Darkness

   I have always hated the darkness. Murders happen there. Lies happen there. One’s fiancé burying his face in the furry snatch of some Asian bitch that wears Louis Vuitton and Prada like sweatpants happens there. Nightlights are for children; don’t be absurd. Just because I hate the dark does not mean I do not exist in it.

            I saw them today. I saw them together today. She was not laughing nor touching his arm the way they do in movies, she looked angry and he had the familiar look of frustration that I remember so well. I felt a flash of comfortable spiteful hate for both of them and enjoyed their stiffness before she raised her hand to brush jet hair from her pale and moonlike face and a glittering meteor laughed from her finger. It was bigger than the ring I still kept in my jewelry box. He hadn’t had the heart to tell me to give it back, he’d said in a letter.

            Sometimes I stand in front of my mirror late in the evening with all the lights on and read my body the way a soothsayer might divine meaning from scattered tea or faded cards. I read the stretch marks and hate my long breasts and worry about the spreading edges of my silhouette. I hate as passionately as I love and there are times when I feel fierce and tigerlike and other times I cannot breathe or look at that cruel mirror any longer.

            I bought a car when he left. My job is easy and pays me well and I had always soothed his brittle worry in the darkness though I felt on edge and let him know he was important too, that his income mattered, that I needed him. When he left, the drab sedan I parked in front of the apartment that was once ours chafed at me so I bought something red and dangerous and although I do not feel red and dangerous others do not know this.

            I want a boyfriend. I want someone chiseled out of brown marble who can dress smartly and stand by me and I’ll know that Damien is watching me and wishing he was that man and he was by my side but he has that stupid bitch, not me, and I will be happy with the new man. I don’t want a new man because of who he will be, I want a new man because of who I am and that is the best way for me to show who I really am.

            Sometimes I drive too fast. I pass people on the road and feel a rush of excitement as the digital speedometer climbs past the posted signs and the sides of the road blur but I am always careful to slow before reaching an intersection or a billboard the police enjoy staking out. I have never been issued a ticket in my life.

            Hands are important, and they say important things. People don’t pay attention to hands enough, that’s what I think. When they grip the black rubber wheel in front of me as I mash on the cut aluminum accelerator and listen to the car’s smooth roar I feel stronger, and my hands say that I am strong.

           

            I have met someone. He is small, much smaller than me, and I worry about the length of my heels before choosing some with a kitten heel that I feel accentuates who I am without towering over the man.

            He is almost dainty. Damien was not dainty, he was broad and husky and had course hair that wove like bracken on his arms, but he did not seem to care about it. This new fellow has a little thatch of hair on his chin and says “um” too much but his eyes are bright when he talks about something that he likes at dinner and so I like it too. His interests are ships in bottles and motorcycles and my car, and I lean over the table in a way that I hope draws his eyes and wish that Damien could see me with him and get jealous.

            When the dates are over and I am at home or lying in slick ecstasy next to him I think about Damien and the Chinese woman and try to conjure some comfort that they are arguing about me.

            “What did you see in her?” the Chinese lady is asking.

            “She was strong,” Damien will say, with his voice husky that way it used to get when he got emotional, like the time that we watched P.S. I Love You and he pretended he didn’t like it (he did like it).

            Sometimes I will get a text message from this new man and I will lay my phone face down and imagine that it’s from Damien and he’s realized his mistake and in those little joyous moments I can savor the deliciousness of his candor.

            I want you back. I’ve made a mistake.

            Damien loved a movie called Watchmen which made me love it too. Rorschach says that when the whores and politicians look up from the gutter and scream “save us!” he will look down and whisper “no.” I like that part of the movie. I like how gravelly his voice gets when he whispers “no.” I imagine Damien texting me, whining that way he sometimes would but this time it’s about the Chinese woman. This time it’s about how much he can’t stand her and all of his reasons for why he can’t stand her are because she is not me. When that happens, I don’t think I’ll let him come back. Instead, what I’ll do is I will text him that single word, and though I can’t be there to read it to him I will imagine him casting his mind back to that favorite movie of his and whispering the word to himself in that gravelly way. No.

            Sometimes the new man will come over with a pizza or something of the sort to my place. I want to care about this new man. My mother said that I was a caring person but sometimes I feel like this is a lie and there is nothing that I can do to change how dishonest this particular attribute makes me feel, but there is nothing to be done. The new man is not who I want.

            A breakup is like going to the store for a Zero bar, and they’re out of Zero bars. You could have whatever else you wanted to have, but you want that Zero bar and anything else you get is going to remind you of how much you wanted a Zero bar.

            Sometimes the new man will undress me and trace his fingers across my body in a way that speaks of desire and awe and I will hate myself for the way I wish it was Damien. Damien doesn’t deserve my love. He doesn’t deserve the way I use to make him shudder and cry out in the darkness even though the darkness made me on edge. I can tell myself that every day for a year and it will not change. This new man cannot make me change.

            I told the new man today that I don’t want to see him any more and he cried and every time I have broken up with someone and they cried I cried too, except for this time. This time instead of the welling tenderness I felt a long and angry irritation and wished he would stop crying. I was the one who should be crying.

            I tore down the decorations that Damien had put up in my room. I hadn’t felt like it for a long time but the other day I tore them down and put up something that I wanted to put up. I don’t care. There was an old poster with the rules of Fight Club on it and Damien and I use to stare at it and laugh because some graphic designer had made a mistake and put the five on twice. I like Fight Club too, but Damien put that on my wall and that’s quite enough from him.

            When I was seven I visited a bee farm. I cannot remember what a bee farm is called. Perhaps it will come to me later. I visited a bee farm and I remember that I was stung by a bee even though the beekeeper had tried to smoke the bees out so that they were docile. One of them had darted from the hive and in the midst of the children he landed on my forehead and stung. The fiery screaming pain made me cry and the other children in the callousness of their youth had mocked me as the next few days my forehead swelled, even after the healing ointments and the removal of the stinger.

            I thought Damien was different. He’s a piece of shit. I hate him. I gave myself to him after I had promised I wouldn’t do that again and more than anything he made me hate myself again. My friend Aria had told me once that above all don’t let a man make you hate yourself, because in the end and besides all of your friends you are the one that you must count on. I remember her advice because she had said it with something like rage in her voice. She said at the end “When you are alone and in the dark you are the only one you can count on to be there with you.” That comforted me when the darkness seemed eternal sometimes.

           

            Today was the day of their wedding. We have so many friends together on Facebook and I forgot it was the day of their wedding and went on Facebook and saw them together.

            I’m sorry, I was lying. I didn’t forget it was their wedding day any more than I might forget Pearl Harbor Day or Memorial Day or one of the sad minor holidays we all sort of half remember. I clicked on the pictures and studied their faces for signs of internal distress and smirked to myself when in one picture or maybe two Damien looked like he was checking out the ass of one of the bridesmaids. My ass is round and plump and the ass of the Chinese woman does not look like mine does. I have many negative features but my ass is not numbered among those.

            Sometimes I would go to his profile on Facebook on my phone late at night and let the glow of the screen illuminate my room and check his relationship status. I don’t want him back, he can rot in hell for all I care. I just know that he’s a cheating son-of-a-bitch and he’s gonna break that poor small woman the way he tried to break me and I just want to watch it unfold in real time. I always wait for the profile picture to load and imagine that they’re not together and imagine that it isn’t that stupid picture where she’s kissing his face with her ring hand on his face like some sort of idiot (she’s going to look like a fool when he cheats on her) but it just ends up making me feel hollow all over again when that dumb picture loads again and I see them and feel stupid for wishing that someone I don’t care about was no longer with someone else I don’t care about.

            He still follows me on Instagram. I try to imagine him seeing my pictures come up in his news feed and he sees that I’m happy and having fun away from him. Every time my follower count fluctuates I check it to see if he still follows me and to see his name on that list gives me a flash of pleasure but when I check his profile he hasn’t posted in months. He used to be obsessed. I know he must be checking it. I know he must see my pictures.

            I don’t eat like I did. I have lost weight but this is healthy because when I do eat it’s salads or granola or something disgusting like that but to see the softness of my belly harden in increments or my thighs get sleeker brings me a secret pleasure nearly erotic in nature. I want to show Damien. I don’t want to seduce him, I want to be a harpy of sex and revenge. See what you are missing? See what you’ve given up? I imagine him laying on that bony little woman in the darkness and I laugh to myself in a way that I feel makes me powerful.

            I threw away my nightlight. I said that I don’t sleep with one but I did and I have. It was small and cheap, just a little glowing castle that I plugged into the outlet across from my bed and I had told myself for so long that it was in case I needed to use the restroom during the night, so I wouldn’t trip over a wandering shoe or some useless item I find myself sometimes too lazy to put away, but it wasn’t at all. 

            I am lying in the dark now, and I feel comfortable alone in my bed. It isn’t large enough for two. It is just large enough for me. 

Frames

This is something I've been working on for class. I've got a few other stories that I can put up and probably will. 

He was once a creature of rings and rags. His body had felt like steel under his torn clothing and I remembered the way his jackets smelled like coffee and charcoal. Lying draped in that absurd gown, wan and tasteless as dishwater with overcast light leaking through the brocade forest that guarded the window, he wasn’t the raging Zeus that had towered over me as a child. The respirator mask concealed his face, his eyes closed against the struggling day. They had shaved his beard, that bearlike mane that covered his face for all of his life I could remember, leaving his face soft and small and unprotected. The chair on the edge of which I leaned felt like a cage.

            “Jason?”

            I jumped up and smoothed my wrinkled shirt. Mom was in the doorway, her broad, usually ruddy face tight as a snare.

            “I brought you a muffin.”

            “I’m not hungry.”

            “You have to eat.” She was purposefully avoiding glancing at the bed where my father laid.

            “I’m just waiting for the bastard to pass on.”

            “Jason, stop.” She set the cup of coffee and muffin down on the table opposite the hospital bed. I leaned against the rough wallpaper, rested my head against it. Mom sat on the other chair, studying my face. She’d been a tattoo artist when my father, a traveling union welder, had met her thirty years ago. She was nearly sixty now, but the ink that leaked out of her sleeves onto her hands and fingers was still bright as the flowers that sat in the window. I looked at the swallows and roses and bright compass on her wrinkling hands and let the familiarity of the designs comfort me.

            “Go home. Get some rest. I’ll let you know when we hear anything.”

            “I’m only here for you, mom.”

            “I don’t need you right now. Not for a while. Sleep.”

When I was seven I took my father’s favorite hunting knife and carved my initials into the broad magnolia that cast a verdant umbrella over the front yard. Never one for small gestures, I carved the letters J A H as large as I could into the dark wood, reveling at the way the bright blade bit into the soft wood, leaving moist, ash-white wood bare. When my father came home and saw my handiwork he just stood in the front yard for a long time, hands on his hips in a way that drew his calfskin jacket behind him like a cape. At last he came inside, silent as a shadow, and found my cat—a little ill-spirited, sickly animal that I called Lukie—and took him into the front yard and with the blunted, sap-sticky blade of his knife he pinned the mewling animal through the ribs to the tree, right between the long legs of the A.

            I remember that it took Lukie a long time to die. I remember that my father left him there a long time.

            “The doctors are giving him a week to live.”

            I had spilled some tea and I drew the droplets along the wood grained formica tabletop of the coffee shop. The barista was closing up, trying to make some noise so I would notice. I ignored him.

            “Jason?”

            “I’m here.”

            “They’re giving him a week.”

            “I heard you.”

            I could hear my mother breathing. She never cried. She wasn’t one of those women who cried at any old thing. She didn’t cry at big things either. She just breathed hard and her tan face would get pale and she would clench and unclench her right hand, over and over again, and the turquoise and silver rings on her hand would scrape together like coins in a pocket.

            “He missed you.”

            “What?”

            “He missed you,” she said, louder. “He told me so.”

            “Bull.”

            “You’re right, not in so many words. We were eating breakfast a few weeks ago and he said ‘I wonder if Jason is thinking about visiting.’”

            “That doesn’t mean anything. He was wondering.”

            I heard her take a deep breath. “You know him better than that.”

           

            When I was eleven my mother gave birth to a girl who lived for three days. When she died I was at the hospital. I’d been told to stay in the waiting room but I had to use the bathroom and found myself wandering the sterile, death-smelling halls of the third floor. I passed a chicken-wired security window and saw my father cradling a stiff pink bundle, face wet. I’d never seen him cry. His rough, perennially blackened hands brushed the area beneath the pink knit cap, tiny next to his bearded face. He never saw me. He never knew I saw him cry.

            We had to go through his things the next day. He was stable, if unconscious, and my mother silently fretted as we purchased cardboard boxes from a moving company and began to pack some of his things away. It was agonizing, this slow march towards grief. I found myself staring out the window at nothing, or memorizing strains of music faintly heard in elevators or seeping from passing cars. I savored the way light struck the scarlet-breasted robins nesting in branches pimpled with lime-colored buds, or the way the horizon bruised with sunset. Every day was one that my father existed in this world, mutual in whatever misery we were given. I could see him again; I could take actionable steps to be in his presence for a moment longer, if I tried.

                      

The Masks of Death

Fantasy pirates? Fantasy pirates.            

          The first time I died, someone had smashed my brains in with a gold brick. It was a traditional avoirdupois ingot stamped with the crown and falcon and wielded by a man who called himself Gaspar.

            I woke up in a room. Not a pretty, white, glowing room like you read about in the accounts written by mystics and mediums but a drab, ceramic feeling room that was about six degrees too cold and a few points too humid, like the underside of a cave. There wasn’t a door. My head hurt.

            I turned around twice. The room stayed mockingly puce. The last thing I remembered was laying on my back on a hot wooden deck under the knifelike Caribbean sun as some madman with an enormous mustache swung two-odd imperial pounds of filthy lucre at my head like a flashing club.

            A woman was now standing in the corner of my room. I call it my room. I was here first. Isn’t that how it works? Or is it the other way around? Whoever arrives last gets it?

            She was slender in a way that suggested death rather than youth and good breeding but her face was hidden with a silk veil in a deep-sea indigo. Her arms were pale and smooth and jutted like eels from her sleeves. She wore a dress that could have been a nun’s habit save for the swooping neck that revealed comely décolletage that somehow seemed out of place, given the rest of her. She unsettled me.

            “You are Oliver Marquette?” Her voice sounded like a cool stone felt.

            “I am.” I don’t like questioning or answering it directly, to be sure, but it seemed she had me pegged.

            “You are dead.”

            I looked around me. It felt true.

            “What am I supposed to do about that?”

            “I need you to do something.”

            “What about heaven? Am I supposed to go to heaven or something?”

            “In England, perhaps.”

            “What?”

            “You’re a pirate, Master Marquette. Not a particularly good one and not a particularly noteworthy one.”

            “I am a privateer-“ I started.

            “Your letters of marque were forged and we both know this. If you would be so obliging as to not waste my time I would be forever in your debt.”

I couldn’t read past her veil. “Well, what do you want?”

“I have something you want, and you have something I want?”

“You’re not even going to explain the heaven thing?”

Exasperation emanated like a stench. “Your religion only reaches as far as the density of its worshipers. Had you died in England or any place well populated by the English, you’d be in some sort of heaven, or in your case, hell.”

“Who are you?”

“Who I am is unimportant. What is important is that I have chosen you for a special task.”

“If I don’t accept?”

“I’ll ship you back to your god where you’ll bear the consequences of your actions. From having seen your deeds, I highly doubt you were a very good or faithful servant so outer darkness and a significant amount of teeth gnashing is more than likely in order.”

“Okay, the task?” I was getting bored of this conversation; the room was giving me some sort of mental rash. I felt restless.

“My temples are being desecrated, my people are being destroyed, my artifacts and holy places are being melted into gold and silver and shipped back across the great ocean.”

“I can’t stop all of Spain.”

“You cannot. You must be my champion. You must stop one man who has done more to harm my people than all of Spain. His name is Gabriel Thiago Ruiz y LaMancha, who calls himself Gaspar LeBlanc. He has stolen my sacred masks, thus rendering me unable to speak to my priests or intervene in the lives of my people. Without your help, they will all die.”

I detected genuine emotion in her voice. It piqued my interest. The veil trembled in front of her face.

“What can I do?”

“He has stolen four masks from my greatest temple. They are beautiful and ancient; he will not destroy them. He has taken them to his Castillo on the island of Barbados where they reside in his mansion. I am releasing you from death to be my champion. Return to earth, raise a crew, and destroy Gaspar LeBlanc and return my masks to my people. In return, I will make you deathless and ageless. Every time you die, you will return from death to continue seeking my vengeance until the masks are returned.”

“What happens when they’re returned? I just die?”

I could feel her smile. “I will let you live forever on Earth, until you choose to die. All riches that you can take for yourself, I will allow you to keep. I will help you become the greatest pirate in the world, if you take the greatest treasures in the world and restore them to my people.”

“Deal,” I said, stretching out my hand to shake. She seemed to glance at it dismissively.

“Be warned, the path will not always be one that you wish to tread. However, if you start now, you must finish it.”

“I’ve never backed down from a challenge.” I have, but that’s not the point. A good liar knows when to fold.

When she spoke, her voice held a smirk. “Good luck, Oliver.”

“Wait, what should I call you?”

She moved slightly, and a red door was behind her. “I am known to some as Mictlan.”

I woke up on ice-white sand next to sapphire water with a brigantine bearing towards me, her white sails bellied under a strong tradewind. I took a deep breath and stood up. On the back of my hand a black compass had been tattooed into the skin. As I turned, it turned as well.

“All right, Mictlan,” I muttered. “Let’s see what trouble we can get into.”