Tagged: fiction
Good Writing Compels Writing
Earlier today, while on shift on this day of unflyable weather, I began trudging through the Gateway to the Great Books essay by Friedrich Schiller. I began it back on November 14th. He calls it, On Simple and Sentimental Poetry.
It is a far longer entry than all others in this volume, Volume 5, “Critical Essays.” And it is rather boring. His vocabulary is far broader than mine and he employs it from on high, without looking down, without slowing down. But I wanted to finish the article, so I reread the introduction, re-caged my gyros, and plodded on.
Finally, the relationship blossomed. Check out this criticism of a man (hitherto unknown to me), Klopstock.
His muse is chaste.
Wow. Stops you in your tracks, no?
Got me to smile and want to share the sentence with you all. Hope it was worth it.
Onward and upward.
Found: A Tale of Unexpected Reunion
“Yeah, housekeepers don’t really keep anything like that. Most people wouldn’t drive back for a sock,” I heard the receptionist reply to me, damningly, over the phone.
“But I’m a regular. It’d be no trouble for me,” I retorted unthinkingly.
“Well, they wouldn’t know that,” she continued, unmoved. Then, to be nice, “So don’t forget your underwear next time either, cause they’ll pitch that too, haha!”
“Haha. That’s a deal,” I replied in kind, though maliciously pouting on the inside. See, I knew all about dirty necrophiliac hotel housekeepers. Throw forgotten socks and underwear away? Right. Sure. If by “throw away” she meant, “sniffed every ounce of man scent out of them while dreaming of someday being friends with George Clooney,” then I could believe they “threw them away.”
I wasn’t about to cry, but I did hold back a torrent of emotion. Frustration and disbelief being the order of the day. How could I—I, Pete Deakon!—forget one of the greatest socks ever assembled on this side of heaven in my hotel room? Phone chargers and loose change, that’s my calling card. Not one of the best socks ever.
Its warmth was unmatched. Its thickness, divine. And when my foot first entered it, I don’t mean each time, I mean I remember the first time I put it on, I swear I saw the face of Jesus.
But now it was gone.
How many times could I look in all the places it could’ve run off to? I triple checked the drawer. I checked both the washer and the dryer at least four times—nothing. I checked my t-shirts. Sometimes, as you know, a sock has been known to get *inside* the garment and I’m not just talking polyester gym wear. Even cotton shirts have been known to swallow a sock or two.
Still nothing.
Days went by.
Every time I passed my suitcase—the offending article—I’d nonchalantly open the lid and double-check what was inside. I mean, surely I wasn’t expecting to find anything, especially after so many days and so much effort.
Late last night, however, a novel angle came to mind. I remembered that my wife, at random, scoops up my clothes from the foot of the bed and unthinkingly—I won’t say with evil intent—puts them in her laundry basket.
“Eureka!” I told myself. “That’s got to be it.”
And rather than get out of bed and look right then and there, I savored the thought like only I know how, and slept peaceably until the morning.
“Fart,” I said, hands mingling with bras and who knows what other odd kinds of accoutrements the woman punishes the Maytag man with.
Was there no end to my pain?!
The hour had become late; if I didn’t get going now, I wouldn’t be able to capitalize on a quiet morning that spontaneously bestowed itself on this overworked—an apparently victim of spiritual warfare—father of three, going on four.
I opened the sock drawer to pick out my underwear and socks. There it was—the evidence that I was without. One sock—unmated.
I thought, “I will never again find a sock to replace these.” I was now talking aloud to myself, “These were the best socks Cabelas ever sold. They don’t even have them anymore. Fuck Bass Pro.”
I reached for a pair of underwear.
What is shorter than “instantly”, dear reader?
Seriously. A second is shorter than a minute. A moment is shorter than a second—some lovey-dovey movie taught me that. And I have to believe an instant is shorter than a second. But what I need to describe is an even shorter amount of time.
A spark.
I mean that in the time it takes to feel a spark, I knew something was different about the pair of underwear I was trying to pull up. It had undue thickness and, again, as quick as a spark, I knew it was heavy—too heavy. I mean, I wasn’t grabbing one of my “off-the-hangar-at-Macy’s-one-pair-only-Tommy-Hilfiger-I-think-they-count-as-MAGA-colors” pairs of 100% cotton underwear. I was touching a newer—and nearly ethereal—pair of Hanes—out of a 5 pack.
As gravity worked against me, all in this single spark of time, I squeezed all the harder and noticed that my fingers were kept separate by some material, some seemingly hidden, spongey, like the thickest of wools-
“My sock!!!”
Picture the blur that is the Guatemalan daycare kids’ hands as they open the Christmas gifts that your high school social studies class got them, picture that and amplify it by every color in the rainbow and every shade of glitter.
Then pause.
These moments don’t happen very often, and at my age, they won’t likely happen very many more times. So I thought to myself, “Let’s not rush things, baby. I know you’re in there. Let me just get my camera quick.”
Long story short, I took four pictures, in sequence, as a time capsule, and sent them to my wife. My final text taunted her to try harder next time, if she really wants to hide my sock from me.
As I’ve been writing this, I know she texted me back, but I won’t check yet—not just yet. These moments—bliss—do not last much longer than a spark, so I’m gonna hold onto this one just a little bit longer.
Guilty Pleasure on A Friday Afternoon
The piano tuner came over today—at my request. He doesn’t have as much personality as my last one, but he is taller by an inch or two.
Picture the scene with me—I open the door. Having only spoken on the phone, and lightly at that, we exchange cordialities and I invite him in. He knows to remove his shoes. But it’s what he did next that I latently long to see—not that I’d ever admit it to anyone. Usually I like to be in control. Usually I like to command the action. But every once in a while, I derive immense pleasure from watching. And today he didn’t disappoint.
He touched…the body of the piano. Mind you, he didn’t just reach out and raise and lower the fallboard. It wasn’t merely—and gently—sliding the music rack in and out. No. He rested his body against its body—nonchalantly. Like he couldn’t hurt her. Like he knew she didn’t mind.
He removed the music rack completely and laid it aside. Then he even rested a tool or two of his on the pins that he would soon twist and turn intelligently.
Understand me here. It’s as if he and my piano were old friends. Intimate friends. As if they had a history. In a sense, you could say that I became an unwitting voyeur. And I loved every minute of it.
You see, I could never do to my piano what he did, no sir. She means too much to me. I treat her perfectly. I only touch a few spots of her body, and delicately at that. I play on her keys ferociously, but that’s what they’re there for. Sometimes I open her lid, but usually I keep it closed. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to do more, to go further. But it feels premature. And there’s a mutual respect that comes with waiting. But that doesn’t mean I don’t like to watch when I get a chance on a Friday afternoon.
Unlived, Unlit, and Unstoppable
In the future, the historians will earn their daily bread by revealing what is common knowledge to those of us who have endured to this point in America’s second civil war. That is, the historians will take up—singularly—as the topic of their magnum opuses the fact that the war (itself not an immoral or criminal part of life on earth) began with wanton, unchecked criminality.
Once it became clear that the police were not going to behave according to their sworn oaths, Americans in whose veins pumped blood which was hot with rage did not line up according to some contemporary “Blue and Grey” as the Proud Boys and Antifa gangs had hoped.
In the beginning there wasn’t strategy; there weren’t plans. In the place of those things, and others, which always took much time to materialize (and only ever did at the sounding of a long suppressed cry for leadership) the baser instincts of society were unleashed. This meant, naturally, that what we now call the “war” first began as all violent crime begins—passionately. And for any crime to receive this noble description, it can only relate one shameful fact: the violence occurred among family and friends.
People, generally men, who had long felt wronged and unheard by the “man” saw an opportunity to take matters into their own hands. One can almost empathize with these previously caged animals. “Fuck it,” they said. “If there’s no chance of punishment this side of the dirt, I’ll take my chances with whatever comes on the other side.” God Will Judge became the mantra.
Who among us hasn’t heard stories of the bloody red, depressingly black, and intensely personal mayhem that occurred in the year before formal armies were announced and maps redrawn? Tell me I’m wrong. We felt comfortable among strangers—enough even to dull our senses with the poison of the month. But no one would have more than one beer with family for fear of missing the cues proffered that home-cooked meals with just arrived, uninvited distant relatives would end in bloodshed. To live in fear of your own kin? That’s a crime against heaven. And heaven has answered, surely.
Culturally speaking, this played out across the country differently. The blacks, hispanics, Chinese, mooslums, and others—by virtue of living so communally as it was—were on edge all the time (which was not too different from their prior felt experience). The whites? Well, we lived out another chapter of the story. The interstates were filled with murderous travelers. To keep up with the new reality, we put a new entry into the Merriam-Webster app entry of “road rage”. And when people stopped for what would have become road rage crimes in the recent past, this time they didn’t fight or shoot each other. Rather, they shared the stories which, like their vehicles, carried them forward by the latent power of unexploded remains of ancient demons. But most of the time no one stopped. Tailgating still caused anger, but no one stopped driving. They allowed the reflection of the bumper close behind to crystallize their vision of the future close ahead.
Here’s the point. Here’s the part that no historian will ever think to write about or investigate because a negative just can’t be proven—so they say. But I don’t need logic to tell you what I saw. The dead, the victims of these crimes of passion? They never saw it coming.
One Black Future
“…we ought rather to be proud of the fact that American literature can boast of at least one good, decent, Christian author who was cursed neither with self-consciousness not with false modesty, those banes of art.” — William Leigh Jr.
“SAY HIS NAME!!”
I found the bullhorn was more annoying than loud. Worse, for their cause, the mob’s response to the prompt felt forced. And I’d be lying if I described it as “loud”. Rather than lead you to believe that my tale centers on decibels, however, I want to say that what worried me now was the shortened breathing and seemingly even shorter attention span of the man who I just met.
And then it happened, I got slugged.
“Say it again,” he yelled at me. “Hey y’all, hold up! Look at what we got here,” he yelled to the mob.
For a moment, the mob pretended to possess enough self-control to be undeterred from their purpose.
But his second call of, “Hey y’all! Y’all ain’t gonna believe what this white boy just said,” proved as attractive to this crowd as a city block of recently renovated urban blight.
I’d straightened up at this point. And just as my composure returned, unexpectedly, I felt his knuckles against my ear again. I crouched low and stepped back for a second time. And down I stayed as I heard an angry, loud young women ask, “What’d he say?” And then what I could only describe as the voice of a future Southern Gospel preacher boomed, “We being peaceful tonight, brothers and sisters. Peaceful. Don’t hit the man. Someone help him.” In response to this great addition to the annals of stump speeches, some sort of lackey came my way, crouching to look over the extent of damage to my face.
Turning to me, the Reverend Doctor said, “Apologies for that. What’s on your mind?”
I collected my bearings, avoided shaking the battlefield surgeon’s hand, and found that I was newly surrounded by the mob.
“You’re not black,” I repeated.
With a squint that betrayed his true color, Pastor-man sharpened his eyes, hoping that his flock would disobey en masse just this once. Only the initial loudmouth proved himself deaf. And so, for the third time, something I can only describe as a mix between a slap and a wild right hook landed on the top of my skull. As I wrapped my arms around my now hunched over, asphalt-gazing head, I had to admit, my skill at recognizing the start of the contest was improving.
“Boy,” the man began, unable to withstand all temptation to civility, “I’m, ah,” he rubbed his chin and looked around as he measured the feeling of the mob. Somebody in the back shouted, “‘We!’” The future-Pastor took this correction in stride and rejoined, “Son, we,” and at this he drew a lazy circle around his head with a downward pointing finger for emphasis as he turned a circle himself, then continued, “we are gonna give you another chance to speak.” (“It’s only fair!” someone added.) “I’m praying,” he paused to let a knowing chuckle breathe, “that you use it wisely.”
Did I want to die? That’s the question I asked myself. I still don’t know the answer. I don’t think I did. But I was tired. I know I was tired. I couldn’t remember a time in my life when we weren’t forced to listen to this nonsensical bullshit, and tonight, I was simply out of energy.
“I said,” I began, “you ALL,” here I diligently added a minor clarification which I thought might help communicate my intention more clearly, “are not black.”
Not like the modern “Cirque du Soleil”-style circus, but quite like an atmosphere of the circuses of lore, or what I imagined to be how those big tops operated—always on the verge of chaos—a circus erupted.
At this, I definitely avoided what would have been the fourth blow by my initial conversant. The trouble was that my path backwards, as I mentioned, had been filled in by the mob, specifically by tightly—and remarkably scantily (considering the amount of fabric)—clothed heavyset women. Like always, these about-to-be-breaking-out rap-porn, IG Queens were, with one hand, pointing their phones at me and with the other, holding drive-thru cups out of which they sipped some sort of sugary delight through straws. All the while, their purses looked like they were enjoying the break from constant adjustments that naturally occurred while the mob wormed its way around low numbered street names.
In other words, I found my retreat blocked off by what amounted to angry, hi-tech pillows.
So his fifth punch did land. Oh well.
“You blind?! You sayin’ my skin ain’t black?”
He didn’t really leave me much time between punches 6, 7, and 8, but I continued our interview anyhow.
“No. I’m saying, ‘You are not,” I suddenly remembered the earlier point of clarity and so corrected myself, but not before number 9, “I’m saying, ‘You all are not black.’”
I stayed on my back for a moment, thinking to rest and recuperate, but was unpleasantly surprised to feel a kick to my left ear—what was up with this dude and ears?
“Let him up!” I heard a loud too-busy-for-choir-practice-but-too-good-to-not-be-in-the-church-choir-alto sing out.
Like a poor form deadlift, all back and no legs, I stood to the erect position again.
“Thank you,” I acknowledged.
No sooner than these words came out did I discover that she might have had a protein shake in her cup. Put bluntly, not ‘all fat’, as I had suspected, and I found myself pushed down, very directly, to the ground once again.
“Bitch, I don’t speak for no one but me, but I am black!” she announced.
So where are we? Right, a kick again from Don Lemon, this time to the kidney, and that makes 11.
I felt there would be another soon, so I hopped up quickly, covered the ear closest to my lately befriended investigator, and repeated, “You all are not black.”
****
“And that’s when we showed up?” Officer Jones asked.
“Yup. My own knights in shining armor. Don Quixote,” I said.
“Don who?”
“Never mind. It’s a book. Good one, too. So what’s next?”
“I think we have everything we need to finish up the paperwork for tonight,” he said. Then he continued, “Can I tell you something?”
“Shoot.”
“You’re kinda a moron.”
“Thanks, man.”
“Will you do something for me?”
I hesitated.
“Will you stop saying, ‘You’re not black’?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“Because someone needs to tell them the truth.”
Escape With Me
My most recent pastor loves to commend believing in the Bible even when you don’t understand it. (Most recently, this was communicated in response to Old Testament saints’ polygamy.)
My father wants to write a book about the value of dreaming–not during sleep, but the kind of dreaming where you let your mind just freely choose a desirable future, no matter how likely, and then enjoy the accompanying sensation for as long as you can–even if it that future never comes true.
My wife is woefully unaware of Western Civilization’s most recent two and a half millennia of history, and simultaneously is one of the most happy and hopeful people I know.
My best friend, who is the most principled, and therefore inspiring, person I know, wonders if the coronavirus coverage and government and extra-government response is actually a strategic, coordinated, and intentional effort by those who oppose President Trump to prevent him from winning reelection.
Put another way, I think it’s time to escape for a bit. Will you join me?
****
I like to escape by focusing as hard as I can on something, anything that catches my attention. No more keyboard. No more blog. No more computer. No more news. No more family. No more house. No more job. No more planet. No more universe. Just me and the idea.
Today’s idea is making a vow.
The vehicle which delivered this idea to me is the passage in Judges where one Judge, Jephthah, vows to the LORD to sacrifice as a burnt offering that which comes out of his home upon his victorious arrival–if only the LORD will grant him certain victory. If you’re unfamiliar, his only daughter is “that which” comes out and he sacrifices her, with her encouragement.
I can imagine that some people would point to this story as reason to question scripture’s status as “worthy of study”. To them I would offer this reminder, “Jesus saved my soul. Jesus commended scripture. I’m sticking with Jesus.”
I can imagine that others would draw some ridiculous and irrelevant points about “vowing” and different “covenants” or more simply, “That was then, this is now–there is no need to dwell.”
Then, I can remember that at the end of a recent translation of Homer’s Iliad, or some other ancient classic, the critic commends it for containing characters who behave so inexplicably and unpredictably. In other words, the critic lauded the story for its messiness. The critic, I think, loved the story because it made the reader think, “Hmm. What would I do?” or “Hmm. Would I do the same thing? Have I done the same thing?”
Vowing is an interesting enterprise as it essentially brings into focus our integrity as individuals. Within “vowing” the group, the community, disappears.
In the account recorded in Judges, the situation’s tragedy is compounded by the daughter’s urging her father to keep his vow, his integrity–even though it would mean that she dies because of it.
Keep in mind that these people don’t know Jesus. There is no “personal relationship”. It’s back in ancient history and it’s over in a part of the world when what we call “theocracies” were at least normal, if not the norm. Also, keep in mind literacy rates in bible times and the chance that the daughter knew anything about Yahweh, other than he was her father’s god and some rote memorization of the most memorable laws, would be very difficult to defend. In other words, I think we could insert any other deity’s name and the story would present the same.
Despite all these words, I can’t untangle myself from the two questions, “Why make the vow?” and “Why fulfill the vow?”
Integrity. That’s why.
****
Okay. Escape over.
It was okay. But I got an email from H-‘s school district about COVID-19 during the attempt. Remind me to close that tab next escape-attempt.
The email contains a link to a “comic” on NPR’s website to use to help kids stay stress free. Pictographs? Really? We’re going to survive the pandemic because someone drew pictures?
What should schools do right now? The same thing they should always do, the same thing which they never do. Pack any children you can see into buildings and teach the kids how to read words. Make it clear that we expect everyone of any age to always fight through any sickness. Keep the posture that because of literacy, if you get sick in America, you don’t die. But most importantly, teach the kids how to read words. Teach the kids how to read words. Teach the kids how to read words.
We don’t need stress-free kids. We need literate adults.
And I just received another email.
I’m over it.
Two emails in less than one hour and four minutes counts as hysteria. This is embarrassing. Every single teacher and administrator involved in public schools should be embarrassed and ashamed for furthering this hysteria.
Review of Joker, by Todd Phillips
The new Joker film is excellent. More than excellent, it is beloved. The dilemma facing me is that I haven’t read one review which accurately captures precisely why it is so beloved. But I know why. And I can explain it succinctly.
The new Joker film is so beloved because it surreptitiously names the elephant in the room, and consequently it offers the audience freedom to bathe in the joy which accompanies naked hope.
Our “culture” is inundated with the idea that “nurture” has won the nature/nurture debate. But not the Joker folks. Instead of pandering to what’s en vogue, they created the most brilliant safe space imaginable (the bleached white halls of Gotham’s legendary Arkham Asylum) and peppered it with a hysterical clown’s slippery, speedy, and blood-soaked footprints. We find ourselves tickled by how Joker gleefully stays one step ahead of the pursuing wet-nurses. But we aren’t empathizing with Joker’s claims of victim-hood, no. What we’re doing is enjoying the feeling of hope. We are basking in the sunlight which is the hope that his chaotic crimes will finally motivate someone to rise and defeat him and all his kind.
In other words, Joker is so beloved because it finally said what we all feel: It cannot be all nurture. Our blood has to have something to do with it. Joker’s blood must have something to do with his behavior. And Bruce Wayne’s blood, likewise, will have something to do with his behavior, with the reason that he becomes Batman.
One must not forget that Joker is the loser.
You’re Afraid of Women? Me Too!
Especially after my last two posts full of heroic bravado, I know my female faithful are longing to know what it’s really like to be my bride. Well, as luck would have it, I feel like pulling back the curtain a bit. The following back and forth occurred on the drive to see some houses. As expected, I lead. Enjoy!
****
“I’m just saying that I don’t think ‘how old a house is’ should automatically disqualify it.”
“All I think about is how much everything is going to break and any money that we save we will spend on fixing it.”
“Every house needs repairs. To me, and this may just be me, the key is having money for those repairs. Sure we could probably afford a slightly newer house, but we’d be signing on to not having that extra few hundred dollars every single month for the next 30 years.”
“I just want a nice house.”
“I know you do, Honey. Me, too. I just feel like you’re not seeing things the best way. So I’m going to keep trying to paint the picture I see.”
“I just would like a nice house.”
“I’m not saying we’re not getting a nice house. I’m mostly just saying we need to stick to a budget. That’s a good idea, right?”
“If we buy a house that’s one hundred years old, and then we need to sell it fast, who’s going to buy it?”
“We don’t know the future no matter what. We didn’t think we’d be moving again just three months ago. I don’t think the future should weigh so heavily in the decision.”
“You’re not understanding me.”
“That may be. But I am asking you to try harder to explain yourself then. (breath) The way I see it, even if you’re right–and we buy an old house and are stuck with it–it’s better to be stuck with a small mortgage payment, than a big one, no?”
“That kitchen was very small.”
“And I feel like I can imagine how knocking out one part of one of the walls would make it feel bigger.”
“But-”
“-And, sorry, I have a philosophy that small is better anyhow. In the future, there will be more people crowding together in that kitchen than in a big kitchen, I promise. I can’t explain it, but I have seen it. In my last house, it was small and I could fill it with people. Other houses I’ve been in weren’t like that. I can see the full, noisy kitchen now. There’ll be twenty of you in that little area chatting away and interrupting each other, saying, ‘Excuse me!’ ‘Pardon me!’ ‘Ha, where’d the … go?’ Everyone will love it.”
(Here, reader, I think it’s better to spend your time imagining the look I felt being cast upon me, than read any feeble description of it.)
“No? Well, I’m right. But I’ll try another way. How’s this? When you say you want a nice and big kitchen, what I hear is that you’d rather spend three hundred dollars per month to look at a kitchen, than on anything else. Is that what you’re saying? Would you say it like that? ‘I’d rather spend money to be in a kitchen than on shoes or clothes or A-‘s education or vacations?’ Is that what you’re telling me? If so, that’s easy. I agree. Let’s do it. But then you can’t complain in the future.”
“Did you just say that to me?”
“(Here see laughter coming out of my big, beautiful smile as I shake my head.) That’s not wrong to say. It’s helpful to say. It helps us communicate because as of this moment I still can’t figure out what the problem is. The way I see it, we have to pay a certain amount of money to live in a building. And anything above that is not smart. Why pay more than the minimum? I’m talking about flexibility. Sure, if we get an old house, it may have more problems. But as they come, we have options. We can fix them immediately. Or maybe never. Or sometime in between. But all the while, we can choose and rank how important every other thing is.”
“The bathtub was very short.”
“Let me put it this way. Would you rather have $300 a month or no money a month?”
“$300.”
“Then I win. I’m telling you that if we stick to the budget and get an older house, which perhaps will need more repairs, we will have $300 a month extra to spend on whatever we want.”
(Silence)
“What if I put it this way? What I’m saying is, if we get an old house, within budget, then every month you can go to the store and buy anything you want.”
****
Here, careful reader, the flaw in husbands and wives trying to talk to make decisions together manifests itself fully. The following questions remain:
Did my heroic, strong, brave, and incredibly intelligent self just get worn down to promising a blank check to my wife?
Was this her aim the entire time?
Did I, in fact, promise it? Follow-up: And, if so, am I bound to keep that promise?
These questions and more are now staring me in the face as I proceed down the path only found by those seeking marital bliss.
She Scooped the Ice Cream
I remember that you welcomed me home from work with a hug. It was a Saturday night. I had flown one call.
I was late the night before and that made you worry.
The roads were better tonight–the ice near entirely gone.
Your son popped out of what I can only guess was another not-quite-discernibly chosen hiding place. He had had on his favorite basketball jersey, baring his skinny arms, as this time there was no t-shirt underneath.
I’ve been gone for too many long day shifts, I thought.
I told him I wanted to talk school work before he took his shower and went to bed. Then I began to take off my boots.
You listened patiently as I explained to him the “in’s and out’s” of following instructions and the particular importance of neat work.
Before my lecture was finished, you got up from the table. You opened the freezer. At the table, I continued to instruct and correct.
You walked to the silverware drawer and returned with the ice cream scoop in hand. It was the second one I bought for you. Do you remember how embarrassed we both were when I couldn’t stop myself from noticing that you had absentmindedly placed the first one in the dishwasher after all? Whoever would make rules for cleaning an ice cream scoop?
I was still teaching the boy as you set the spoon down beside the two bowls and put the ice cream back.
What’s the rush, I thought?
But I didn’t ask. Instead I hoped to guess right. I hoped it was his long-awaited bedtime.
I hoped my hands would soon feel your soft skin and find themselves bumping clumsily into your own as you removed your soft clothes. I hoped my eyes would see in yours that you were waiting for me to take you to our bed. I hoped my ears would hear and feel your impatient and impassioned breath. I hoped my lips would feel your tongue respond to my own. I hoped my body would press eternally into yours. I hoped.
I hoped.
The Black Mask and The Executioner
“I am innocent!” the noble, righteous, and beautiful hero protested, unable to rain down his fist for emphasis. The blood dripped from where his finger nail used to be.
His hands were taped down to the kitchen table of his youth. He couldn’t get up. He couldn’t move. A whimper escaped his lips. The Black Mask did not notice.
He muffled an indignant and a righteous howl as the Black Mask unexpectedly reached across the table with both hands and tore the tape away with a speed that rivaled lightning.
Maybe it’s over.
The hero prayed, thanking his god for rescue. Almost imperceptibly, he lifted his head to get a better look at the masked man and the torture room, once his safe space.
The walls were charred black. The place where the stove used to be–the stove which received his mother’s love, meal after meal of his distant childhood–was now as empty as a reluctant warrior’s gaping chest cavity after receiving an RPG round on a foreign battlefield, in a forgotten war. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, she stood, stable as an oak tree, beautiful as a sunset–and apparently as fleeting–never so much as hinting that the effort she spent preparing his food should cost her more than the mere hours it took.
Before his hands had moved even an inch, an agonizing pain began at his left wrist and tore through his left arm like a tornado through a Texas trailer park.
Then he felt something moist smear across his face.
Then he heard the sound.
Then he saw the instrument.
The head of the ax was buried into the kitchen table. The handle stood cocked like the minute hand of his parents old wall clock, except that this cursed chronometer just announced Pain’s time of birth. And like a watch, it divided his wrist from his hand as cleanly as up from down, as permanently as left from right.
“Where do you think you’re going?!” barked the hot voice, smoke bellowing from beneath the Black Mask.
Time was running short. One hand already lost, coupled with the fact that the Black Mask was running out of torturous tools, the hero decided to sing out one final protest. His voice, his majestic, his chivalrous, his heavenly voice–the voice that had drowned forest fires as it chased them down mountains, the voice that had serenaded thunder back into the puffy clouds from where it came–his only weapon.
Attempting to use his body to help elevate his noble cause to the gates of heaven, he began to stand as he proclaimed, “I’m sorry!” He drew his next breath as if it might be his last. “But I am innocent! And I demand you cease these proceedings at once.”
Uninterrupted, he boldly continued his pathetic, and now somewhat benevolent, plea, “And what have you done with my moth-”
But before he could finish a button had been pressed. Straps of scalding, sinewy snakeskin sprung out from the floor beside his chair and wrapped painfully across his thighs. The wooden chair legs groaned under the new, nearly unbearable load.
The hero heard what he supposed was a laugh–but sounded more like enemy tank tracks grinding toddlers’ teething smiles into the wood-chips which fill schoolyard playgrounds–flap out from the bottom of the Black Mask as the eye holes sparked flame-red with delight.
The realization that there was no point in protesting hit him like thirteen jackhammers during a construction sign-studded summer drive at five.
Seeking, but seeing no disagreement, he stretched his right fingers out and felt for the brier-barbed pencil.
“Did the Black Mask leak a solitary beam of light?” the hero wondered confusedly, his left stub likewise pulling the loose-leaf paper close.
The outside world could have fallen away, burned away, dried away, or shaken away and the Black Mask would not have noticed as he watched the boy sigh and write out for the sixtieth time, “I am responsible for my gloves. If I lose my gloves, it is my fault. I will not lose my gloves again.”
Captain’s Log 