A Little Bit More

During my lunch break, Vince and I walk to the café just down the road—the same café where I met Finn. He loops my arm through his and pretends I am his daughter, never mind that I have almond eyes and fire hair. He orders a double and I ask for Chai, but wish for a beer. Clanking, the cooler still sits wedged in the corner, though all the windows are closed today. A few locals sit on barstools, a man with a map and a Mac sits in the corner, his crinkled poncho crunched under his ass. Vince and I don't talk. He holds my hand and that says "It'll be alright." His eyes are bright and he is winking back something, maybe a tear. That says, "I love you."

I shouldn't be such a hypocrite. I know it. But, when I look at Vince I see football and meatloaf, a man with an arm around my mother's waist, hair grayed at the temple. I see a family without fracture. No Audreys or Aubreys or Step-Ford, Platinum card women with high heels and high almighty sentiment.

The last fragment of day shimmers by in a drugged fog. I move about the kitchen like the undead and serve up orders with Barbie's stolen plastic smile. The rain soaks through my jacket, leaves my hair clinging to my cheeks, and my hands purple. When I reach my apartment, I hear Sullivan yowling. The door is open, my TV gone, my windows smashed, rainwater puddled up and around like a retention pond.

I reach for the phone and find it disconnected. My computer is gone as well.

~

"Everything."

"Two months of revisions."

"All of my grad school samples."

I want to cry. I want to scream and hit things with knives and stab people with baseball bats. I want the world to stop spinning and drop like a broken elevator into an endless shaft. Everyone stupid would be crushed underneath, trapped between Antarctica and hell. Death by cold or death by fire.

A Piece of Something: Fiction

It is the summer of 1994 and I am 5. We live in California. Sunshine drips from the sky, soaking through my porcelain skin, drenching it with color. I am running through cool sprinklers, then I am alone in the rose garden. My grandfather planted eighty-five bushes in honor of my grandmother—the one he beat to death. At dusk, I like to wander in and around the blooming plants in search of fairies. I never find any. When I am twelve, I realize that nothing is magical. I begin to plan my future. My father loses his job, our minivan is repossessed, my mother begins working at Wal-Mart, and my brother is regularly harassed by a neighborhood bully. Fights and boys and bad ideas seem to flock toward me. I am vindictive, cruel, beautiful.

~

Here, in this city. Now, in 2010.

Nothing is real. Yet, people have you believe that they tell the truth. They want you to love them, to love the autumn sky, to sing and drink and sink to the lowest depths. They want you to be on their level. I try. I tried. I am trying. I tell Finn.

I tell him, "I don't believe you."

~

Sometimes, I think the world is flat. Not the whole world, just my little piece. When I seal that envelope with the payment for my college loans inside, I think I am falling. Then I remember the world is round, and everything begins again. It doesn't have to be money—though that slips through my fingers like hot sand. Other times, the sensation is induced by the squealing of squad cars moving rapidly up the cobble stone, or the feeling of cold porcelain against my skin after a rough night. I am always falling.