Nasty Conjugation

Here is a story I’ve been working on! It will be included in my forthcoming short story compilation Eleven Stories That End With Unnecessary Violence.

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Drops of rain filter the orange street light to make shooting stars, shards of flame streaking across the glass until they’re snuffed out by the windshield wipers. Another night in the suburbs.

I smell like cigarettes. I’m twenty-five and I’m driving home to Mom and Dad, chewing on a piece of Winterfresh gum so they won’t smell the beer on my breath when I kiss them goodnight. I’m terrified that the world has already ended, that Jesus swept off all the believers, that time has stopped and nobody told me. I roll down the window and spit out the gum. It never lasts more than two minutes, tops, before it just tastes like sweetened spit.

I have two groups of friends, one composed of co-workers and one composed of people I’ve known since high school. The co-workers, for the most part, are still friends with the people they knew in high school, too. We’re all having one big regional high school reunion every night over twenty-five cent wings and five dollars pitchers. At least some of them have their own apartments now. I think about punching the steering wheel, but I’m too bored to be dramatic.

I know that the day is coming, the day when one of us stands up during Happy Hour and proclaims that it’s time. We’re going to all get up in one decisive motion and do it. We’re going to get it done. Our masses will collect, our hearts will combine, the fire will start and we will become the supernova that this place deserves. We’ll burn the place to the ground, burn the ground, and then build it all again without all the bullshit. And then we’ll get another pitcher because this one’s empty. Who wants to throw in?

I just spent maybe an hour trying to finish a poem about uncertainty and motion. It’s hard to write something like that. I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t be writing it, at least not in the way I was trying to. What is beautiful about poetry? I don’t tend to even like poetry, but when I do it is because it has managed to take a universal concept, something huge and sprawling, and express it in something so small and detailed and singular that I can relate. I don’t relate to emptiness or love or desire. Who does? That’s not how people experience things, not in abstract words and generalities. I need to clear my head a little bit, so here are three things. They are things, definitely.

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“I’m not paying you to ask questions. I’m paying you to fill this pony with vanilla ice cream!”

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Well, it looks like my new website has gestated long enough to burst forth from the Interwomb, slimy and imperfect, crying for attention and lusting for blood. Your blood.

I won’t get overexcited and pledge myself to updating every day. We all know how that would go. Rather, I am trying to force myself to write a little every day, and if that daily writing is not offensive to the eye then I will post it here. Any poems or stories I complete will also go up here, along with any random madness that comes upon me.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to leave comments. We like that.

WHOAH EDIT: I forgot to mention, I am slowly adding things I have already written to the archives. You may access them by clicking on the categories to the right of this post.