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.

            

Il Paradiso

            We walked for hours without stop and every time I tried to slow down Belvedere shouted things at me in languages I didn’t understand and I felt alone and tired and misunderstood despite the knotted mass of us together but I kept walking.

            They carried guns and didn’t try to hide them even though we were walking through the most dangerous section of the pass and the tall camera-towers stood on either side and would have called the shadowy helicopters like flies to carrion should they have been seen or even paid attention to but no one did so we kept walking and they kept carrying their guns.

            The ground was flat and hard and broken in parts by large rocks too small to make the road impassable but too large to comfortably ride a cart or car or horse or ATV over so we didn’t seem to make much progress but there was still much progress to be made and if we slowed Belvedere and the rest continued to shout and the young ones marching in the front continued to cry and I continued to swear vengeance in the half-asleep manner of one who has lost his mind or his will aside from that consuming fury.

            (I have no patience) Belvedere would shout in that voice of his that should have belonged to a god or a statesman or someone who would have used it for something else besides that rage that seemed to boil like fire inside of him.

            There was a soothsayer named Salvador that once had sat and muttered by the fire and thrown tiger’s teeth that snapped and clicked together in the air and had scarred his hands as the spirits made the glyphs face up or down to tell us their twisted wills and he had sent the children into battle for us and we had listened to him but now he was walking with us and beside us as though he was one of us but he was not and when we stopped at one of the streams for a blessed break to drink water two of the young men one of whom had lost his brother in the blood and the war spent the precious seconds they could have spent drinking water they would not get again for hours drowning Salvador in the stream and letting his body float downstream.

            I remember Belvedere laughing and cradling his gun like a child as he watched the two young men drowning our soothsayer and letting his body float downstream and I remember hating him the way I had never hated anything or anyone else in my entire life but there was nothing I could do and that made me hate myself.

            They called it paradise but it didn’t look like paradise.

            They locked us in corrugated steel shacks that twelve of us stayed in per bunk and I remember catching Father’s eyes as he tried to get us together again but Belvedere saw our look and singled Father out and dragged him before the rest of us and chained him to the giant stump that stood in the middle of the compound and chained him to it and stripped him of his clothes so that we saw his tattoos and his scars and his shame and Belvedere told us that Father, but he didn’t use that name, was going to die but he would let the gods of nature do the killing and not waste a bullet and I remember the screams far into the night as the tigers that crept through the compound stripped him of flesh and organs.

            They came to me once during the day and they asked me, (do you know the old ways?) I told them I didn’t but they insisted and they told me they knew the scars on my arms and my hands and refused to let me alone until I allowed them that I knew the old ways but if Belvedere or the others found out they would pull my bones from my body like ribs from a pig and they let me alone but made me swear to assist when the day came.

            The day came and they struck at Belvedere but he knew the old ways too and before they could raise their machetes and strike him down he called fire and poison from the trees that surrounded us in Paradise and consumed them like leaves in a forest fire and he ordered their corpses which crunched like cooked pork to be thrown in the clear and blue ocean and I remember that I was carrying a girl named Annamaria but now she weighed no more than a rick of punk wood and when we threw them in the ocean they floated and Belvedere laughed and asked his men politely to shoot their bodies and they did and the bodies exploded across the water like cones from a pine tree and the fish came and ate the pieces.

            (Sic semper ignavus) I remember Belvedere saying which wasn’t right it should have been something else but I cannot think right now but he left and went back to the white and clean house he lived in and we were locked in our steel huts without light or food and in the middle of our filth and starvation two of the young men who had killed Salvador killed again and ate the bodies and descended to madness and the next day was Christmas but we did not celebrate though Belvedere commanded celebration.

           

            

The Savants

I'll admit, this is dark. 

            They landed on Earth on a Tuesday, for some reason I remember that. So many decades of wondering; we had imagined golden bodies and tentacles, green dwarfs or scarlet gods. We wondered about their size, their metabolism, their lusts. When they came, though, they seemed quiet and reasonable, and both terrifyingly and disappointingly like us. They had translucent blue skin, eyes that glowed nebula orange or green or violet, depending on their mood. They spoke quiet, strangely accented languages, but limited themselves to English, French, Spanish, Arabic and Cantonese. We humans, trained by decades of alien movies, expected annihilation. Instead, the domination was short, minimal, and brutal. They had soldiers that we called Samurai who wore sleek black armor that shrugged off tank rounds like a leather jacket shrugs off hailstones. They were nearly invincible. News cameras captured footage of a single Samurai punching holes in tanks, catching armor piercing rounds like footballs and slinging them back. Twenty of them destroyed the human resistance in New York, seven took Berlin, only three strode into Paris. We hoped that was all they had but when one was slain, with a subnuclear ICBM outside Baltimore, thousands dropped out of the sky, falling from their worldship that anchored itself to our moon and disrupted tides. They quietly, almost apologetically, dragged world leaders into the streets and blew their brains out with weapons that shot glowing slugs. Several of their chieftains politely arranged a press conference and explained that Earth was no longer ours, and to avoid decimation and sterilization we would quietly resume our business and allow them to go about the business of extracting the minerals they needed from our core. Afterwards, they would allow us some measure of autonomy. Their name in their language was long and musical. “Call us Savants,” they said.

They didn’t mean any of it.

Millions died. Those who resisted the massive, gaping holes they tore in the surface of the earth were put down like rabid dogs. The skies were blackened with soot.

            I don’t know who discovered the properties their blood carried. No one ever knows these things. We called them Cannibals. A few fighters in Saint Petersburg managed to kill a Savant who had removed his armor and perhaps in some orgy of bloodlust, drank the blood. They became godlike. They moved nearly faster than people could follow, ran on walls, gained strength beyond natural abilities. They attacked six more Savants and tore them apart. They stole their weapons and assaulted a shuttle heading for the worldship.

            And then the effects wore off. They had assumed the effects lasted forever and hadn’t bothered to put on a samurai’s armor. They were slaughtered like animals when their reflexes slowed, their motor skills returned to normal. They weren’t able to raise the guns the Savants carried like pistols.

            More followed suit, stealing bodies of Savants and draining them of blood they then injected into their arm like heroin. The long-term effects became apparent. They went crazy. Cannibals craved Savant blood. They snapped and snarled. They became feral and would lose themselves in that place in their mind, the eternal ecstasy of the bloodrush. They would hurl themselves, naked and furious and totally without the protection of armor or bloodrush at an armored Samurai, leaving us to dejectedly hose them off the streets. If they had enough blood, though, they could be kept sane enough to keep fighting the way they had. We stole more weapons from them, because as it is with any species, the ones who know best how to kill them belong to their same species.

            I heard about the Cannibals and their fight to get the Savants’ God-King in the worldship, but I continued to hold to my strategy of remaining quiet and going about my business.

Everything changed when the Savants found my wife and daughter had a rare type of gene they wanted for their genetic museum back on their homeworld. They broke into my house at one in the afternoon, found my wife and child there with me, and while one of them smiled gently and held me back, dissected them on the living room floor and harvested them like cuttlefish. I still remember the Savant who did it tying his golden topknot back before surgically laying my still-living wife open from clavicle to pelvis, ignoring her screams as they snipped her organs from their places and sealed them in plastic. Then, my daughter, my child. I went away. I remembered holding her hand as she skipped to her first day of school. I remembered watching her blow out the candles on her fourth birthday. I remembered teaching her how to say her alphabet. And now, along with those, I remember a blue-skinned Savant snapping her ribs as he opened her like a box, taking out her tiny, perfect organs and hosing the blood off of them as she screamed for me, until he took her lungs too.

People ask me why I fight, why I am a Cannibal. I tell them it’s because I’m crazy.

Maybe I am.

Cactus

            Cactus

A story told about a man from many aspects of his own writing including letters, emails, texts, facebook posts, and more. All backstory is related through written accounts exampled above, all frontstory after finding the cactus and beginning to make a positive change in his life is chronicled purely through action and forward facing or present introspection. 

It was a stupid, stunted, weird little thing, but somehow Brandon Mosley knew it would be different. The cactus was about as tall as a bookmark, swollen at the top in a toadish bulge as though someone had planted a particularly unfriendly gourd bottom side up in a tacky yellow flowerpot. He found it outside the coffee shop before unlocking (precisely at 5 a.m.) sitting damply on the step in the indigo shade of a Nashville dawn.

            He hadn’t had much at all to own for himself. A dinky studio apartment kept his shabby belongings shouldered together on the fifth floor of an apartment that lacked even one positive aspect good real estate should possess.

            He picked up the cactus, enjoying the weight of the cool, damp ceramic against his palm. He gently touched a needle at the top, feeling the tiny sting. The bell rang as he shouldered the door open and stepped into the darkness.

            “That’s a good pet for you, Bran.” Alice was twenty-one, a graphic design major at Vanderbilt and weekend evening barista. The morning regulars had come and gone, the shop rich with the smell of French roasts and the rattle of mixers, the muted roar of the milk steamer. Now it was quiet, nearly dead, Brandon’s shift slowing to a close.

            “Why?” The cactus had drawn some glances, the occasional comment from patrons as it sat next to the cash register.

            “I dunno.” She flipped her highlighted hair and made herself a venti macchiato with extra caramel. Brandon studied the comment the way an archeologist might a new artifact: turning it this way and that in his head.

            “You should change the pot, though. It’s ugly.”

            “I don’t really know anything about plants,” Brandon admitted. It hadn’t occurred to him you could change a plant’s pot. It seemed an immutable aspect of the plant, like trying to change its root structure. As soon as he mentally admitted this, the thought seemed silly.

            “It’s a cactus,” Alice said, perching on the stool behind the counter. “How hard can it be?”

            At home Brandon booted his laptop. It was an old, stuttering, flickering antique of a thing, as much a relic of college as his spring rush t-shirt and dusty game console. Cactuses were hardy, he found, but not invincible. They needed some water, but not too much. Sunlight, but not an abundance of it. He placed the little thing on his windowsill and stared at it a moment before pulling a bottled water out of the fridge and pouring a little into the soil. After contemplating his new roommate a moment, he drank from the bottle.

            Elyse

            A Poem

            Brandon Mosley

            You, of golden skin and azure eye

            I, of darkened brow and shaded demeanor

            Rich with gloom but lightened

            By your elemental presence

            I knew nothing

            You touched my cringing skin

            Reeled me close

            Like a fish

            My emotions tight

            Bruises beneath purpled skin

            Then

            You left

            Moonheart

            Spoken Word

            Brandon Mosley

            You can race the moon two hundred miles across the sand, but we’ll never know the true impact of a compass against ocean waves. Brokenhearted people staring at the same celestial body night after night dreaming in tears of a world where the loneliness of a lunar goddess does not somehow mirror their own. The stillness of a dead pond, rotten wood torn straight from the heart of a stilled oak unbroken by the peaceful distraction of ten thousand souls breathing their last in an undiscovered unison. In this hope I draw my breath that some foggy morning the brassy lungs of portly Zephyr shall unstill my curtains and draw new light into the bleakness of a dying man’s unglazed eye.

            

Salazar the Wizard

Here's a story beginning in the myth-punk style of The Arabian Nights.

            Salazar stood quietly in the darkness, contemplating his sins. The manacles clattered around his feet as he shifted his weight. The grate high above remained impassive, like the heavens he had cried out to for help. The gods didn’t listen; no, they feasted on human suffering like vultures on rotting flesh. They were waiting for more of his suffering--it must be as sweet as mangos to them. Salazar refused them even that much pleasure and thus remained silent.

            The grate shifted high above with the deep scraping sound of stone on stone. Light sprayed down through the steam.

            “Have you repented, blasphemer?” The voice called. Salazar didn’t even deign to raise his face to the light as he remained silent.

            There was muttering above. Several of the elders must have been there, he thought.

            “Blasphemer, is breath yet in your body?”

            Let them wonder.

            A ladder spooled down, swinging gently near the place his chains had been bolted into the bedrock. There was grunting, far above. Salazar muttered strings of arcana into the moist air, feeling the words fall like pebbles, entirely bereft of the crackling energy he had once commanded. His rings had been stolen, his pendants destroyed, his staves burned.

            A fat, sweating man with a dirty beard woven with silver charms reached the bottom rung and shakily stepped off the ladder, brushing his silken shirt down over his ponderous belly before turning to regard Salazar imperiously.

            “Blasphemer, you answer me not.”

            “Burn in eternity.” Salazar murmured. The light was dim, but even so the man’s face visibly reddened.

            “You dog!” He shouted, his high voice ringing off the slick walls. “Even now you speak more blasphemies against your priests.”

            He produced a key that appeared to be more dagger than instrument and thrust it into the massive padlock at his feet as if he wished it were Salazar’s throat. The lock snapped open with a metallic scream. Salazar stepped away from the stone post as composedly as a cat, towering over the short man.

            “We have arrested your magics, you are without your potions and poisons and elixirs, you foul creature. Kill me and your death will take a thousand years. Up the ladder with you.”

            Salazar climbed the ladder, luxuriating in the pull at his once dormant muscles.