Cilantro and Highway Robbery in the Form of Avocados

This is a somewhat mocking and satirical take on second person, post-modern and nihilistic novels about life and philosophy and masturbatory self-deprecation. It'll probably never go anywhere but is darkly funny and in way, kind of emotional. I'm in the throes of applying to grad school and this might get farther than what I'm submitting. Who knows?

            It is at moments like these where you find yourself amazed at your nihilistic existence, brought to tears by the sight of an earring back on your counter as you stand on a kitchen chair, pissing into your sink while the pest control guy blows up your upstairs bathroom. You didn’t fall in love with her until after she left, and she didn’t accept that love until she no longer wanted it. Specificity, you tell yourself. Specificity is what your life needs, not more of this ridiculous and unfocused existing you do an awful lot of.

            You bought yourself a cactus after she left. You named it too, but you forgot the name on three consecutive days of blind stupor courtesy of Ketel One and just called it Plant. It sat on your dresser and looked vaguely disapproving, if plants could look disapproving, and you remembered the Dmitri Martin bit about being less nurturing than a desert and tried to water the thing.

            You remember your mother, the poor fragile thing, throwing caution to the wind when she screamed at you. You told her you wanted to be a concert pianist, she said you might as well be a crack addict. “It’ll only be a matter of days,” she had muttered angrily at you, scrubbing her hands with surgical precision in a kitchen sink filled with tepid, chalkboard colored water. “It’ll only be a matter of days and you’ll be rolling bums for eight balls and stealing comforters out of Laundromats for warmth on the streets of Seattle.”

            “Why Seattle?” you always asked. She never answered. In her mind, Seattle may as well have been the world capital of squalor, the Timbuktu of downtrodden vagrants.

            She’d never been to Seattle but her uncle had choked to death on his own vomit outside Spokane in a heroin fugue after failing to sell even a single set of cutlery to an urban center of three million and a handful which I supposed in her mind was evidence enough for the validity of her prejudice. “You’ll be murmuring to yourself in the second person,” she said, “you’ll be fantasizing about strangling Anglican priests and trying to make some sense of life you’re Kierkegaard or Marx.”

            The closest my mother ever came to swearing was when she screamed tamales, very loudly and very seriously. The bus had broken down and she was on her way to an interview for a job putting stickers that said “grown in the USA” on oranges coming off Barbadian freighters. You were small and easily frightened and the word burned into your memories because in your New Jersey upbringing you hadn’t ever heard of a tamale and the first time you saw a roach coach helmed by a Mexican man named Salvador called “The Tamale Town” you sniggered to yourself in a worldly way.

            She choked back tears when you left and instead handed you a bundle of what turned out to be two hundred and forty-seven dollars in crumpled fives and ones and a hallmark card with a kitten on it that said “You’re a failure” and on the inside it said “Just Kitten” and she had written her name in careful, tight script. No “love”, no “best wishes” just “Just Kitten” and then “Elaine.” You pinned that card up on the mottled and broken wall when you reached Atlanta and cried so hard your throat hurt and your stomach roiled and then the first thing you did when you left your rank and musty room was to use some of that two hundred some-odd to buy a loaf of bread and some hard salami at a price your mother would have called piracy.

            

The Archbarons

Sorry it's been so long since I posted, life (and college) has swallowed what little free time I scraped together. However, I still have had time to write. Over the next few weeks I'll be posting some of what I've created in the hiatus and perhaps some new things as well, as soon as school lets out. Let me know what you think.

This story is sort of fanciful, and came from watching The Sword in the Stone for the first time in a long time. I don't know if the plot is even viable, but the world is fun to explore. 

            The teakettle shrieked and ran under the stove. Adrian snarled and kicked the black monstrosity the kettle was cowering under. The stove muttered under its breath.

            “Mom!” He shouted. “I’m going to kill this kettle!”

            “Don’t!” His mother’s voice drifted from the tiny parlor. “We can’t afford another.”

            “It doesn’t want to make tea!” Adrian shouted. “It’s a lazy little bugger and never wants to make tea.”

            The kettle lofted a piece of stale cheese at Adrian. Frustrated, he stomped into the parlor and dropped onto the ancient rocking chair opposite the worn divan his mother sat on, knitting cozies to sell.

            “Why can’t we be rich?” He knew there wasn’t an answer.

            “Go get your pole and fish a while, dear.” His mother answered gently, not looking up from her work. “There’s little enough we can do about it.”

            “I wish Dad had never died.”

            “I assume he wishes the same.”

            “I shouldn’t even be here.”

            “It would certainly make things easier if you weren’t hanging about. I could actually get some work done.” The humor in her voice was kind, but it had bite. Adrian sulked as she lowered her work, looking at him wearily.

            “I told you a half-dozen times. Until you realize there will never be enough money if you make me stay with you all the time instead of accepting the kind gentleman Alexander’s proposal, then we will never have enough money.”

            “He’s a stiff.”

            “You’re a brat. Now please, off you go.” She returned to her work.

            Adrian walked out the door, which tried to smack his backside as he left. He turned and spat an epithet at the object, then began to walk through the woods to the creek.

            Purth had been a flourishing land full of commerce and trade and happiness and kindness and wealth, until the Enderfell wars. Two powerful factions of Archbarons had clashed, the Pearl and the Iron. The Iron thought that they deserved more power than even the Empress Dowager because of their hereditary Thaumaturgical abilities. The Pearl thought that the natural balance should be kept as it is, and left the way it was, with the natural ruling order. The Iron were the Empress’s Own, her special forces and elite warriors, executioners. The Pearl were healers, traveling bards, guards. The Pearl were, obviously, wiped out, and the Thaumatic fallout from the battle had enchanted ordinary items for miles. The battle that they had fought had wasted the battlefield, which now was known as Frith’s Folly. The leader of the Pearl Archbarons, Frith, had left the land after watching so many of his friends and family die at the hands of the Iron Archbaron’s Field Marshal Agex. Some said he would return, others said he was dead. Who really knew?

            The little stream was only marginally enchanted, but fish would still on occasion say something sarcastic, or otherwise depart from regular fishly duties. Adrian dropped his line into the azure water and let the silence consume him.

Hungry Jack and Montezuma

                Lee felt the familiar feeling come over him again: the raw, shaky panic that rumbled low in his chest and made his stomach roil. Outside the cell, the caravan was rolling up the gates. Hungry Jack’s armored trucks, salvaged from a forgotten Loomis motor pool and splashed with a crude red crown on their bulldog hoods, idled outside the steel rolling gates. Lee stood and watched out the reinforced chicken wire window as the black flagship armored truck started forward once the gates had opened, followed by the next three.

                Hungry Jack would eat now, Lee thought. Then he and his men would summon the women, spread the wealth they had torn from the dead fists of vagrants, gypsies, tribalists and the homesteaders that stubbornly attempted to carve a home from the thick jungle that boiled from the superrich soil. After that, well, Jack would sate his lusts with his favorite concubines and then call—

                There was the sound of a steel lock sliding back, and the door swung open. Two soldiers stood there, heads wrapped in the damp white headscarves that kept them cool in the unrelenting tropical heat. One carried a machete, the other one of the precious shotguns.

                “Up, you.” One of them roughly grabbed Lee by the arm and hauled him to his feet. The one with the shotgun stayed in the hall. Lee was frog marched out into the dilapidated passageway. Hot sunlight tore through holes in the plaster walls, throwing shards of light on the slick, mossy tiles of the ancient mental hospital. Through these holes creeping vines the thickness of a strong man’s bicep snaked, spreading their roots on the eternally damp surfaces. Through the holes in the walls Lee could see the climbing baobabs with dark fortresses of roots, colossal kapoks and abiu trees with swollen yellow fruits like warning buoys.

                The double doors to what had once been the chief administrator’s personal quarters were thrown open and Lee was shoved forward onto the moldering carpet. Hungry Jack sat on his makeshift dais, four of the largest desks in the building had been pushed together in the cathedral-ceilinged room. Four oriental rugs and a huge papasan chair had been sat atop this, and behind it all a brightly colored, hand-carved wall of wood was nailed to the desks, creating a sort of throne. Two of the concubines lounged at his feet, wearing only long beaded loincloths about their waists. They gazed at Lee with hooded eyes, slight smiles. 

                Hungry Jack claimed to be as old as the Cataclysm. Few believed him, as it would have made him a hundred and fifty years old, but others claimed the Cataclysm had changed more than the atmosphere and the soil. He had no memory of the time before the Cataclysm, Jack claimed. He had been sent to earth as a child of the sun, a god. He had no name and no occupation, but awoke in a factory of some sort. The story, as he told it, was of him standing and seeing a sign before him of his name and his purpose. He had torn down the sign and taken a vehicle, driving until it would not go any further. He wandered, clutching only his banner and a monkey wrench until he reached a small tribe wandering the grasslands that were swiftly turning to jungle. He had taken control, founded his empire in the mental hospital, and put up his banner, his mantra, in the throne room in which he now sat.

                The banner behind Jack said “Hungry Jack: Everybody’s happy when it’s Hungry Jack.”

                “So this is the assassin.” Jack’s eyes were devastatingly lifeless, the blue of a strangled man’s face or a vein under the surface of the skin. His face was dark from the sun, his hair was an unnatural white that stood up in every direction, a strange disconnect with his otherwise youthful appearance. His body rippled with muscle, wearing only military style cargo shorts in camouflage and swimming shoes. Across his chest was a tattooed jolly roger, and dozens of crosses decorated his arms. Each one of those stood for a man he had killed. He lounged in the throne, smiling.