She says, “Fish are people too. Now, I can’t un-murder this Scottish salmon – to god if I could – but I can give it a decent burial.” She whisks your plate away with one hand, the other still shaking in indignation, and does a crisp about face. She goosesteps toward the kitchens, or maybe a shady hill under a tree with a tiny, open grave.

You think: she works hard but – boy – did she overcommit to the wrong person. You aren’t picking up the check and Death probably doesn’t like people trying to ‘un-murder’ anything. But you’ve finagled more time – if only to sit and argue with your silent companion.

Is Death vindictive, though? Is your last conscious act in this life going to cost Server Winona in much needed tips? Not to mention drag out her last table of the night, denying her and Anonymous Male Bartender an opportunity to have sex at least twice before sleeping spoons until dawn, thereby descending further into love? You wonder about these things.

He (Death) doesn’t express any guilt, though. Nor vendetta-inspiring anger. In actual fact, he’s not even looking at you or Server Winona. Death pokes his skinny fingers into his depleted seltzer glass. Focused. He’s tweezing at his lime slice buried in the ice cubes – like he’d dropped a quarter in an arcade claw machine for the chance to play. The lime slice wobbles, distorts, ever so slightly, through the ice.

Vegetarian Entrée

There are three people sitting at the bar: a server, the manager, and the sous chef, having an after shift drink. Anonymous Male Bartender pours a Guinness into a pint glass up to the golden harp on the glass’s logo, then sets it on the bar while the white foam climbs upwards, bubbles settling, transforming into black liquid. He slips back towards the kitchen where Server Winona, presumably, waits for you and Death to fuck off.

Pots and pans clang. The head chef is either passive aggressively reminding you that you are keeping him from a drink at the bar and hours of sleep or the restaurant has just fallen silent. Probably it’s a dash of each. Yours is the last and most hated table of the night.

You don’t speak to Death anymore. Breath is a limited resource now. Death waits for your meal to arrive before he digs into his own.

Considerate Death.

He’s still trying to extract the lime from the glass.

While you wait for a nonfleshy-type dish, you study Death in a way that you never have before. The past meals with Death left you feeling lucky that you were eating and able to breathe in sunshine. Death loomed over your devilled egg sandwiches and pickle spears for decades. Fear and gratitude. Ice cream cones tasted sweeter because corpses don’t eat mint chocolate chip.

When you first figured out what Death wanted to give you (blackness, blankness, un-ness), you collapsed on a flight of green-carpeted stairs and wept like a glass of ice water in your mother’s arms.

She said, “hush, child, that won’t be for another sixty – eighty years before Death comes for you.” But you didn’t stop your hysterics until you turned blue, hyperventilating on the green carpeted stairway and woke up tucked into your own bed.

–Beddie house –

The blankets marked with special protective glyphs, traced by your mother’s finger, the person to flick the lights and leave her child in total darkness.

Then the meals began.

Hungry Death.

As you aged away from the green-carpet episode, you invited Death to show himself by driving your car like a Spanish bull during peak rush hours, swerving for the sake of swerving. You ate frozen pizza that reported “Low Fat,” plus Dead Sea sodium levels. You had X number of sexual partners that you suspected might have been axe murderers or, at least, sadly unstable in the small hours. Why? Because the young you thought Death competed for your life. You believed for years that every day above ground was a victory over your silent nemesis, not realizing that your life was never yours in the first place.

Anonymous Male Bartender returns to the bar to put a head on the Guinness pint. Server Winona appears from the kitchen carrying a steaming bowl.

The chef made you roasted tomato and basil pesto penne. The sauce is vomit green, but the garlic and olive oil smells stimulate your saliva glands, filling your mouth and making your lips shine.

Server Winona grates snowflakes of Parmesan into the bowl. She smiles with her mouth alone, plus her imperative to “Enjoy!” sounds like a threat. Her frustration makes you shift in your chair, but while she is close you sniff her as much as the food, trying to imagine what Anonymous Male Bartender must feel when Server Winona nuzzles into his young man’s chest. Love and the last traces of coconut moisturizer, you expect.

Death tucks the corner of his napkin into the collar of his shirt; the otherwise virginal linen bears a salad dressing smear. If you squint the splotch is either the profile of John F. Kennedy or a balding Martha Stewart.

You dine.

Why am I here?

Not an existential thought: a practical question. Why haven’t you just left? Stood up, extending both middle fingers to Death and then jetted out into the night? You stop stabbing at your pasta.

To preclude Death stopping or following you out onto the street, you could fling the tablecloth and what rests on it over his head, turning him into a spooky, fishy, ghost. Being Death, though, he’s probably capable of extricating himself from the shroud; then he’d extricate you from the world on the spot.

Poof. Cease to exist as flesh.

If you drape him with the tablecloth, then beat him vigorously with your chair before he even realizes why his vision has gone black or why the butter tray is staining his crotch, thereby incapacitating –

Why not get Server Winona and the rest of the staff to help? You should shout, “Hey, this is Death in the flesh and evening dress! This is for Gam Gam, this is for Mittens and Fido and The Notorious B.I.G.!”

You imagine the chef flinging a pan of cherries jubilees onto Death, Anonymous Male Bartender smashing the end of a bottle of domestic light beer against the bar and lunging towards our common foe, slashing at the sweetly smoldering figure. The whole restaurant would rejoice. Caramelized lamb chops all around! Huzzah!

But who knows what exists out in the night.

Death is looking at you, as you slow-cook this crock of shit. He’s smiling without showing his teeth. You are a child who’s almost managed to not burn his morning toast.

You can’t kill Death; you can’t even offend him by trying. Sisyphus was the last person to cause a major upset in the whole life-death cycle when he chained Thanatos to a pole, ensuring that no human could die. Even then, with an apparent mortal victory, Sisyphus got the raw deal: a few extra miserable years on the surface followed by eternal torture in Tartarus. Continual darkness, that’s the best you can hope for.

You look longingly at Anonymous Male Bartender and Server Winona, their heads inclined, whispering, because whispering feels more natural to people in love. They’re experiencing something so personal and intimate that to share even a sentence fragment with a passing dishwasher would expose the illusory cloud world that lovers create for themselves. The private-love world where passion lasts indefinitely and the warning words of trusted friends are laughed at. “Nobody can rain on this parade,” they say. “The initials cradled inside hearts, tattooed into the skin of an oak tree can’t ever fade.”

But they’ll find out soon enough.

Even as you long to be the third half to their whole – if only for the length of a dessert course – you take a vindictive glee from knowing that Server Winona and Anonymous Male Bartender’s happiness will one day fracture into anger, bitterness, and loss. Server Winona will lie about her whereabouts; Anonymous Male Bartender will be insensitive towards Server Winona’s best friend from high school; one will cheat on the other; the collapse approaches. Thinking about this, you take the same kind of joy misanthropic youths take when setting fires in alleyway dumpsters. You want to join their whispers, to lean close, sensing Server Winona’s spearmint gum she uses to mask the scent of decay and asexual oral bacteria that stain her teeth, piling like yellow snow drifts.

What a foul world.

You’re done. You’re so fucking done with this whole fucking scene. You didn’t ask to come here, to be born on this American continent, to have these non-reciprocal interviews with an effete Grim Reaper – so effete, condescending and taciturn he might be an exaggerated cartoon Frenchman! Fuck cartoons. Fuck the French. And fuck America, not just the United States but the entire continent. Fuck the western hemisphere and the east for good measure. Fuck Death, fuck restaurants, fuck classical mythology, fuck lovers who haven’t figured out that the love is all in their heads yet, fuck pewter serving utensils, fuck pesto, fuck white linen napkins with black piping, fuck twenty percent tipping, fuck tablecloths, fuck the smokers’ section, fuck the non-smokers’, fuck apostrophes, fuck the second person, fuck you, fuck me.

“Fuck your salmon, you pallid fuck!” You say this last part aloud, forgetting that nobody, including Death, has access to your mind’s tickertape scrawl or climbing internal anger-barometer; you are totally alone with your thoughts.

You stiff-arm Death’s plate toward him, spilling grilled asparagus and fatty amino acids onto Death’s tuxedo shirt and slanted bowtie. Death is holding his fork inches away from his open mouth, balancing a morsel of pink Scottish flesh.

Like synthetic doll hair your anger burns out fast.

You’re left ashamed, numbly nodding while Server Winona makes excuses for your clumsiness. She hurls napkins into Death’s lap, offering comped glasses of dessert wine, as if the chef had greased the plates through either negligence or a suspect sense of humor. She really just wants you to pay up and leave; she doesn’t understand what that means for you.

Death is looking at you, still gently steaming from the chest and crotch. Is he disappointed in your lack of composure this close to the – your – end or are you projecting your own self-disgust into his flat little eyes?

Dessert

Server Winona flies out of the kitchen like a paper airplane from a middle school delinquent’s grubby paw. The chilled plates she slams in front of you and Death sport Art. Dessert Art. Heaven-white buttercream frosting embracing three layers of black chocolate cake, each separated by blacker strips of chocolate ganache. Three raspberries and a mint leaf nestle on top like twin clutches of Phoenix’s eggs.

Anonymous Male Bartender sprints from behind the bar with two small glasses. The wine sloshes way high up over the crystal lips but each drop slips back into the respective glasses. He releases the glasses several feet away from your table; he freezes in position after letting go: crouched, pointed fingertips towards the floating dessert wine, impersonating a wizard (or a bowler) without the beard or purple robes. The glasses float to the table and land before you two, filled to the brim.

You wish you could explain to Server Winona and Anonymous Male Bartender that Death is the man you’re sitting with. Death, buying you a meal, the last meal, the most unnecessary meal you’ve ever eaten because he’s going to snuff you out – wetted thumb and forefinger pinching a candle wick – before you can even begin to digest it.

These nutrients will never absorb in your colon; bacteria will flee your sinking Titanic, like all living organisms aboard the Titanic tried to flee, leaving this last meal to ferment in your belly – rotting like the rest of your inanimate meat.

Death tucks into the cake. His eyes roll up and his lashes flutter. Under the table, his legs jiggle. After each bite he shoots his tongue out to search for crumbs trying to escape. His slice vanishes in seven rapid-fire forkfuls. Death sighs through his nose; the candle flames shudder.

You take a bite of cake. Your mouth is so dry, the cake is so moist; chocolate fills your sinuses and smothers every taste bud. Your throat muscles don’t want to function. The single bite is trying to choke you. You spit the dark wad into the cradle of your napkin, gasping like a butt-struck newborn in the doctor’s arms. Death sees.

Death reaches over the table. For a second, you think he wants to hold your hand and you recoil. Instead, Death pulls your plate towards him, and pushes his glass of wine across to you.

Merciful and fair-minded Death.

Greedy and silent Death.

Your cheeks burn at your inability to handle cake. Confusion, shame, fear, anger, exhaustion – what are you feeling right now? If life were a physical object, you’d slather it in Vaseline and lodge it in your rectum or sprint to the Yukon and bury life behind your log cabin – six feet deep.

Thoughts chase themselves like rats in your head. You hear their hairless tails dragging along your sticky gray matter, nibbling the frontal lobe. You sip your wine to stop yourself from vomiting –

But, oh.

The wine banishes the rats. It’s Port, technically – from Portugal, thicker than water and darker than blood. The first taste curls your toes; a tiny moan escapes you. It’s as sweet as the cake yet the alcohol’s bitter burn balances the wine, rendering the otherwise cloying liquid into a celebration of contrast, a brew master’s metaphor for the tension between hope and surrender, joy and gloom, April and November.

Death ate his second piece of cake at the same speed as the first. He drops his fork onto the bare plate, leans back, pats his stomach, and signals Server Winona with his thumb and forefinger in the shape of a check. The clatter of silverware on the white dish drags you out of your reverie.

You hold up two fingers in Death’s smug face: “wait a moment there, I’m going to need a third one of these.” You toss the glass back, roll the wine in your mouth like a mid-Atlantic squall while Server Winona approaches the table and waits for you to swallow. She’s tapping her foot, hand on hip, lips puckered, but you don’t care anymore. This woman can’t hurt you. Her disapproval will only last until she learns you are dead – if she ever does – because nobody thinks ill of the dead.

“How was everything? Can I get you your bill or…” she pauses, hoping one of you will say yes, “maybe you’d like something else?”

You swallow. “Yes, please, I’d like another glass of this.” You hold up the glass, the last scarlet drop reflects pink light through crystal stem, “It was exquisite.”

“I’ll have to charge you for this round. It’s a rare vintage, specially imported, from the countryside around Faro. According to myth, a tribe of Giants committed ritual suicide rather than capitulate to the Goat-king who wanted to enslave the giants and their magic. Their blood and bones they left give each grape a little of the magic. Long story short, we charge twice as much as anything else in this place. Sure you want it?” You’re glad you aren’t the only bullshitter in town. You glance at Death: he’s trying to get the lime out of his drinking glass again. The seltzer is long gone and the last of the ice cubes have fallen victim to room temperature.

“Put it on our tab. And why don’t you buy yourself and that gentleman behind the bar a drink too – on us. Then you can bring the check and we’ll be out of your hair.”

Server Winona’s mood has totally reversed itself. She leans over the bar and whispers to Anonymous Male Bartender. He had been twiddling his thumbs and staring at the ceiling for twenty minutes. Now he’s smiling and pulling an artillery shell-sized bottle from the upper shelves behind the bar. He pours a glass of the port, and then mixes himself and his lover something fruity, adorned with paper umbrellas.

All other candles, besides your own, have been extinguished. You are alone in a dim oasis.

You relax in your chair, drinking Death’s wine. For the first time since entering this restaurant, you are satisfied. You won’t escape Death; no degree of wanting to live will keep you alive. Death doesn’t respond to pleading, threats, or flattery – his secrets and your life are seamless eggs: delicate and impossible to understand without irrevocable breakage. All eggs crack, though, eventually. Whether they hatch downy chicks or become part of a western omelet, all eggs break and are released from what defines them. You feel wise while you watch Death struggle with his lime.

Settling Up

Server Winona returns with the wine and a black leather folder. She makes eye contact with both you and Death. Her smile rivals the one she wore while fooling around with Anonymous Male Bartender.

“Have a good night, you two. No rush to finish that drink, you have all the time in the world,” she says.

“You have no idea, Winona.”

Death pulls a wad of bank notes and crude gold coins from his jacket pocket and stuffs them in the leather folder without looking at the bill total. He’s not concerned with counting Server Winona’s windfall: the lime still eludes him.

The second glass is dry. You savor the third. It’s the kind of wine you never taste outside of major life events: births, weddings, the signing of peace treaties after years of conflict, a loved one’s sudden –

Death throws his head back, mouth gaping, tongue protruding past the point of his chin. He up ends his glass with its uncooperative contents over his face. The lime tumbles from the glass, out into space. You see the limes pebbled rind in a slow-mo instant of clarity.

The lime plops into Death’s left eye. You stop breathing. You’re not dead, just surprised.

So is Death.

“Mother of fuck! That stings worse than a wasp’s asshole!” Death’s voice is nasal. The giant noise of his words forced from the tiny tunnels of his nostrils sounds like a colitis-ridden child farting into a saxophone. Shock and alcohol scare a laugh out of you. “It’s not funny, this really hurts! Goddamn!” Death grinds the heel of palm into the affected socket. He rocks back and forth, gargling out strings of nonsense: “aaaagh oooof eeeeeeeeeackackaaaa!”

Melodramatic Death.

“Here,” you say, handing him your napkin.

“Thanks – hey wipe that stupid fucking grin off your face, you don’t know what this is like.” Death takes his hand away from his eye, now spider-webbed with irritated blood vessels.

“Death speaks? Death is a potty mouth who can’t handle a little pain?” Then your grin does fade. You feel a lot less wise than you didn’t a minute ago when you thought life was a mysterious egg. “What does this mean?”

“It means you shouldn’t get citrus in your eye, dipshit.”

“But why did that happen? Why couldn’t you get the lime out? And then why did it get in your eye? What does the lime have to do with tonight?” You lean forward, past the point of politeness.

“What? No. What? The lime doesn’t have anything to do with you, you fucking egomaniac. My poor eye certainly doesn’t have to do with you. Things just happen. It’s meaningless. Fuck that lime.” Death drops the lime on the floor, grimaces like a petulant four-year old and crushes it with his shoe. “Pretend like it’s a sign or some bullshit if you want, I don’t care. Finish that,” Death points to the wine forgotten in your hand, “and let’s get the fuck out of this joint.”

Death takes the napkin away from his face and blinks a few times. He’s calmed down now, silent again.

What do you think? How do you process this outburst in the context of your final moments of your final meal?

Nothing. Death said “meaningless” and he has no reason to lie to you. Maybe it does mean something, but you don’t have time to figure it out. Plus you have a half glass of wine left to enjoy. That’s enough. That’s plenty.

You drink the wine in short order, placing the glass back on the table like the holiest relic of a religion you don’t follow.

Death stands. You stand. Death walks around the table; limejuice squelches on every other step.

He reaches out and rubs the spot between your shoulder blades in a gentle, clockwise motion. The touch comforts you. Death’s hand drops back to his side. You both walk towards the door. Measured steps, in unison.

As you pass the kitchen area you see Server Winona and Anonymous Male Bartender leaning against the walk-in freezer, her mouth flattened against his so closely they may have accidentally knotted their tongues together. The pair are totally alone. They're free to make love (or slake their lust if that is all they’re capable of) as long as they shut the lights off and lock up when they leave. You are glad for them. They take no notice of you, unable to see beyond their private world.

You and Death, still holding hands, stop in front of the door. You glance over your shoulder at the restaurant. Your table is littered with currency, earthenware, and a napkin, wet from Death’s tears. Solitary, the table floats amidst a sea of indistinct shapes. You wonder what, if anything, tonight meant.

Through the glass panes of the door, the street is just a late-night rumor seen through your own reflected face and Death’s next to it. Both are so familiar to you.

Death opens the door for you.

Courteous Death.

You gulp the outside world into your lungs for the last time and step out into the chill of the night.

Know your date's all time favorite U.S. president and what that REALLY says about your love interest's personality:

George Washington: probable tax dodger, definite bootlegger.

Thomas Jefferson: graduated from the University of Virginia. 

John Quincy Adams: loves the word haberdashery but can't spell it.

Millard Fillmore: digs kinky role playing involving inverted power dynamics (e.g. teacher-student). 

Benjamin Harrison: time-traveler. Trust me.

William Taft: either power hungry or just food hungry. 

Calvin Coolidge: why the fuck does your date own so much Vaseline?

Jimmy Carter: believes aliens built the Pyramids of Giza.  

George W. Bush: bike shorts aficionado.  

There is an Ancient Babylonian Priestess (or, more exactly, the de-fleshed spirit of an Ancient Babylonian Priestess) in my head. I don’t know how she got in there, but she wont stop chanting or sloshing my brain-jelly against the rim of my skull. She must have slipped in along with Steven King, DFW, public radio, loud rap music, Anne Sexton, John Dunne, and shouting family members. Words and syntax orbiting my head like branch-bowing fruit. So sweet. So wormy.

But it’s only ABP that makes me put out like this. Poetry, prose, shouting on the street: “Heavy bearded like I’m Jesus, circumcised like I’m Jesus, unhappy like I’m Jesus!” Why do you do it to me? Why do I feel anxious if I haven’t written in a few days? Tapping out a note or two on my phone helps but not a whole lot – steam from a kettle’s whistle. I write in a furry, alternately grinning and scowling, running my coffee-yellow tongue over my smoke-yellow teeth. What do you do to me, ABP? What do I do to you?

I use her so the reader sees exactly what I see. We layer images and characters like geological strata, burying dinosaur bones way down deep as irrefutable evidence of my existence, both holy and secular. Crushing coal into diamond and diamond into dust.

ABP: This sentence doesn’t quite work.

ME: Well, I’ll put some pressure on it.

That’s all I ever say to her, while she offers me fatty grains until my liver swells and I am diced all to bits for foie gras. She feeds me the courtroom sketches of Puerto Rican bomb makers, Icelandic demi-gods caught in a world that doesn’t want them, and Freudian epistles to dead friends – and I digest them any way I can, with an eye towards clarity, dynamic verbs, endings where circumstances make the hero eat shit, and uncompromising control. If you do not see what I see, I will run up on you in a balaclava and hooded sweatshirt, armed with similes and neologisms, and slug it out until you surrender all aesthetic prejudices.

We want you to feel what we feel, which is often “caustic glee.” A little boy from Massachusetts, who liked to torture black ants, grew up into a young man who likes to make his audiences uncomfortable. I hope my sentences make you cough and my chapters give you emphysema. My goal is to put a phrase or an image in your head like that pimple you are acutely aware of right now. Make it last for months, red and infected, until the blemish becomes just another aspect of your beautiful face. You’ll miss it when it heals.

Maybe I’m painting ABP too forcefully as a Dismal Diana, a lone trick phony. We can be upbeat. Some days, manic. ABP snuggles up sometimes, whispers to me, and licks the ridges of my ear. Those days I write about friends, dogs panting on the beach, and simultaneous orgasms. We find that all our writing is equal parts joy and sadness.

I write because ABP doesn’t have another outlet and my ego needs constant attention. I write because business majors make me want to vomit into their Blackhawk snapbacks. I write because writers have better drugs that make me vomit into their black stocking caps. I write because I read the sentence below on a plane from Barcelona to Ireland and giggled to myself for the whole trip, wiggling my body side to side like a toddler gumming cotton candy:

“He clawed at his shirt and ripped it open. It was fastened with snaps and it opened easily and with no sound. As if perhaps the snaps were worn and loose from just such demonstrations in the past. He sat holding his shirt wide open as if to invite again the trinity of rifleballs whose imprint lay upon his smooth and hairless chest just over his heart in so perfect an isoscelian stigmata” (The Crossing: Border Trilogy, Cormac McCarthy).

I mean, come on; fuck me, right? It’s passages like that that make me want to trek to the homes of my favorite writers and conduct a couple blood sacrifices, which all conclude with yours truly eating the raw heart of a fresh-slaughtered goat as a symbolic stand-in for the elder writers’ talents. Writers love symbolism. ABP loves raw flesh.

I was uncomfortable with the idea of being lost before ABP gave my cloud of words an animal shape. Solitary kid lying on a grassy green hillside. She teaches me about me, exposing values and ideas I didn’t even know I had. She tells me stories that I steal from her. Then I steal intimate personal life-details from drunk and chatty college kids and offer those to ABP. I am very easy to talk to. The trick is eye contact and to actually listen rather than waiting for an opportunity to speak; people are uncomfortable with silence, it’s amazing what they’ll tell you to avoid it. My eyes say, “I want to know, please tell me;” the spirit behind my eyes says, “I want to know, please tell me.”

Hooray for the ABP because I don’t care about much else; hooray because now I feel comfortable in places I’ve never been before, surrounded by people I’ve never seen; hooray for exposing myself and her thoughts to random people (e.g. fiction seminars); hooray for that flock of moths tickling in my guts before readings or workshops; hooray for people who unabashedly point out my weaknesses.

This is a serious thing we do. I don’t make jokes – I don’t have enough white space for jokes. People tell me they think my work is occasionally funny, and in our #postmodern world that’s fine, but every word they’re laughing at I laid like a judge at sentencing. I don’t make jokes. This is a serious thing. We (you, I, me, and ABP) might be laughing sometimes but laughter is one weighty pigeon in the shooting gallery of narrative.

“Write in joy; edit in sorrow.” I wrote that down half a year ago. I don’t know if it’s useful. I tend to go overboard in terms of language on first drafts and indulge myself. If being brought up in the social-media-soaked world has given me one pearl of insight – besides, I fucking despise social media – it is to always write it down. That’s my bulbous marble (if I’m flattering myself) in its natural amorphousness. Then I chip away, shave, and superglue as needed during the editing process. Final product: Micky Angelo’s “Davidian Cyclops.”

But, that’s why I write: possession.

This homework assignment took a left field-type tone. I’m not sure how to end this. Goodbye? Until next Thursday? Do you, ABP, want to blow smoky O’s and pop X pills until one of us gets tic tac toe? Do you love me? Do you think you could ever love me?

I went down on the universe and she gave me crabs like tiny itching stardust.

Now I walk around fresh from razor and medicated shampoo, a baptized and immediately excommunicated member of the Jackalope cult: giddy-nauseous, manscaped, a marble Adonis about to vomit off gin and tonic with eyes only for fur, for her fur.

I had one last vision of the Jackalope, that Freudian slit, in a dark Dakota plain – the Badlands –

no rails, ties or howling train here, just grass and churning night.

She loped towards me and with each bunch

and release of haunches the light changed.

Night to day and back again until she reached me and gored my side with her antlers, flipping out a grapefruit tumor like grease off a hot griddle.

And I thanked her as she lay on my wheezing chest in the flattened grass and blood and spilled cancer.

I said to the Jackalope in this dream that felt so real except for all happiness, “I like it when your mascara drips. It’s sexy, like you’ve been crying, like I come upon you in sorrow and I comfort you.”