Sunlight

The espresso machine made a high-pitched action sound, like it was calling to a great choreography. The dark coffee dripped out with tension and purpose that overcame the grinds. The pressure itself lent the espresso a vibrance and a fortitude, so the potion would yield its drinker with an exactitude and a grace. Joseph anticipated the bitter sharpness with a patience he only had when he first woke up before his psyche kicked in with the expectations and frustrations and demands. The sun gave the floor a golden and natural beauty.

He lit a Lucky Strike Light and sipped the dark liquor. The cigarette tasted like a cigarette, but somehow it left him with the smells and tastes of marshmallows and caramel. The morning was breezy and the window was open. The smoke when he exhaled was pushed past him, so there was no cloud lingering and crowding him. There was a clarity this morning. His sense of the cosmos, his sense of self as a man were not discordant. Every day, to a degree, his heart contorted in rebellion against being, but some days were worse and others were naturally free of this pain unless he made an effort to tune it in.

He finished the small cup of coffee and took four deep drags of the cigarette to finish it off. It was his habit to smoke cigarettes to finish them, not to enjoy them. When both his cup was empty and the cigarette end was in the ashtray, he was struck with a feeling of emptiness. He looked out the windows at the sun reflecting off of the faces of mans' works and saw a stark and unloving world. It was unloving because he didn't love it. He knew he hurt the world and the world hurt him. Still, they were stuck with each other.

He looked through the craigslist ads for any sort of inspiration. This was the beginning of a quest. Somehow, the decision had made itself that he was going to make some sort of criminal profit. It was true that he had no money, and his appetites were ones that absolutely had to be sated or he would suffer in many ways. Harming other people was profane and unacceptable. Property and numbers, money and things like that were abstract. It was even too much for him to cause someone any amount of fear that they would suffer. His modus operandi was to steal that which was available without making threats, without even making the trespass known.

For a long time, he had romanced the crooks who thieved from pharmacies. The apothecary was the keeper of much comfort, much ease. There were movies about such capers, and there were occasionally police blotters of such fiends that managed to rob a chemist with force or threat, or even pull the thievery off with the grace that Joseph might at night with clever and creative problem solving. The craigslist posts provided no idea to make golden twinkle in his eyes, no opportunity to bend a deviant smirk on his face. He sighed and lit another cigarette. Staring out a window in the slanted ceiling, he saw the sky slide by. He thought about the chemist he went to for a prescription and how there was an apartment above it. The visual memory, a picture, struck him that this apartment was empty and undergoing construction. The obsession for a caper set in. For now, he would be consumed with working out a solution to the problem that was defining itself.

Louise was wearing blue scrub trousers and two white hospital gowns with tiny blue lillies. He was shaking with anxiety and brimming with rage because the arrogant nurse wouldn't give him lorazepam. The nurse, William, said that Louise already had some 4 hours ago at six AM. Louise was suffering. William was a nurse, not a doctor. In an idealistic sense, those who would swear by and honor Asclepius and that which he represents should be wont to alleviate pain and suffering. William had a mustache and ears that had grown callous to the pleas and petitions for drugs by patients on the psych ward. He did not have any allegiance to Apollo, but he had all of the superciliousness that someone emulating a doctor's erudition and the weight of a doctor's experience would have. William was an asshole, the kind of asshole that worries that people will take advantage of him if he isn't a selfish asshole.

Louise went back to his room on the psych ward. There was no art on the walls, nothing but an empty wardrobe and plastic covered bed with thin, cheap linens. The window was on the 4th floor and it most certainly didn't open. He could see where the wall had been patched up after patients had punched, kicked, or otherwise destroyed it. This was obviously a common voice for protest on the psych ward. Less common, but infinitely more profound a voice was coprography. Still more pointed an argument came naturally to Louise. In fact, few things had ever come to or felt more naturally than what he had for William. After pacing around in a tight circle until the pointlessness of it overwhelmed him, he half-squatted in the bathroom and defecated into his left hand.

Grinning a grin not because of the perversion he'd committed himself to but the great satisfaction he felt knowing that the contention he was about to make was irrefutable. He was walking down the hall of the psych ward with a winning argument in his hand. William would have to concede that medication isn't some sort of privilege for those who deserve it but a mechanism to treat suffering in those who need it. The fear that people will somehow feel good because of a chemical was old, tired, and the suffering that was left to fester because of this fear was much greater in sum than all of the destructive and unjust catastrophies cast on the reputation of chemicals used as drugs. In fact, the outlaw of narcotic chemicals had led to the abuse of much more savage ones like alcohol, and indirectly to more deaths and injuries physical, emotional, and spiritual of many people. The pervasive and misprescribed social substitution of booze in lieu of ancient communions like opium was a loss.

Only since about 1914 in the USA, with the Harrison Narcotics Act did Joseph's appetite for soul-soothing agents become conventionally immoral. Alcohol was briefly made immoral, but unlike narcotics that mistake was corrected shortly thereafter as society illustrated the absurdity. Interestingly, more deaths have occured from legal alcohol than from true narcotics in nearly any period in history. Still, the taboo and stigma of opiates has become fixed and petrified as a convenient culprit, an affectionate evil, a comfortable notion to pity, fear, hate, and absorb contempt.

Joseph was aware that both Galen and Hippocrates acknowledged the benefits of elixirs derived from papaverum somniferum. The Hippocratic Oath was probably not actually written by Hippocrates, but it seems worthy of note that medical men and women by tradition subscribe to a creed credited to a man who extolled the healing of the poppy flower. Being aware of this made no difference for him in a society where those seeking relief and comfort were regarded as sick at best and subhuman at worst. Joseph woke every morning suffering pain physically, and at 30 had only began to accept that this pain would not decrease as time passed.

He walked in front of the Burrows & Close chemist. There did not appear to be anyone living on the third floor, and the second floor apartment had no windows. Only the ground floor, the pharmacy, appeared to be occupied in the building which did not share any walls as the building which once laid adjacent and shared a wall was long gone save for the sidewalk windows of a retail shop. He entered the store and noticed magnetic sensors on the door and cameras in the northwest corner of the shop floor and behind the counter facing the counter from the pharmacy area. There was a shelf, like a bookshelf in a library, standing into the middle of the pharmacy area that divided the pharmacy into two long aisles. Smiling at the nice pharmacist, who would fill his script even if he had to pay her later because he was such a regular customer, he left and walked up the block to see the back of the building.

The back of the building was where the stairs to the upstairs apartment was. The contractors had made the apartment as secure as they could. Joseph realized that he would have to recon this setup after hours when they'd gone home to drink black label, read the Sun, and watch football while they ate their kebabs. He hoped, in his anti-hero villainous ways, that their kebabs were as tasty as his medication was. That was what he prayd: "God, I'm not asking for any special favors for me today. The good men who have made the effort to secure this building -- may you bless them and guide them, may they know love and calm, may their women love them and they their women, and may their kebabs taste as tasty to them as the dope is to me."

Joseph lit a cigarette and looked up at the grey sky as it misted down cool droplets at him. The double decker buses in England always made things feel surreal, like he was living in some magical old book. The complexity of that surreal feeling was that often he wished that he could get home, and he didn't know where 'home' was. At times, it felt like some sort of curse or the answer to a wish that he should have been more careful in making. This evening he had a purpose. If he concocted a sound plan, and executed it perfectly he wouldn't even need luck. The only fortune he would require was not to have very improbable misfortune, that no cosmic anomaly crop up that would throw a wrench in his sweet machine.

He went home and curled up under a blanket and dreamt of the cards with the contacts for a chip, ones for telephones, credit cards, parking meters. In waking, he had recently encountered these devices in the Netherlands and was certain that it was an omen that the US was lagging behind in technology that would ultimately doom the individual in society for the sake of (or the pretense of) security for the collective. The street interrupted his rest, with horns and diesel engines and alarms and voices. It was time for the men to eat their kebabs, time for television, time for the secure to rest. Out of bed and into his blackest pants he climbed. He brought along a crow bar.

Louise marched up to the nurse station door. The top half of the door was opened in, leaving the bottom half of the door to prevent the likes of Louise from invading the dispensing nurse and the precious pharmaceuticals. William shook his head and told Louise sternly, "I -told- you, you won't get any sedatives from me until 6 PM -tonight-. You're -here- because you abuse drugs, and I'm not letting you do it. Not on my watch!" Louise replied, "Are you sure? That's your stance? You'd rather that I suffer than give me a drug that I want that alleviates my suffering?" William interrupted, "Look, you're not suffering, you're just trying to get over on me, on the system." "I promise you, I -am- suffering. This conversation and your morality aren't making it any better." warned Louise. William asked, "You want an acetaminophen?" "Do I look like an acetaminophen will help? I'm shaking, sweating, and all of my muscles are contorted and grinding my bones." Louise demonstrated and issued this final point, "Mr. William, I am suffering from a physical anxiety that is causing my physical pain. Lorazepam alleviates the anxiety, the contortion, and the pain. I don't get high when I am given a therapeutic dose. I am merely relieved of the burden of pain. Is that wrong?"

William smirked. "You're a junkie. If you don't change your ways, you're going to die." he said. Louise looked down at the poop in his left hand then he looked up at William who was smirking smugly at Louise, content in his domination of a patient making an effort to get a drug on the patient's terms. It was William's house, not Louise's house. They had to learn, William was no sucker, he thought to himself. He knew their tricks, he knew they were sick and greedy and would do anything to get a fix, a high, to take drugs. Louise couldn't understand how it was a bad thing to take something that made anguish go away. Louise wondered why William controlled it like it was something that had to be earned by merit rather than by necessity, something that he didn't deserve? Louise watched William give up his smirky stare of pity and go back to looking at whatever he fancied on the internet. He saw the clean shaven jawline and he raised up his left hand. With a left-arm pitch, he flung the turd at William's head. It broke into two parts, one of which hit his ear and the other his neck. William wasn't immediately clear about what had hit him, but he was sure that Louise had thrown it. Before the stink hit him, he got up and walked towards Louise. On the way to the door, he reached into a drawer and uncapped a long syringe that was pre-loaded.

Joseph climbed up the scaffolding on the back of the building. He clinked the crowbar hanging from his belt on the metal bars of the scaffold. This made him fearful and he became completely still and quiet, using his black clothing to dissolve back into the night. He sang a song in his head of tragedy while he waited for the quiet of the night to soothe him back into confidence. The moon was barely there, a waxing crescent. He slid through the windowframe into the apartment. The floor was being redone, and as lucky as he could be he paced out to about where he imagined the counter of the pharmacy to be. He pried up the floorboards to find some wiring and boarding which drywall was mounted from inside the pharmacy. In spite of feeling how wrong the action was, he hammered out the drywall from below the floor of the apartment, opening up the ceiling of the pharmacy. He was practically inside the candy shop, and had been nearly perfectly quiet. Looking around with light from his mobile phone, he found a cord the contractor were using in lifting and lowering a large rubbish bin. He tied the cord to the middle of the crow bar and wedged the bar across the two strong supporting beams of the ceiling.

Lowering himself enough that he was comfortable dropping, he did so and found himself standing behind the counter of the pharmacy in the middle of the night. The metal grates were pulled down and locked over the windows, so he had little fear that he would be discovered. So, he began his catalogue of the bottles, throwing anything he liked into the backpack he had. He was disappointed in himself. He was disappointed that his successes had been relegated to this, that his appetites were so base and insistent, and that he as a man and as a monkey, could not survive without chemicals. Mostly he was disappointed that he would unlikely find this opportunity again, and furthermore he was all too aware that this fortune wouldn't last him half a year. It was just happening and he was lamenting its inevitable passing.

William opened the door and called for nurses to help him subdue Louise. When he touched the crap on his ear, saw the brownness on the floor and smelled the ultimate in disrespect, all of the condescending pity for Louise left his eyes. His lips puckered together in rage like some sort of pissed off anus and his motions became jerky and violent. Louise was just standing there, smiling, but William employed his Aikido training to crash Louise into the floor. Kneeling on Louise's head, he injected him with Lorazepam in the ass and as the other nurses arrived he increased and maintained pressure on Louise's head with his big asshole of a knee. Louise was no longer human to William. It wasn't on camera, but Louise wished that it had been. The words they exchanged would surely have been important to anyone reviewing the incident. Louise wanted desperately to wash his hand. They had no intention of prioritizing this need. As the high dose of lorazepam set in, he was strapped in 4 point restraints to a bed mounted to the floor.

Joseph filled his bag with all of the wonderous items he'd coveted for so long. He became sick with withdrawals from just being around so much chemicals. He went through some drawers and found a bag of syringes that looked like they would work. Considering all of the bottles he chose to be of similar function, he chose the smallest dose of hydromorphone. The decision he made was just to get himself comfortable enough to get up the rope and out. After a long time dependent on opiates, they have a fortifying effect on the user, they give the habitual user strength and energy, they settle the stomach and turn gravity down. As he fixed and the hydromorphone crossed the blood brain barrier and settled into his delta and mu receptors he began to feel normal and hopeful again.

He didn't feel any better about the caper though. He still felt that the whole cycle, the appetite, the need and the satiety of the panicky appetite was just more of the same world that he did not love. All too aware of the lie that was the sense of warmth and ease that washed through him as the hydromorphone did what it does, he was still bereft of meaning and hope. The drugs didn't work. They alleviated his physical pain to a degree. The cost for this was the pendulous oscillation between anxious exhaustion, sweaty weakness and soporific sanctuary, fuzzy clarity, and gritty points in between. What he hated most about his life was that he was a coward. None of his failures pained him more than his subservience to fear. An anger swirled through his brain, like the chemicals meant to grant him peace and ease.

Louise woke up with his scrub trousers wet and grim. He had pissed himself. Someone had cleaned his hand for the most part, but he was still irritated by the feeling under his fingernails. He hollered out for help. With no special hurry, a nurse came in. It was late at night. He asked the nurse what her name was. She calmly replied, "Andreea. Are you going to be nice? No more monkey business?" "Yes," Louise said, "Can I have my lorazepam now? It's after 6." "Absolutely." Andreea left returned with his sedative. This struck Louise as phenomenally bizarre. He'd been heavily sedated for who knew how many hours on the very chemical that he was denied -because- he had been denied and so threw feces in primitive protest. When he woke, and didn't need it, he was just pressing buttons on the off chance that his madness would be validated. He was in fact proven. Andreea handed him a towel and a fresh set of hospital scrubs and gowns. Louise went directly to the shower.

In the shower he washed himself from the top of his head down to his toes. In a way he was cleansing his conscience, trying to redeem his motives to himself and reclaim a constitution of sanity. He was ashamed. Not because he threw poop at an asshole with glaring self-righteousness but because he was reduced to living with circumstances where that action actually seemed appropriate to his addled mind. Where had he become lost? When had he lost his way? Medically, he would benefit from the chemicals, but he was unable to administer them to himself responsibly. He was a darwinian failure, and as he washed himself he was sure that he wasn't qualified to reproduce. It seemed sad and quiet but true that he should be responsible enough to let the bloodline of pain and suffering stop with him. When he began to consider the role of environment, culture, and custom in his plight he stopped. The mental acrobatics were a waste of everything, an internal dialogue that needed to be stifled. When he finished washing, he felt better.

Joseph sat on the floor of the pharmacy. He looked up at the ceiling. There were surely ways for him to build a platform in the room that would allow him to jump up and grab a supporting beam, but the cord hanging down was nothing but a precarious menace. Reclining on his elbows, he looked across the store at the door and the light from the street reaching through the small spaces in the rolled-down grates protecting the glass. He had plenty of time to work on his escape. They didn't open until 9am, so he imagined that he had until at least 7 before the sun came up and he'd have had to make his way out. Somehow he felt safe in here, like there was nothing he needed outside of this small space.

Truthfully, he wasn't safe in there and there wasn't much of anything that he actually needed in there. He needed much more, more than he had ever given and more than the world could ever give. There was an infinite array of reasons and culprits he could blame for his misery, his meaninglessness, his human condition. Still, he found that he could only hold himself responsible for his own and the suffering of those he loved most. He was capable of love. Where he came up short was in tolerating himself; loving himself was well beyond the realism of being a consideration. For so many times he'd declared a new course, and set the course and charted a better way, he'd more often than not abandoned the voyages before he began.

As he sat comfortably on the floor in the middle of an extended serious crime, having mainlined hydromorphone to quell his sickness, the levity of being began to console him. After all, part of his metaphysical affliction was that it all was a comedy as much as a tragedy. To find his way, he'd have to remember the comedy and make the ways he had been blessed to succeed with in earlier years and much better days as a younger man. Why be afraid; what was there to lose?

Louise breathed deeply and watched the television in the common room on the ward. They served snacks. White bread and little single servings of peanut butter and jelly were laid out for the patients to eat. He watched the television, but he couldn't bear to give any attention to what was -on- the television. In the morning, he'd surely have to speak with the doctor about the poop throwing, and he was certain that the antic was going to cost him more time, potentially much more time, in the custody of the mental health medical service. It was worth it. What had he learned, he asked himself. The lines for moral right & wrong were always going to be overextended. He fully respected the golden ethic of reciprocity. It seemed like the most perfect and simple and true law that man has ever learned, known, or written. He learned today though that there will always be others who will not tolerate your own needs, and your own comfort and well-being will be imposed upon, interfered with, stolen, or broken at times for any of a variety of irrelevant reasons.

In this case, throwing poop paid off in the short term but it was no great revelation that this was the exact -wrong- thing to do. The full consequences, the full price of this victory and this need being met would become clear tomorrow. It was useless to speculate what that cost may be, but he was sure that it would be more than he would have had to pay by just waiting 6 more hours for his medication, and speaking with the doctor tomorrow to resolve the problem. He definitely learned that games you may play just once can have gross repercussions and impact much more than the features of the game. His internal dialogue spun its wheels while he breathed a deep breath and said to himself, "I'm a man. Not a monkey."

Joseph wished that he was agile like a monkey. He had to figure out how to get out of this pharmacy that he had broken into. It amused him, his predicament. For so many years, he had envisioned the great cat burglary of a pharmacy. Now, when he'd realized that dream, he'd managed to trap himself in the greatest cache of drugs he'd ever seen. It was poetic how well he'd fucked himself. Far too many times he'd got himself off by observing how unique and clever he was. This time he was just a little too clever for his own good. When he came in through the ceiling, he was aware that he'd have to get out, but he had a cocksure feeling that he could just figure that out when it was time to. Having looked around the shop, he could only find flimsy cardboard boxes to stack, none of which would hold his weight. The only thing he could think to do as his anxiety rose and a panick set in was to IV more hydromorphone and take 4mg of alprazolam.

He fell asleep with his head on a stuffed animal. He had munched on a fruit & nut chocolate bar, and the half-eaten bar lay next to him. He heard the metal grate sliding up and he saw through narcotic eyes the early morning sun as it crept in through the glass windows. The chemist unlocked the front door. He looked up and smiled. She looked confused, not afraid, then he saw her lips contract and he could tell she understood what had happened. Without any grace at all, he hopped to his feet and made for the door. The chemist shouted, "I know who you are, Joseph!" She did. He saw her several times per week. She had his address. He was fucked. Turning around, he asked, "What do you want me to do?" She shook her head and picked up the phone, presumably to phone the police.

He said he was sorry and then went out the door. The same surreal buses, the double deckers were lined up at the bus stop. Hopping on the front one, he sat down without any destination in mind. The only thing he knew was that this had to stop. He would talk to a doctor. Maybe medicine could help. He prayed that whatever god's plan was, whatever the universe had in mind, that he would be able to honor it and that he be an instrument of god's will. He felt alone but not lonely. Somehow he knew the universe had a plan. The sun gave the bus an auspicious glow. That sunlight and how his eye took it in was all that he had.

What it Feels Like to Break Your Tibula

When you wake up, you get ready for work. You put on a nicer, less comfortable pair of shoes, and you look at them. Then you grab another pair of black sneakers and bring them with you. You work from early in the morning until 1pm, it's rather uneventful. Then you drive back to the office and home. You start to park in a spot, and a man prevents you. He yells, "I'm waiting for someone!" This frustrates you, but you decide that it's probably just better to just park somewhere else. So you do. Then you collect the lunch, the bags, and the stuff and cross the street. You see that cars will be coming and in your nervousness jog across the street. Then you keep on jogging because it's raining. Five steps later you slip, attempt to catch yourself on a wet metal grate with slippery shoes and get no traction. You find yourself on the pavement, wet and in the rain. You hear a crack, and it hurts. You're unable to breathe, it's raining and you're on the ground. You pray that it's not broken, "god, please don't let my leg be broken".

You somehow collect yourself but when you attempt to put weight on it you know that it's broken. It's a challenge to hobble the rest of the block around the building and you're still praying that you don't hurt it worse.

trepanning

The man said, "That's the way the Universe works." It was a good omen. The man spoke like Joshua. He spoke of accepting the little losses and a faith that life works its own way out. Joshua noted this well. The ideology was not novel to him, but he was very comforted that he encountered it outside of his own hamster wheel of a head.

Rebecca slept in her bed, her hair snaking a semicircle around her eye. He loved her. She was beautiful in so many ways. Today would be a good day, and he was glad to be alive. For whatever reason, life had dealt him a 50/50 hand. He'd play today. It looked good.

Hours before the sun lit the horizon, he arrived at the small, spartan headquarters for the banquet server staffing company. It was his first shift. When he walked in the door he felt his whiteness, like all the african eyes were responding as one would to a prominent skin disorder with averting, staring, making contact with other dark eyes, dancing eyebrows and creeping smirks. His reasoning quicky neutralized the fear, a rationale that they wouldn't have asked him to come work if they didn't want him to, further rationale that no one cared or should care, and still a still further case for the defense of his skin that it didn't matter and if it did it shouldn't.

With all of that early morning darkness, his body language became rigid, it became jerky. He was so aware of his stride, how his arms hung, how his eyes and their tell-tale brows tuned the focus of his insecurities, his lips and creeping warm smile that, so paralyzed with anxiety, just wouldn't bloom. His presence became uncomfortable. The awareness of all of this made it worse. Still, he spoke with a projected voice and made eye contact with whomever he was speaking to. The test of endurance came when he wasn't speaking to anyone, and he fell to feel like a pink elephant no one wanted to think about.

He was asked what size uniform shirt he wore. Somehow he was comfortable saying "small" even though he didn't like the fact that he had to wear the clothes for small chested men. In spite of self-appraisal that his greatest present growth was in learning to be small, it was a challenge to voice this to Miss Mystic in the presence of other black men. Wondering if anyone felt he was challenging their entitlement to work, he spent his psyche on quelling a chromatograph of defensiveness.

They asked him to drive and to follow Michael. After Miss Mystic finished photocopying his license and social security card that was made of paper as weakly constituted as his sense of self, he went out to the car and the intersection to wait for the blue van that Michael would clip down i-95 to Wilmington for the gig. He left the radio to Baron, but Baron chose not to bother with the suffrage. This evoked more neurotica, more suffering for Joshua. Around then, he fell into the mode of driving, with great concentration to safely follow the speeding, careening blue van down the dark highway where police cars gauging speed could make nice pickings of them. The hyperfocus was a relief from the racial anxiety, the insecurity, and the exhausting self awareness.

By the time they arrived at the client, Joshua was exhausted. He followed the rag-tag army into the building and stood around visibly uncomfortable waiting for a mission to start, something to rescue him by consuming the time left to steep in his anxiety. Nervous smirks and nearly constant repositioning behind men and women who seemed more at ease with the environment, the client's site, and comfortable in their own skin. He imagined he'd be more comfortable in their skin and he felt a silent nervous twitter that emitted and resounded in his innate encyclopedia of mendacity, bringing the ordeal closer to an end. His clothing was clean and sharp, the only flaw he felt was in the very unnoticeable white branding text on the tops of the tongues of his shoes. Even though he looked around at the escape of the floor and observed two other pairs of the same shoes, he was tolerably dissatisfied.

Without further ado, they took up the list of items to check off in setting up the immense banquet hall. Quickly he encountered the house-employed banquet servers taking turns making a point of correcting him one way, then the next in contradiction until he voiced his frustration to an approachable waitress and carried on with the best, most obvious compromises he could find. The clock began to pick up momentum and the service swayed into seating, pouring, and slinging plates. To his own pride, he wisely anticipated some questions the guests would conjure up, and asked the team captains for those resources before the guests even seated themselves. Things like tea, lemons, napkins, etc. can cripple a server during service if the waiter has to take the time to find them or find someone who knows where to find them.

The choreography for this lot of rag-tag jolly-roger varlets needed work. There was a sadness for him that such a crew were in parts and at times stifled when it came to working together. The same selfishness, contemptuousness, and arrogant sense of self so painfully out of scale that singed him when he watched television or encountered cavalier personalities in social life crept between and divided the mates as they handled the business. One of our number was asked to leave the client site, leave the building, and do so presently or greater problems than the exile itself and its inconvenience would follow. He was unable to rally behind this mate, because in truth the cur was out of order. The occluded message he saw was that these transgressions were ones that he himself had made, thus so much less tolerable. It was beautiful somehow, that what he could not accept for himself was understandable when he witnessed it as it clashed for another misadjusted personality.

As he worked, he identified his errors and corrected them. He observed banquet servers who moved with confidence and natural grace and purpose and emulated them, he saw that planning and experience in seeing what was to come next granted him this ease. Once he saw how something was convened upon to do, he quickly fell into sync and felt that comfort. In a way, it was a competition with himself. He thrived on competition, even when it consumed him and even when the way he thrived was not more than superficial and dismissive.

At the end of the service, a team leader came to Joshua and asked, "Are you working tomorrow, Saturday & Sunday?" "No, I don't thi..." "You are now. Can you?" "Not tomorrow if it's before 12, but this weekend absolutely."

It was a great compliment. In a way he was, as he had been called, "a machine". He -could- handle it. Even when he couldn't, he did. Most women and men have that characteristic. It's one of the beautiful ones, the trait that we just find a way. For someone that capitulated so often the minutae before beginning for the childish fear of fucking it up, Joshua managed very well when the pressure was on.

There were times when he cried because he could not solve a math problem. There were times when he cried because he could not meet his own expectations of surpassing expectations. There were times when he cried because he, for everything he tried, could not manage to live as a modern man. This small day set up a frame for yet another new way, a way to win. He loved Rebecca and the image if her with her hair curled around her heavy eyelid stayed with him. She deserved to sleep and sleep well. He had miles to go before he wept, and miles to go before he wept.

To Be So Fortunate

Melvin was wrought with anxiety. He sat in the group on the edge of the patio and looked up at the flashing apocalyptic thunderstorm. The stalls of rain, backlit an electric grey, ordered their way to the horizon where the setting sun was calling a close to travels. Expecting to have left already, he had packed all of his clothes in perfect arrangement in his suitcase, leaving no room for waste or disorder. The others on the patio, his family of youths, were all better positioned so they would not be struck by lightning. They had congregated like a litter of puppies in the corner. Carl, Davina, Mario, Isaiah, Gideon, little Embily, Elizabeth, and Gerald were all smiling nervously, and all touching each other with one part or another. The parents, uncles Mike, Franklin, and Francis and the childrens' mothers Helen, Louise, and Andreea all sat calmly in a ring concentric to the corner, facing out and allowing their arms to hang comfortably over their chair arms.

He had been tricked, Melvin. In Harlem, he had an apartment where even now the roaches were surely conspiring to take it over as he sat helplessly in the bouncing rain in the suburbs of Philadelphia. It was his impression that he'd be back on his way to the city after lunch with his distant cousin Elizabeth. She was an uppity bitch. When they met, she had come in from some friend's living in Philadelphia, and was on the phone with a friend explaining that she'd try to get out of going back to NYC today and make it down to DC to get together. Melvin listened in and tried to find ways that he didn't understand the conversation and it wasn't his business, that the transgression of his nosiness did nothing but cultivate frustration and should be dismissed until she presented her new agenda and it became an issue for him. Just listening, he thought, he hadn't encountered any issue, it was only his ears and mind attacking him.

When the rain began, the families unpacked their rain clothes. All of them seemed to have come prepared for this storm, bringing galoshes, plastic raincoats, brimmed hats and extra pants to change into when it was over. Somehow this thunderstorm had made its way through the roof and second floor, and there was no sanctuary anywhere in the house. Melvin's suitcase was getting wet. They spoke of "the one who would be hit by lightning" like it was an expected seasonal event. Little frogs in the springtime, lightning bugs, nighttime cicadas, the baseball season and "the one who would be hit by lightning". They didn't look at him when they had been speaking about it over the weekend. Their disregard wasn't just natural disinterest, it was a sympathetic method of not informing Melvin, like they all knew or believed they were safe because Melvin was going to be struck, not them.

He could reason that this made no sense, but his heart knew better. For whatever he owed to the universe, he would be settling that debt shortly. The strikes of lightning got closer and closer. The storm got louder. It became evident that Melvin would, in fact, be struck by lightning. Perhaps that was why the other youngsters had left him out by the corner of the patio, exposed like some sacrifice to the fates.

Somn Usor

The quilt had a pattern that made its orientation on the bed so conspicuous that Oscar was compelled to adjust and readjust it every time he looked at it. There was a file of geometric deer, beige and contrasted by a muted, almost sealike green. There was no sky for the deer, but they were separated into strata by aquamarine banners as wide as the little deer. It made for a calm magic, the Cherokee quilt that Oscar flew through his dreams under.

The ceiling was slanted, as the second floor was once an attic. Roy had built and finished the second floor of his one story house in the 1970s. There were windows on each side of the long room, one facing the front of the house and the other looking out over the back. He had painted the eaves a light green, the color of the fields the deer coolly graced through on Oscar's quilt. The steps to the front of the house were also painted a rubbery blue grey. Roy painted his fence a bright silver, and the long separate garage in the back was painted to match the house. He cooked his steaks with tender loving care on a small cast iron hibachi grill. The cucumbers and tomatoes that grew up the fence made a humble, clean salad. The trees smiled down on the whole affair, and Oscar smiled up.

Polly, Roy's wife, spread her fingers out over the formica and looked out the double windows over her sink at Roy in his slacks and white undershirt at the hibachi. She loved him. His sense of humor was perpetually antagonistic, but his smile made his barbed affection warm and kind. He loved her. For all the world had cheated them, they stayed fast.

He had escaped death underground as a coal miner, and she had escaped with him from a mountain hell where the ladies were bent on gossipy judgement of each other in an infinite cycle of hypocritical tsks. They loved each other, and their love was carried through sighs and eyebrows and morning coffee and evening television. Roy called television the "boob tube". Oscar liked to watch Knight Rider. Oscar would look at Roy watching television, then look at Polly watching television and catch her stopping to look at Roy. Then she would acknowledge Oscar and purse her lips in some unconscious expression of maternal generosity.

It was Halloween. Polly was full of tales about razorblades and LSD in candy, and insisted that Oscar not cheat and take any pieces before he got home. Oscar was worried and tried to make her sure that she knew he wouldn't. She took a valium and stood by the storm door and waited for the neighborhood kids to come by with their costumes and contorted faces and spastic antics. Roy sat on the sofa and used the box with 14 buttons and a mode switch to control the channels on his boob tube. Polly had a way of talking to Roy with soft, almost silent words issued when facing away from him that he could hear, like vibrations through the air weren't necessary for them. They spoke a different way. He grinned a grin and pulled his chin down to mute his laugh.

Oscar was Coca-Cola. His arms were dressed in thermal underwear and they stuck through holes in the top of the Coke can he wavered about in. The large cardboard costume was painted perfect red and the cursive script in painted white read "Coca-Cola ®" down the can. He loved Coca-Cola like grown-ups love coffee. Oscar's father was like his brother in some ways. Roy & Polly took care of him, and his father was subject to the same approval and disapproval that he was, though it was certain that he was a better boy than his father. Dad was taking him out for trick or treating, and he insisted that the best approach was to walk out and then work their way back to the house. Oscar loved walking through the neighborhood with his dad. It was even night, but they were allowed.

The first house was on the uphill side of the street. It was simple and unconfrontational and Oscar felt eased as he climbed up the three stairs and knocked on the door. A young wife opened the door and asked Oscar what he was. "Coke!" he said, and then held his pillowcase up. Oscar didn't pay attention to what she placed in his bag, he just gave her an excited "Thanks lady!" and hopped down the steps. His dad was smiling. They carried on through the neighborhood and Oscar explained what his costume was and the wives gave him candy. Soon, his dad said they were finished and they made their way down the last street to the house.

The lights were on and he could see Polly's silhouette in the storm door. She tilted her head back and Roy leaned forward from the sofa to look out past her at Oscar and Charles. Oscar could see him look back up at his wife and then lean back. His dad opened the gate and he ran up the walk with his swinging bag of candy. Polly opened the door and said, "Look what the cat dragged in!" He looked up at his grandmother with a big smile and opened his bag so she could see all the colors. She asked him if he had eaten any. "Nope, but I gave one to Dad! He said you wouldn't mind." Then she followed him to the kichen table, where he emptied the candy onto the top and she began to inspect each piece. When she gave them the pieces, he put them in separate piles by candy and counted them. 11 Reese's peanut butter cups, 8 Jolly Rancher sticks, 14 Butterfingers, 18 Snickers, 4 Mary Janes, and so on. She let him eat a peanut butter cup. Then it was time for him to get ready for bed she said.

Oscar loved to go to sleep like most kids don't. She made him brush his teeth, but she was less bossy about how he should do it than his other grandmother who he also loved but in a different way. They were both pretty and they were both nice but Polly was -his- grandmother. He changed into his pajamas. She washed his face, something he never liked because the cloth was all scratchy but afterwards the dry towel made it all feel nice. He could feel the water evaporate and a cool sleepiness start to settle in. He told Roy goodnight and that he loved him from the hallway and padded upstairs to the attic bedroom. On the way up the stairs he liked to try to fart at his grandmother who was walking behind him. When he did this, he made like he was being propelled with great velocity up the stairs. One time he was trying to fart so hard he accidentally pooped right into his pants. That night wasn't funny.

The backyard was brightly lit with a great halogen light, and it reflected brightly off of the white ceiling. There was a cardboard with St. Pauli Girl on the wall from when his uncle slept here. She seemed really pretty, like Polly. Oscar was afraid he'd see a ghost, but when he prayed he felt better. So Polly asked him if he was alright, if he needed a glass of water. He was fine and wasn't thirsty. Then he prayed that there wouldn't be any ghosts. His father said that once he woke up in this house and there was a ghost, so he bit the ghost's hand and the ghost slapped the shit out of him. The ghost was of Oscar's great grandfather, Poppy. Oscar played a movie of the day through his head, he thought of St. Pauli girl and he thought of multiplying numbers. Then he was aleep.

Polly was sleepy. She took another valium. Roy finished smoking a cigarette, stubbed it out and then took the ashtray into the kitchen. They took turns in the bathroom, Polly first and then Roy, and then got into their bed. On the dresser a large mirror reflected the bright light onto a wall. Roy watched as the timer cut it off at 11:30. Then he unwrapped his arm from Polly and rolled over onto his back. He was glad the day was through. Polly slept like a baby, like Oscar, and the valium kept her breath slow and silent.

Charles sat up in his bed in the unfinished basement. He wrote a letter to a friend. She was one of many people he'd been unable to show love for, where circumstance had prevented him from giving. He writhed around periodically, his back a stiff and and twisted braid of knots, then recomposed himself and wrote out another sentence. At the end of the letter, he signed "Love, Charlie" and folded the pages into uneven thirds. He laid back onto his bed and slowly fell asleep on his side with a pillow between his knees, still in his clothes, with the light on.