shinin bright in the sky

twinkle twinkle
little star
a house is burning down in minnesota

Scar

Whilst walking down the street was when I first gained notice of the scar on the back of my hand. It was shaped somewhat like a mattress, if there had been a mattress with the words, “I am a thief and a no good dirty liar” written on it. Naturally, I was very confused, as anyone typically is when they notice strange mattress scars on the back of their hands. I resolved to find out where it came from and why it was there.
I went to the fortune teller. Sat down. Crossed her palms with gold, so to speak. She stared at her little crystal ball for about five minutes, then pulled a sheaf of papers from under her table and started to write, rather voraciously, if you can even call writing voracious. But it was rather frantic, and maybe even frenzied, nevertheless. It was some odd crossing point between a normal, composed state such as she had been in when I walked in, and the stereotypical fortune teller frenzy that often proves itself to be a sham owing to its over-zealousness. After she finished scribbling, she handed me the piece of paper and told me to get the hell out of her place. So I left.
I went to the closest deli with sitting space, ordered a sandwich, and sat down to read the prognosis.
After I had read it, my mind was racing. I ate my sandwich quickly, paid for it, and walked at the speed of light back to my hotel room. The ten minutes it took to get there seemed like years, to use a cliché that hopefully will not betray a lack of creativity on my part.
When I got to my room, I laid down on my bed and stared at the ceiling. Thinking. Just thinking about what I had read. Was it true? If so, if I made it true by accepting it as true, then I would just be damning myself to a long life of self-torture and pain. Could M.D. really have killed E.? It didn’t seem possible. But then again, there was that time in Jakarta when M.D. and J.F. beat each other unconscious. And K.E. couldn't have stolen that shipment of diamonds, they were so securely locked away that K.E., an amateur locksmith who created and broke locks as a hobby starting two months ago, couldn’t possible have gotten at them, and therefore this who affair with H.O. couldn’t have even come to such a bad end at all. I tried to think it away, to create an alibi for M.D. He was at the coffee shop, yes that was where he was it never happened at all that fortune teller is just a stupid liar and I am not a bad person and this is all a dream and when I wake up tomorrow morning my scar will be gone and everything will be sunny and happy again. I giggled.

Tin

I woke up that morning in a cookie tin. It was your average-sized cookie tin. By the smell, I guessed that it had contained Danish butter cookies at some point in time. Not anymore. There wasn’t anything in there except for me. Little old me.

In case the reader hasn’t already figured this out, there really is not much to do in a cookie tin. You can throw stuff at the walls and listen to the loud clang of unspecified material hitting metal and then the echo of the sound waves taking a jog around your ears. You can also pound the walls with your fist and scream, if you’re the more desperate type. Or you can just sit there, crunched up into a little human ball, and close your eyes and pretend you’re in someplace beautiful instead of this damn tin cookie container. I did all of them. First the second then the first then the third. After a while you give up hope. I wasn’t sad, though. I was just resigned.

I had nothing better to do, so I reviewed the events of the past night. It had been a Sunday night. I was walking around the streets of the city aimlessly, trying to have my eye caught by something, some store, restaurant, club, person, anything. At about eight o’clock I began to get hungry. I went into the nearest restaurant that seemed cheap and generally not unappealing. People talked all around me. I couldn’t hear one person at a time, but rather an anonymous din of yells, whispers, screams, grunts, clangs of utensils on dishes, opinions, expressions, individuality, all the same old shit you get when you go out. The public is rather dull, they seem to all just be talking about variations on the same theme. I want ¬this I hate that. I don’t want to want anything anymore. People are always talking about it, and, to be honest, I’ve really become rather tired of it.

I ordered my food from a fresh-face young boy who’s nametag said ‘Albert’ on it. He seemed college age to me. I commented that you didn’t see younger people with that name anymore generally speaking anyways and he replied that his parents were living in the past man or at least they had been when they had him. I ordered a turkey sandwich with tomatoes and other stuff on it and he brought it back in about ten minutes. Pretty fast cooks here huh I commented yeah he replied. I ate the sandwich. Tolerable, it filled me up. The tomatoes were crunchy.

After that, I left to go walk around some more. Nothing notable happened. Just the minutes backwards somersaulting by and the hours snowballing until it was midnight and I was tired so I went home. I had an place on fifty-second street. I walked into the apartment and flicked on the lights. I filled my pipe, lit it, and put on a Coltrane record. After the album was over, I read a bit and went to sleep.
I had one dream that night. They say that we have lots of dreams every night, it’s just that we don’t remember them. The ones that I can’t remember are obviously irrelevant. The one I can is rather irrelevant also. In it, I was sitting in a cave. It was underground. There was one stalagmite, standing way up tall, parsing my field of vision into two halves. One the right half, the rocks that made up the cave walls were blue. They had scratches all over them, as if a lion had been sharpening his nails on them. The other side had green rocks. They were actually black, but there was so much moss growing on them that they were green for all intents and purposes. I remember thinking that the moss was poisoning the air and that I was going to die and that then the lions were going to come home and eat my remains with chopsticks and fried green beans. A cold gust of wind blew through the cave. I thought that that meant that maybe there was a way out. The air had to come from somewhere. I searched frantically all over the walls of the cave to find an opening, but to no avail. I felt myself begin to suffocate slowly, and as my face turned blue, the whispering came out of nowhere –

I woke up then. Or maybe I just don’t remember the rest of it. It doesn’t matter anyways.

The tin can began to get colder and colder. Eventually it froze. The ice began to creep along the walls, slowly and steadily making its advance toward me. I sat there, shivering, waiting for the ice to envelop me.

In the end, it didn’t really hurt that much.

The Bar

There is a bar on West 54th street where people go to get away. There isn’t really one specific kind of person that hangs out there, but they all have one thing in common: they’ve got nowhere better to be. Some of them just found their significant cheating on them, some of them just lost their jobs, and some of them did both of those a really long time ago. They're all drunk, but not drunk enough to get rowdy. Just drunk enough to forget they exist. Nobody vomits in the bar, and there are never any fights. It’s always quiet in that bar, the silence only punctuated by the occasional mumbled call for another drink. Most of the people there lean their elbows against the bar, and prop up their heads with the arm attached to that elbow. Some of them look asleep, sitting there with their face down. But they aren’t really asleep. They just don’t want anybody to talk to them. But nobody ever comes into the bar looking for a conversation or a good time. But nobody’s there for a bad time, either. They’re all just sitting there, because they know that nobody will disturb them. They can just sit around and think about not thinking about whatever got them there. It is the most comfortable place in the world. They do what they want, which is nothing. The owner doesn't make much money, but enough to survive. The lighting is dim, and the bathroom is relatively clean. Some people smoke cigarettes. Some don’t. Nobody cares.
At around four, when the first rays of sun start shining in, people start to clear out. They leave money at the tables. They aren’t paying for the liquor. After the last customer exits, the bartender and waiter hang a big closed sign above the door. They begin to clean up. And when the bar opens at eleven, they’re ready, ready to accept the new crowd of broken souls, ready to provide a safe space for them to feel better, ready to make them feel comfortable and accepted, ready to let them know that everything would be better soon, and even if it wasn’t, they’d always have the bar to come to.

Bourgeois

The guests arrived at seven-thirty. Their cars all drew up in unison. They were all black Mercedes with high quality speaker systems on which they listened to Nina Simone. The insides were beige, leather. Their exteriors, shiny. They had been polished by the servants as they always were before their owners drove anywhere.
The men got out of the car first. They descended, stiff and proud, from the driver’s seat of their car. They all wore black tuxedos. They examined their bowties. Raised their hats to the other guests. Then they walked around the front of the car to the passenger seat. Still in unison, like they were all walking to the rhythm of some cruel, absurd waltz. They opened the passenger door of the car, gracefully drew it open. One foot, and then the other, of the lady descended. They wore tall, black high heels. Black was in fashion. The ladies, all at one time, floated out of the car and graced the asphalt with the oh-so-lovely touch of their stilettos. Once they had gotten to the other side of the car, picking up their feet ever so slightly with each step so they looked as if they slid across the ground, the full content of their outfits was displayed. They wore slim, black dresses. They went down to about their knees.
Offering their elbows to the ladies, who naturally accepted with grace and poise, the men walked towards the mansion, and the ladies inevitably followed, seeing as they were rather attached to the men. They made their not-so-long and not-so-harrowing journey through the not-so-wilderness of the street on which the mansion was situated. They were thoroughly tired at about the halfway point and therefore decided to stop for some wine and cheese, after which they continued their walk. Being elegant is tiring. As they walked, they slowly formed into a single file line, with adequate space in between each couple. The first one arrived at the door. The man rang the bell. The host opened, greeted the couple with something like, you’re right on time, or, the early bird always catches the worm as they say. After this the couple was invited in. The second couple approached the door. Waited for the first couple to get comfortable. Rang the doorbell. The host greeted them with something like, second ones here! The third couple approached. Similar procedure. And on and on until the reservoir of elegant couples was extinguished.
Each couple sat across from each other at the table. The host sat at one head, the wife at the other. It was a rather long table. An abundance of silver covered it in the form of multiple spoons, forks, and knives for each person. The tablecloth was white and frilly.
The host stood up and tapped his champagne glass lightly with his dessert fork. It made a dainty tinkling noise, not unlike the sound of a champagne glass being lightly tapped with a salad fork. “I have an announcement to make,” he said, “I would just like to thank everyone for coming and I would like to tell you all tha–“ he was cut off by the champagne glass exploding in his hand. A barrage of bullets erupted from the tommy guns held by the two gunmen who had jumped through the doorway that led from the adjacent room to the dining room. People tried to hide, but it was no use, as the gunmen had obviously had a large amount of practice and were very quick and efficient in their jobs, gunning down a room full of people in about forty-five seconds. Blood leaked onto the expensive carpet from multiple bullet wounds. Expressions of shock and horror were imprinted on the dead. Their body positions resembled more a bag of potatoes than an elegant swan. One of the woman’s heels was broken.

The two gunmen surveyed the carnage. Nobody was alive.

One gunman turned to the other and said, “Bourgeois fucks.”

The other one said, “Yeah.”

The Kill

Fattie Shaw was eating a cheap-ass meal in a cheap-ass diner and casually pretending to read the newspaper when he saw the man with the yellow hatband and green suit walk past. He walked fast, looked like he was in a hurry. Had to find someone. Meet someone. Pay someone. Kill someone? Shaw slapped more than the meal was worth on the table and walked out of the diner. It was a crowded street, but Shaw could keep an eye on the hatband man pretty was, he was maybe six foot five and stood out pretty well. He was carrying a big briefcase. Probably stuffed with money, Shaw thought. Or H. You never knew with these high rollers. Probably lived pretty damn comfy. The man walked. And walked. Turned. Shaw turned. Pretty easy job, Shaw thought. But then: don’t jinx it Fattie. You’ve seen enough murder mysteries to know that the perfect crime never goes right. The man checked his watch. Seemed relieved. Pace slowed down. He went into the nearest diner. So did Shaw. The man ordered some coffee. So did Shaw. Then Shaw went to the bathroom. Went into the stall, pulled out a revolver and silencer. Spun the silencer on quickly and expertly. Shaw had deft fingers. They almost stroked the revolver as they checked the bullets in it. The hands of an artist. Shaw liked to think of himself as an artist.

Fattie stuck the revolver into the waistband of his pants, flushed the toilet, washed his hands. He buttoned up his suit jacket so no one could see the butt of the gun sticking out. Went back into the diner. Man only half done with his coffee. Slow drinker. Shaw was a fast drinker. They evened out. Finished at the same time. Left.

The following went on for a while. Man didn't seem very conscious of his surroundings, he never noticed Shaw. He turned into an alley where Shaw presumed the man was going to drop off the briefcase. It was one of those dead-end alleys that the heroes always get trapped in in movies. They always make a miraculous escape, though. Not this time, Shaw thought to himself. Not this time.

Shaw anxiously fingered the butt of his gun, stroking it like it was his pet poodle. Shaw peeked into the alley cautiously. The man was facing the dead end. The man checked his watch. The bullet made a hissing noise. The man was dead.
Fattie took the briefcase and walked away. Better get away quick, before someone sees you.

On the subway back to the boss’ house, Fattie wondered who the man was that he had to be killed. What was in the briefcase. What was his name. Things like that. But Fattie kicked it out of his mind. Best not think about details. You’ll slip up, and then it’ll be you they’re gunning for. Twenty years and a couple of jail raps and like hell he was going to mess a job. No use in thinking about it, he thought. I kill. They pay. Done deal.

Untitled, because I'm that mysterious.

What is it about sitting in the forest at night that makes one feel like a feather falling from the highest to the lowest point, stuck in some perpetual zig-zag down the wind currents as gravity pushes one down towards the inevitable end? It is so quiet, the trees seem to look down at you, or rather where you are sitting, knowing that soon you will have to leave, but they will be there for hundreds of years, aging and aging but still remaining, while you age and die, wither away into the dust that always lies at the end of any path. The silence, it looms over you like a massive piano full of weights, pushing you down some sort of hole of terror. Yet this terror almost feels good. Maybe terror is not the right word for it, maybe it shall be referred to as awe. Yes, it is the awe that is that impending disaster that is the piano, it is awe that forces you to contemplate the futility of existence, your tiny-ness in the grand scheme of things, because there is one, random and unfair as it maybe be there is one. It is in the forest at night where one discovers such amazing things as out of body experiences and meditation. You levitate towards some higher state of being, one unoccupied by you until just now, which gives one a feeling of power, yes, power, joy, now it is you they awe! But then you drop, fast, and you plummet off of your throne. You think of something else, somebody else, what they said, or did, what they looked like, and your concentration is broken, you rub your head into confusion as you ponder the rationality of what just happened and you think it was maybe all just a dream, maybe this is all just a dream, what if we are just small particles attached to the buttocks of some dust mite that makes its home under the couch of some poor middle class family in which the father figure is named Bob, and Bob is rather allergic to dust mites, and so as the mite crawls up and up, it flits its way to the top of the couch, jumps into the air, flies over near Bob, and then: sneeze, the forceful ejection of air and snot and who knows what else is so strong that the mite is flung, flung across the room and smashes into the wall and dies, and there is the apocalypse, presented to you by the fine ladies of the 23rd Street Brothel and Playhouse. The stars peer confusedly as you peer confusedly at them, wondering how a ball of gas remains in such a shape with such volatile nuclear reactions going on inside them, why don’t they explode like a woman on her period and fling themselves like the dust mite against some cosmic wall, and the stars wonder how a collection of bones muscles and blood vessels and whatnot packaged up in a big fancy bag of skin with some hair in a few places retains its shape instead of just slumping into nonexistence and how that somehow breeds consciousness. So take off your clothes, dance nude through the forest, be free, etc. Scream like there’s no tomorrow, because there probably isn’t, and who gives a shit anyways, what is tomorrow that means so much that you always have to be worrying about it and therefore cannot enjoy it when it comes because tomorrow never comes, right when you think it is almost hear it recedes into the distant future, once again to torture you because you cannot control it, you cannot control your own fate or destiny, you are destined to be eaten up by the worms just like the rest of us, decomposing until all that is left of you is a tombstone, some bones and a few certificates certifying that you, indeed, did exist, because that really matters, it matters so much that you existed, you, a tiny dot in a tiny dot in a tiny dot in a tiny dot in a tiny dot that is the visible universe, the limit of what we can perceive, because what we can perceive becomes larger and larger every moment, but what we cannot does the same, the vast universe of mystery.