(Don't show up drunk, though.  I want to be clear about that.)

Rock wrote:

Cool. Good luck, let us know how it goes! 👍

Thanks. Probably terribly.

I'm torn between choosing one of the one's I already feel sort of works, because that would be easier, and choosing one that I know definitely doesn't work, but has potential. Reading things in public has an amazing effect of making you grasp what you have to do with a piece to make it not suck shit. And if I hope to rescue some of the deformed babies I've created, these are the things I've got to do. Get up on stage and welcome failure.

But I'll probably chicken out and go with one that I know will fly to some degree. Then be mad at myself for being a coward.

4  

My attention had now been drawn to Sarah. Contemplating her like the trees outside. Staring long enough to see all the birds in her. Until they begin to stare right back at me.   

It was good to see her like this. Would normally only catch flitting details of her life coming out of her in pieces, like a broken transmission. Usually quickly turned off like a song on the radio she didn‘t want to ever hear again. Her childhood something she would only speak of slowly as if reading from a Chinese food menu. Running her finger along the words, repeating fragments of memories phonetically, possibly worried they might not even be hers. Pensively uttered, as if they might conjure terrible dishes of pigs blood soup to the table if she said the wrong ones aloud.  

But today she came down the stairs and talked for a long time. Long enough she seemed like both a new and an old person as we pushed ourselves through the screen door into much needed fresh air. And as we began to work our way up a grassy trail, she was talking and I was listening and the leaves and branches above us moved back and forth. The two of us moving steadily towards a stable full of horses where the sunlight also smelled of horses. Wandering in the light slightly dazed, looking around and almost laughing until stumbling across a grizzled man sitting on an overturned pail and looking up at us. A chewed-upon nose and some soft sagging eyes seeming surprised we had found him here. Looking like he had fallen off a boxcar and no idea where he could have come from, until Sarah began to talk to him like an old friend.  

“Bob”  

It seems Bob is the owner of the place. The man we were paying to let us stay here for the weekend. Taking a nip of whiskey behind a bush, then rising to talk to us about a special place we should go and try and find if we’re out to walk. A good place for couples. Pointed the direction we should go, just around the fence, through a clearing, out across a big field where he had put a bench for us to sit in the middle of it all.  

“It’s not too far. I put a flag there so you’ll see it clearly. A nice place to finish off a bottle of wine”.   

We tell him we’ll do our best to find it. Stumble forward, unsure exactly where we should be going. Pointing at everything we see and not too concerned we don’t have a bottle of wine with us. Or if we ever find our way to anywhere ever again. 

6  

What had we been arguing about? Had we been arguing? Think I can remember things getting real tense around the barbecue before I was sent in here to find the butter. Or whatever it was she had needed me to find. A cheese grater? A meat thermometer? Just standing there, opening the same drawers over and over, thinking about everything that was burning on the grill outside as I remained no help at all. Thinking of all of the other errands she had sent me on, and how much time I had spent just standing around looking confused as our dinner was laid to waste by these flames that kept rising higher and higher. Maybe only sent in here so she didn’t have to look at me anymore.  

I wanted to scream that I had told her the lobster would be too much. Had warned that the steaks and asparagus and potatoes in tinfoil were already beginning to overwhelm things. Could already see the rivets popping off our evening as Sarah began realizing that dinner was getting out of hand. At least laughing at the tragedy of it at first. How hopeless cooking was in our state. But then quickly beginning to boil over, when she realized there were no reinforcements to come rushing in and save things. That everything might burn. That every cry for help she let out, was to be greeted with me still stuck in my lawnchair, telling her I can’t deal with it.  That tonight she said it’s her turn to cook. That I don’t know anything about barbecues and she knew that and covering my face in hopes of just focusing on the music I can hear playing inside.  

“My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums”  

Trying to make out all the words. Hearing them better than ever before. But soon realizing I had to get up and do something to be of some service. It didn’t matter if I had been right about the lobster because I would need to find the butter immediately. Or the cheese grater. Or the meat thermometer. Anything I might come across in this strangers kitchen that might save me. Keep the evening from no longer being a place I wanted to sit around in.  

“Did you find it? David, did you find it?”  

Put the dog on a leash and walk away for a bit. Walk up a hill and stand under a tree and look down on the road that no cars ever came down. Just cows on the otherside. A moment that is unspeakably beautiful. Just me and the dog listening to the slow tolling of the bells hanging around their neck. A sound that seems attached to time itself as they slow the whole world down with how leisurely they move down the road. Just slow enough in hopes of correcting things.

Finally giving Sarah the time she would need to rescue our dinner. Make it so she didn’t hate me late into the evening for doing nothing as it got slowly ruined.  

And when I returned back to the cottage with the dog by my side, she was smiling in the kitchen. Had food on plates. Everything looked fine and we were both hungry. The dog too, as he watched us eat.  

Maybe we hadn’t been arguing at all.  

Maybe those wonderful cows had saved everything. 

SYLVAIN WITHOUT A STORY  

1  

Sylvain! Has come all the way from the mountainous regions of France. Mostly to stand in dorm room doorways. Silently leaning with his hands pushed deep into the pockets of his jeans and wearing the same blue sweatshirt he’s had on since the first day of class.   

Doesn’t have a story of his own to fit in. More than content to just be off to the side, smiling and squinting. The kind of face a child could doodle on a scrap of paper. A simple face like a cartoon, always watching our pre-drink rituals with slight bemusement, but never coming out with us. Saying nothing at all unless someone shoots him a question out of nowhere.  

“What kind of ladies do you like, Sylvain?”  

Ones with hairy armpits.  

“You got deodorant in France?”  

He says the French prefer to smell natural.  

“You a virgin?” 

 He isn’t. He’s fornicated once.  

“Did she say yes?”  

In his heavy French accent, he drawls out a long, long “Noooooo-ooooo”. Smiling a little more. Squinting a little tighter. Then shuffling off down the hallway as our cabs arrive. All of us howling with laughter at how Sylvain never disappoints.   

“Did he just tell us he’s a rapist?” 
 
“I think so”  

“Do you think there are wanted posters of Sylvain all over France?  

“Oh God I hope so”  

And as we hit the bars, we hold our drinks high above our head in celebration of crazy French engineers coming across the ocean to say the kind of things you talk about for decades to come. To stand in doorways. To make universities worth coming to.  

2  

Or maybe Sylvain wants to be part of a story after all. He had been standing in a doorway, but this time stinking of booze. Leaning a little heavier into the door frame. Hands a little deeper in the pockets of his jeans, as if holding onto something in there that was keeping him from toppling over. Still wearing the same blue sweatshirt as he suddenly lunged forward and grabbed Garrett by the shoulders and threw him against the wall. Putting his face close to his. Still squinting but no longer smiling.  

Maybe Sylvain had been asked too many questions that night. Maybe he had a bottle of vodka hidden somewhere in that completely empty room of his.

Maybe Garrett deserved whatever beating he got.

It was, after all, the second time that week Garrett had been attacked by someone on the floor. Last weekend, it had been Alberto, who choked him on the carpet after he said he looked like Fred Flintstone one too many times.   

“Fuck Alberto, he does look like Fred Flintstone”, he said after that attack.   

“And fuck Sylvain, he smells bad”, he said that night after Sylvain stumbled back to his room to vomit in his closet, and not come out of his room for a few days. The stench behind that door only increasing by the day. “I can smell his cock from across the room”  

No one had heard what Garrett had said to get Sylvain to act this way, but it didn’t matter. For the rest of the year, no one would let the Frenchman stand in their doorway ever again. He seemed dangerous and they would chase him away if he suddenly appeared there to squint and smile. Would tell him they were sick of him stinking up their rooms. To have a shower, for God’s sake. To change that fucking shirt.  

And Sylvain would just wander away, with that bemused look on his face. Happy with his natural smells. Maybe a rapist. 

NAN BRAIN  

1: No Corndogs for Me and Susie Primeau  

My grandmother asks if I remember my good friend Susie Primeau. All the good times me and her used to have walking through the midway. Going on all the rides together. Everything lit up. Eating corndogs. Even though I would never eat a corndog.  

“Do you still ever see Susie Primeau?”  

I don’t tell her I never knew her, and she would be an old lady now anyways. Keep it to myself how it was never her yelling to go faster on the Polar Bear Express. Not her full-grown body crushing my tiny bones to dust as we spun around and around. She was already grown up by the time I was born and probably not hanging out with little boy’s she’d never met before.   

She had been my Aunt Andreas friend. They must have been the eaters of corndogs. But not since they were little kids, back in the 1960s.  

I could have told her all this, tried to clarify things, but I kept it to myself too.  

“She was never a pretty girl. I don’t know what you saw in her, really”  

I don’t even know what Susie Primeau looks like or if she would have been my type, but I can understand how my grandmother might mistake my friend for her. Every year, taking Garrett with us, and him already burdened with the defeated energy of a middle-aged woman. Probably complaining about how much his feet hurt as we walked through the fair. How the rides made him dizzy. Picking the tomatoes of his subs and complaining that he asked for no tomatoes and looking like this sandwich had ruined his life.  

I tell her I agree that Susie Primeau wasn’t very pretty, then remind her of how Garrett would sadly be sitting there with his sub. Forlorn in the food building. How she always found it peculiar he would eat the same thing every year, even with so much else for him to choose from.   Hope this might be something she remembers.   

“Oh, yes, Garrett”, she says, slightly dazed at hearing the name. “Do you still see Garrett anymore?”  

“Sometimes, yes”  

“He was always a little strange, wasn’t he”, she says, softly, trying to remember if it was Susie Primeau or Garrett she was now talking about. “Does he still live in that same place. He’s alone isn’t he? Men like him have it really hard. It's such a lonely life. They are ashamed of who they are”  

I say, not really. Tell her Garrett is completely fine all by himself.   

“Did Garrett know Susie Primeau too?”, she asks. “He must be very lonely, mustn’t he? Such a strange boy”  

I tell her no, they never knew each other, but if she’s concerned, we could always set the two of them up on a date. Let out a laugh so she will know this is something to laugh at.  

For a moment, there is only a clucking sound at the back of her throat as she considers this possibility. Her false teeth moving around in there somewhere. Loosening from her gums.  

“Hmmm, no, I don’t think that would work out. She was never very good looking, and Garrett is....you know”  

I tell her she’s right, it was probably a stupid idea. That maybe we should just keep watching the television and stop talking. But she seems to prefer to stare out the balcony window, remembering so many things that never happened, and nearly nothing that did. Looking pale, looking weak. Her hair flat and her clothes too big for her shrinking body.  

She looks from the window, back to me. “Do you still ever see Susie Primeau?”  

I keep looking at the television.  

2: Loose Change/Dead Cockroaches  

Soon all that will be left in that brain of hers will be two things.   

She will never forget the sound of dead cockroach shells laying at the bottom of a vase in Johnny MacMasters apartment. She’d come to keep the old man company and, before she left, give the vase a little shake to check if they were still in there.  

“Not sure why. I didn’t like the sound, but I would shake it anyways”  

She will also never forget exactly how much money the paramedics found in the pocket of the man she saw jump off a bridge. Watched him come all the way down as she sat next to the river with her brother. Saw his body land, twisted around the trunk of a tree, grass in his teeth, and 35 cents in his pocket.  

“I don’t know why, but I didn’t like knowing that. Can’t remember who told me, but someone did, and it made everything worse. It seemed the kind of thing that should have been kept secret. That it should have just been left in his pocket and never counted at all”  

As the years go on, she still talks of the sound cockroaches make when they are dead and you shake them around. Will mention the thirty-five cents in the pocket of the man with grass in his teeth. Never forgets either. Says these stories the same way, every time.   

But as we drive by our old home, she doesn’t even look at it. Doesn’t turn her head. Seems not to remember the fifty years we left inside of it.   

Mabye not enough dead cockroaches.   

Maybe too many quarters to fit in any one pocket.   

3: Love Forever Nan  

It’s Christmas and Nan is on the couch not saying much. Not opening any of the gifts piled at her feet. Looking around at Aunt Andrea’s apartment, where we now come for holiday dinners. Maybe wondering if she ever lived here. Maybe unsure where she just came from.   

When she realizes I am sitting across from her, she slowly reaches into her shirt pocket and pulls out an envelope she’s had twisted up inside of it. She hands it to me, saying I don’t have to open it if I don’t want to. She has written on the outside, her handwriting shaky, looking like it almost couldn’t make it all the way to the end of the three words she has written there.   

I don’t open it until I get home. Inside, I find some dollar bills, crumpled up so badly they kept the envelope from properly closing. Looking like they had been pulled out from between the cushions of a couch. Like it was all she could find lying around the house.   

I feel like I shouldn’t count it but I do. Forty five dollars. Two twenties and one five. Pushed weirdly down into an envelope that says “Love Forever Nan” in such bad handwriting I can barely read it.   

Forty-five dollars.  

It’s a number that lodges in my throat. A number she probably wasn’t sure of when she put it in here. That she didn't count herself, only knowing that she had to give me something.

A number I can’t stop crying over, even though I’m not sure why. 

Too bad Yarn didn't get the invite to this party, pal.

DYING VAMPIRE VS. FAT COW   

Not even my vampire uncle thinks he is going to live forever anymore. Maybe it’s the cane he uses because of the drop foot. And the rotten back. And the rickets. How he can’t get up and down the stairs that lead to his apartment above a store anymore without a struggle. How he makes me go up ahead of him because he doesn’t want me behind and watching him strangle the banister. Having to pause at every step to catch his breath. Yelling at me that he's left his door unlocked and that I should go through it already and stop watching him.   

Wait in there on the couch for him. For him to eventually make it all the way up here. Come through the door and into the living room, very slowly, saying ‘fuck’ with every step. ‘Fuck fuck fuck all of this fucking shit’  

You can just tell looking at him, that he isn’t going to live forever.   

Maybe it’s the hair that makes it so we can no longer pretend it is the kind of thing an undying vampire would ever have on his head. A combover clearly unfit for the undead. One long hair, died jet black, wound round and round his pale little waxen head. Cowering at the top of his scalp as if a crucifix has been thrust in its direction.  

And now here he is, slowly lowering himself onto his couch. Showing his clenched teeth. Maybe a smile, but probably not.  

“Ha!”  

At least he can still let out his short hoarse laugh. The same one he’s had for centuries of blood sucking and cocaine sniffing. Of telling me he’d never grow old, but then grow old anyways.  

“Ha!”  

Laughing at the human predicament. The hopelessness of it all. But mostly laughing about how he’s about to call his sister-in-law, my Aunt Andrea, a fat cow.  

He loves to call her that.  

Possibly the last thing left to keep him young. Even if it’s also not working. 

3  

Evan returns frightened. From wherever he was, a bedroom or bathroom, leaving his anger over my taste in music down the hall and coming back scared. I can hear it in his voice as he returns to his place on the couch. Rests his cane against his shelf of records he seems suspicious of me ever nearing again.  

“I got used to going wherever I wanted. All over the city. But I can’t go anywhere anymore. I don’t see anybody. My legs are finished. I’m just on this couch”  

His voice sounds different. He says no one ever visits. That almost everyone he knows is dead, so of course no one visits. Maybe only me left to not bother.  

“Everyone. Dead. All of them. Drugs. Suicide. More drugs. Now just you. And you’re here now but you won’t be later. Maybe should have had children of my own”  

When I get up to change the record he wants to know if Sarah is lonely. If I think Cathy and her might become friends one day. If Sarah might want to come down and go for walks with her from time to time. Keeps saying he’s sure they’d get along. Both like walking. Looking in shop windows. Things he wouldn’t do, even if he still could use his legs. They could be friends, maybe.  

Didn’t I think so too?   

Before I can answer, he sees me learning over to look for another record and his old anger returns.   

“Pick something good this time, you little rat”  

I am immediately flooded with relief. I recognize this voice. My uncle is back. Do my best to make sure I choose something I know he’s going to hate. Keep him in this state until Cathy and Sarah can return. And when they do, he’s already begun hissing about fat cows, and power of attorney and how we’re all going to get ripped off by Andrea on the inheritance.  

“Not like I’ll be here. Your grandmother is going to outlive me for sure. Probably going to outlive all of us. But if she doesn’t, it’s going to be up to you to keep an eye on that fat cow, because I won’t be here”  

And now he’s got his cane back in his hand. His hand a fist. Pounding the cane into the floor. Driving the people working in the store below us nuts.  

Maybe not much of a vampire anymore. But still a terrible neighbour. Still a pest. Still driving everyone crazy, even without any good legs to get around on. Still the uncle I've always known, even if maybe he will die one day, after all.

2 ‘ 

Norma didn’t know much about dwarves. Just knew their lives were hard. Would sometimes talk of how they always, ultimately, commit suicide. Famous dwarves even, but never sure exactly which ones. Would point to any she saw in a movie and tell her grandson “Do you know he shot himself in the head”. Or maybe “That one hung himself”. Never really sure what they did to end it all, but always claiming they were on drugs. Would have drunk themselves to death anyways.  

“And who could blame them”, she said, quietly, mostly to herself. Would explain to the boy this was not a good world for the short. Shook her head, and said it wasn’t fair, but you needed to be much taller than that. Grew particularly concerned when she thought of how tough it must have been on those little legs, being drunk all the time.  

“They already walk kind of wobbly, for Christ’s sake”  

But she understood their struggle. Had tremendous empathy and would nearly look sad as she claimed she knew what needed to be done.  

“You’ve got to sterilize them”, she would sometimes start to mutter from the end of the couch. Very sure of herself. Usually a dwarf suddenly appearing on the television for her to stare very seriously at. “Otherwise, they're just going to keep killing themselves. What other choice is there?”  

And the dwarf on the TV would start to dance.   

And Norma frowned.  

“It’s the only humane thing to do”  

Her grandson nodded. Agreeing with Norma, as he always did. Wondering exactly how short was too short. If he was tall enough yet not to worry and who else she might find too sad to live.   

3  

Sometimes I would sit on my mothers lap and help her read.   

“What’s that say?” she’d ask, pointing at a word just short enough for me to understand. And I’d do my best to explain.  

But sometimes, a word even I didn’t understand would appear on the page we were reading. That somehow my mother would recognize as I read it out loud to her and it would now be her turn to explain.  

“Vinnie Barbarino?”  

“Oh, he’s gorgeous”, she’d squeal, then immediately look away from the page, as if she didn’t want to learn anything more that day. Even though it seemed like we were starting to get somewhere.  

So there I would stay. On her lap and forced to repeat the word back to her, slowly, over and over. Make her follow my finger. Try and get her to read it aloud herself. Needed to do whatever I could to help her. Had been hearing about who my grandmother wanted to sterilize next and if I could just get my mother to start reading on her own, maybe she could stay safe.   

But needed to work quick. My grandmother already had a plan. A good way to identify the undesirables.

“There needs to be a test and you need to get a certain score before you can have kids. You’ve got to be able to prove you can look after them yourself, and not expect others to do it for you”  

I had to make sure no one would suspect my mother. Or that she’d be prepared if someone pointed her out and made her prove she was smart enough. That I wouldn’t have to be erased if she got all the questions wrong. Ate her pencil instead of answering anything.  

My grandmother thought it a very serious problem. In particular, would mention her concerns whenever I returned home from visiting my mother. Acted like she could see her influence on me. Maybe thinking I might need to take a test now too. Suggesting that maybe she should be in consultation with the government. Had lots of ideas of how to best put her plan to use.  

“You’ve got to give it to them when they are young. Before they can start getting themselves pregnant. They can’t help themselves and then it’s too late. As soon as they can, kids all over the place. No one looking after them”  

And so it was up to me to help my mother. Read words to her slowly.  

“Vin-nie Bar-ba-reee-no"  

And my mother just wanting to know if there is a picture anywhere.  Says the word doesn’t look nearly as good as he does. Starting to get angry when I keep sticking the page in her face every time she looks away. Clearly no idea what my grandmother has planned for her. What she would have already done long ago, if she’d only had the chance.  

4  

Christopher hasn’t been given the test yet. My grandmother hasn’t even seen him for years ands so he has been left free to keep getting them all pregnant. These girls who would barely talk. In houses where there was glass in the carpet for babies to step on. Where asses are wiped with whatever loose sock could be found laying on the bathroom floor.  

His first girl disappearing with his first born while he was at work. Off to a farm where there was an electric fence Baby Joey Ramone would always grab with both hands, and get shocked down into the horse-dung filled mud. Soon disappearing him even further into the wilderness once she realized Christopher knew where she was living. How he was planning to come rescue his son from more electric shocks. Probably drunk. Probably screaming about something. Taking Baby Joey Ramone deeper and deeper into the woods to avoid ever having to deal with it.  

The next one, the same thing. Taking the kid back to her mother’s house, where there was no one to notice when she became schizophrenic. Couldn’t look after herself. Kept letting Fast Eddie out the side door like a cat who needed to roam the streets and mark his territory. No one tending to his lazy eye, which was crawling further and further into the back of his head. Maybe a better place for him to be looking than the house his mother took him to. A place where the lack of light was comforting, not dingy and frightening and making it hard to avoid stepping on all the shit covered socks that littered the carpet.  

And of course, the dwarf pregnant almost immediately. A condition that made her walk even slower than normal, just as he liked it. Harder and harder for us to let her keep up with us as we moved down the freezing streets, eating bags of fast food hamburgers and needing a drink. My brother convinced this one would stick around. That she would have to. Finally able to raise one of his boy’s to adulthood. That he was ready to be a father now but, right now, telling her to walk faster. Getting angry because the beer store was about to close, and we were walking so goddamned slow.  

Mayonnaise on his chin. Everyone looking at us.   

5  

I ask him if he’s worried his son will be a dwarf too.  

He makes a long sound to show he’s thinking. I don’t think he ever answers.  

“If he is, it’s going to be a hard life for him, you know”  

He’s still got mayonnaise on his chin. Probably from earlier.  

“Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”  

I make sure he’s aware he’ll be the only one who can reach the cupboards. That his whole life is going to be getting things off countertops for them. How he’s going to keep having to get off the couch.   That it was going to be a hard life for everyone.  

He says he didn’t think of that. Gets up. Puts something into the microwave. Stands there waiting for it to get hot. Sees his future in there.  

6  

Christopher quickly realized his brother was right. House keys and drinking glasses and packs of cigarettes and everything else she needed always in places too high to reach. Always calling out his name when she misplaced the stepping stool he’d bought her. Always calling out for him as soon as he got back to the couch. Calling from the kitchen. Calling from the upstairs bathroom. Calling out “Christopheeerrrr, Christopheeerr” until it got him pulling out a knife and screaming at her that he’d just sat down. Was he not allowed to sit down?  

“Literally, just sat down”, he explained to the judge, hoping maybe he’d understand how all he had wanted was to relax for a second. How he had been getting things for her all day. That she probably didn’t even look for the stepping stool he bought for her. That he hated the way she called out his name. But the judge wasn’t interested in this line of defense and asked him to stand up, just like everyone else was always doing. Waiting for him to get to his feet before sentencing him.   

Three months. And all because he couldn’t sit down. Even a court of law, telling him this wasn’t allowed.   

He should have listened to his brother, who always seemed to know his decisions were bad before he did. Was smart in a way he didn’t know how to be. Stuck forever with the kind of brain that thought dating a dwarf would be easier. That being so much taller might make him some kind of king.  

But even in a house full of them, he could never win. Bottom of the barrell. Only slightly better than the stepping stool. Didn’t have to go looking for him. Would always come when he was called.   

And only some of the time carrying a knife.